Francois Recanati

In a series of papers, Sperber provides the following analysis of the phenomenon of ill‐understood belief (or ‘quasi‐belief’, as I call it): (i) the quasi‐believer has a validating meta‐belief, to the effect that a certain representation is true; yet (ii) that representation does not give rise to a plain belief, because it is ‘semi‐propositional’. In this paper I discuss several aspects of this treatment. In particular, I deny that the representation accepted by the quasi‐believer is semantically indeterminate, and I reject Sperber's claim that quasi‐belief is a credal attitude distinct from plain belief.

Peter Hanks and Scott Soames both defend pragmatic solutions to the problem of the unity of the proposition. According to them, what ties together Tim and baldness in the singular proposition expressed by ‘Tim is bald’ is an act of the speaker (or thinker) : the act of predicating baldness of Tim. But Soames construes that act as force neutral and noncommittal while, for Hanks, it is inherently assertive and committal. Hanks answers the Frege–Geach challenge by arguing that, in complex sentences, the force inherent in the content of an embedded sentence is cancelled. Indrek Reiland has recently objected to Hanks’s proposal that it faces a dilemma: either force cancellation dissolves the unity of the proposition secured by the cancelled act of assertion (and Hanks’s proposal does not work), or Hanks’s proposal reduces to Soames’s. In this paper, I respond to Reiland by offering an analysis of force cancellation which gets rid of the alleged dilemma. The proposal is based on a set of distinctions from speech act theory : between two senses of ’force’, two types of act, and two types of context. The role of simulation in force cancellation is emphasized, and connections drawn to broader issues such as the evolution of complex language.

In earlier work on so-called moderate relativism, I distinguished three semantic levels: (i) the meaning of the sentence, (ii) the lekton (a typically ‘relativized’ proposition, true at some situations and false at others), and (iii) the Austinian proposition (the lekton together with a topic situation serving as circumstance of evaluation). The lekton can be construed as a property of situations or a type of situation. The Austinian proposition is true iff the topic situation is of the type corresponding to the lekton.In his contribution to this volume, Max Kölbel expresses a few worries about my framework. First, he finds the psychological considerations I offer in support of the intermediate notion (the lekton) insufficient: a properly semantic justification is needed, he argues (and he provides one). Second, he worries about my thesis that the lekton is ‘fully articulated’, because it conflicts with the contextualist claim (defended by myself in many writings) that ‘what is said’ is porous and hospitable to unarticulated constituents. Third, he discusses potentially unwelcome implications of my view in connection with faultless disagreement.In this response I consider the three issues raised by Kölbel, along with his suggestions for tackling them. I endorse Kölbel’s semantic argument for the lekton while dismissing his objection to the claim of full articulatedness. Regarding faultless disagreement, I attempt to make sense of it from a classical expressivist standpoint.

Over the past fifty years the philosophy of language and mind has been dominated by a nondescriptivist approach to content and reference. This book attempts to recast and systematize that approach by offering an indexical model in terms of mental files. According to Recanati, we refer through mental files, the function of which is to store information derived through certain types of contextual relation the subject bears to objects in his or her environment. The reference of a file is determined relationally, not satisfactionally, so a file is not to be equated to the body of (mis-)information it contains. Mental files are the mental equivalent of singular terms, and the reference of linguistic expressions is inherited from that of the files we associate with them. On this approach, mental files, the vehicles of singular thought, do all the work of so-called 'modes of presentation' in Fregean and neo-Russellian theories.

In their chapter, Bourmayan and Recanati discuss the intransitive use of 'eat' and cognate verbs which take (on such uses) an indefinite implicit argument. Sometimes, Recanati pointed out in early work, the implicit argument of intransitive 'eat' seems definite ; there are also seemingly anaphoric and bound uses. How to account for them ? Recanati's early account invoked free enrichment, but Marti's negation test provides counter-examples to that account. Bourmayan and Recanati offer a new, situation-theoretic account, show that it can handle the negation data, and discuss the implications of the account for the Recanati-Stanley debate over for the semantics/pragmatics interface.

Our thought and talk are situated. They do not take place in a vacuum but always in a context, and they always concern an external situation relative to which they are to be evaluated. Since that is so, François Recanati argues, our linguistic and mental representations alike must be assigned two layers of content: the explicit content, or lekton, is relative and perspectival, while the complete content, which is absolute, involves contextual factors in addition to what is explicitly represented. Far from reducing to the context-independent meaning of the sentence-type or, in the psychological realm, to the 'narrow' content of mental representations, the lekton is a level intermediate between context-invariant meaning and full propositional content. Recognition of that intermediate level is the key to a proper understanding of context-dependence in language and thought. Going beyond the usual discussions of indexicality and unarticulated constituents in the philosophy of language, Recanati turns to the philosophy of mind for decisive arguments in favour of his approach. He shows, first, that the lekton is the notion of content we need if we are to properly understand the relations between perception, memory, and the imagination, and second, that the psychological 'mode' is what determines the situation the lekton is relative to. In this framework he provides a detailed account of de se thought and the first person point of view. In the last part of the book, Recanati discusses the special freedom we have, in discourse and thought, to shift the situation of evaluation. He traces that freedom to a special mode - the anaphoric mode - which enables us to go beyond the egocentric stage of pre-human thought.

