-
12Response to Voltolini's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop
-
301Does linguistic communication rest on inference?Mind and Language 17 (1-2). 2002.It is often claimed that, because of semantic underdetermination, one can determine the content of an utterance only by appealing to pragmatic considerations concerning what the speaker means, what his intentions are. This supports ‘inferentialism' : the view that, in contrast to perceptual content, communicational content is accessed indirectly, via an inference. As against this view, I argue that primary pragmatic processes (the pragmatic processes that are involved in the determination of tru…Read more
-
5Response to Fernandez-Moreno's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop
-
82Pragmatics and Logical FormIn E. Romero & B. Soria (eds.), Explicit Communication: Robyn Carston's Pragmatics, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 25-41. 2007.Robyn Carston and I share a general methodological position which I call ‘Truth-Conditional Pragmatics' (TCP). TCP is the view that the effects of context on truth-conditional content need not be traceable to the linguistic material in the uttered sentence. Some effects of context on truth-conditional content are due to the linguistic material (e.g. to context-sensitive words or morphemes which trigger the search for contextual values), but others result from ‘free' pragmatic processes. Free pra…Read more
-
125Deixis and AnaphoraIn Zoltán Gendler Szabó (ed.), Semantics Versus Pragmatics, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 286--316. 2004.A defence of the 'pragmatic' theory of anaphora (which stresses the analogy between anaphora and deixis) against an argument put forward by Gareth Evans.
-
21My contribution to the 'MIMESIS, METAPHYSICS AND MAKE-BELIEVE' conference held in honour of Kendall Walton in the University of Leeds
-
79Moderate relativismIn G. Carpintero & M. Koelbel (eds.), Relative Truth, Oxford University Press. pp. 41-62. 2008.In modal logic, propositions are evaluated relative to possible worlds. A proposition may be true relative to a world w, and false relative to another world w'. Relativism is the view that the relativization idea extends beyond possible worlds and modalities. Thus, in tense logic, propositions are evaluated relative to times. A proposition (e.g. the proposition that Socrates is sitting) may be true relative to a time t, and false relative to another time t'. In this paper I discuss, and attempt …Read more
-
269Content, Mood, and ForcePhilosophy Compass 8 (7): 622-632. 2013.In this survey paper, I start from two classical theses of speech act theory: that speech act content is uniformly propositional and that sentence mood encodes illocutionary force. These theses have been questioned in recent work, both in philosophy and linguistics. The force/content distinction itself – a cornerstone of 20‐century philosophy of language – has come to be rejected by some theorists, unmoved by the famous ‘Frege–Geach’ argument. The paper reviews some of these debates.
-
14Response to Carston's paper, 'How Many Pragmatic Systems Are There'?
-
174Force cancellationSynthese 196 (4): 1403-1424. 2019.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 : 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 i…Read more
-
16The limits of expressibilityIn Barry Smith (ed.), John Searle, Cambridge University Press. pp. 189-213. 2003.
-
53Local pragmatics: reply to Mandy SimonsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (5): 493-508. 2017.In response to Mandy Simons’ defence of a classical Gricean approach to pragmatic enrichment in terms of conversational implicature, I emphasize the following contrast. Conversational implicatures are generated by a global inference which uses as a premise the fact that the speaker has said that p, but only the triggering inference is global in cases of pragmatic enrichment. What generates the correct interpretation is a process of reconstrual, which locally maps the literal meaning of a constit…Read more
-
Contextualism and CompositionalityIn Luisa Mora-Millan (ed.), Cognicion & Lenguaje, . pp. 201-217. 2008.
-
55Réponse a mes critiquesPhilosophiques 33 (1): 275-288. 2006.Réponse à trois études critiques de mon livre Literal Meaning à paraître dans la revue Philosophiques (Montréal).
-
115Singular Thought: In Defense of AcquaintanceIn Robin Jeshion (ed.), New Essays on Singular Thought, Oxford University Press. pp. 141. 2010.This paper is about the Descriptivism/Singularism debate, which has loomed large in 20-century philosophy of language and mind. My aim is to defend Singularism by showing, first, that it is a better and more promising view than even the most sophisticated versions of Descriptivism, and second, that the recent objections to Singularism (based on a dismissal of the acquaintance constraint on singular thought) miss their target.
-
756Quasi-Singular Propositions: The Semantics of Belief ReportsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 69 (1). 1995.
-
Primary Pragmatic ProcessesIn Asa Kasher (ed.), Pragmatics: Critical Concepts. Dawn and delineation. Vol. 1, Routledge. pp. 512-531. 1998.
-
The Simulation of BeliefIn Pascal Engel (ed.), Believing and Accepting, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 267-298. 2000.
-
393De re and De seDialectica 63 (3): 249-269. 2009.For Perry and many authors, de se thoughts are a species of de re thought. In this paper, I argue that de se thoughts come in two varieties: explicit and implicit. While explicit de se thoughts can be construed as a variety of de re thought, implicit de se thoughts cannot: their content is thetic, while the content of de re thoughts is categoric. The notion of an implicit de se thought is claimed to play a central role in accounting for the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentificati…Read more
-
7Response to Predelli's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop
-
11Philosophie