According to a widespread picture due to Kaplan, there are two levels of semantic value: character and content. Character is determined by the grammar, and it determines content with respect to context. In this chapter Recanati criticizes that picture on several grounds. He shows that we need more than two levels, and rejects the determination thesis: that linguistic meaning as determined by grammar determines content. Grammatical meaning does not determine assertoric content, he argues, but merely constrains it — speaker’s meaning necessarily comes into play. On the alternative picture he offers, there are four basic levels, only one of which is determined by the grammar. Pragmatics is what enables the transition from each level to the next.

Through perception we gain information about the world. We also gain information about the world through communication with others. There are concepts — indexical concepts, such as the concept of the present time ('now') or of the present place ('here') or the concept of oneself — which have a special link to perception. Are there concepts which are tied to communication in the same way in which indexical concepts are tied to perception? After discussing, and criticizing, a deflationary approach to the phenomenon of deference, I argue that 'deferential concepts' are indeed the communicational equivalent of indexical concepts.

In this paper, I argue that the notion of ‘context' that has to be used in the study of indexicals is far from univocal. A first distinction has to be made between the real context of speech and the context in which the speech act is supposed to take place — only the latter notion being relevant when it comes to determining the semantic values of indexicals. Second, we need to draw a distinction between the context of the locutionary act and the context of the illocutionary act: contrary to a standard assumption of speech act theory, they can diverge, and their possible divergence explains a number of puzzling phenomena involving indexicals.

Both Literalism and Contextualism come in many varieties. There are radical, and less radical, versions of both Literalism and Contextualism. Some intermediate positions are mixtures of Literalism and Contextualism. In this paper I describe several literalist positions, several contextualist positions, and a couple of intermediate positions. My aim is to convince the reader that the Literalism/Contextualism controversy is far from being settled. In the first section, I look at the historical development of Literalism. This development reveals a gradual weakening. The question that naturally arises is: How far can we go in this direction? Where will this tendency ultimately lead us? And the obvious answer is: to Contextualism. In the second section I describe the steps which, from a critique of the currently dominant literalist position (Minimalism), can lead to Contextualism. In the last three sections I describe various contextualist positions, and I discuss possible literalist replies to the contextualist challenge.

In this paper I compare my account of IEM to another one, the Simple View, according to which a judgment is IEM just in case its grounds do not include an identity. The Simple View does not say why no identity assumption is needed to ground the singular judgment in the IEM cases; my account is meant to complement it by providing an answer to that question. According to my account, the judgments that are IEM are based on a certain experience, and what they are about is pre-determined by the mode of that experience, by the type of experience it is, in a way that leaves no room for an alternative.

To deal with memory-based modes of presentation I propose a couple of revisions to the standard criterion of difference for modes of presentation attributed to Frege. First, we need to broaden the scope of the criterion so that not merely the thoughts of a given subject at a given time may or may not involve the same way of thinking of some object, but also the thoughts of a subject at different times. Second, we need to ‘relativize’ the criterion of difference to particular subjects in particular situations. Thanks to these revisions, we can make sense of Evans’ notion of a dynamic mode of presentation that persists through time despite lower-level changes. A dynamic mode of presentation is a complex mode of presentation involving several epistemically rewarding relations to the reference successively (in contrast to composite modes of presentation, which involve several epistemically rewarding relations simultaneously). I show how this idea can be cashed out in the mental file framework, and how, in that framework, we can provide a straightforward answer to the question: when is a mode of presentation based on a memory M the same as the mode of presentation based on the perception P from which the memory derives? The answer appeals to the distinction between anchored and unanchored memories.

The debate between literalism and contextualism bears on the (in-)existence of ‘free' pragmatic processes, i.e. pragmatic processes of interpretation which contribute to shaping intuitive truth-conditional content without being mandated by anything in the sentence itself. In his new book John Collins defends the contextualist position. He focusses on so-called ‘unarticulated constituents' (e.g. the unmentioned location of rain in a statement like ‘It is raining’) and argues against the idea that the existence of certain bound readings for the implicit component entails the presence of a covert variable in the syntax to which the alleged unarticulated constituent is assigned as semantic value. In the absence of properly syntactic evidence, Collins says, 'judgments about semantic readings are invariably amenable to a pragmatic explanation'. In a recent paper, however, Paul Elbourne offers the sort of evidence which Collins says would be needed to support the literalist position. On Collins' behalf, I discuss, and rebut, the evidence offered by Elbourne. In the last section, I argue against Collins that optionality is a better criterion than unarticulatedness for establishing that a given meaning component results from a free pragmatic process.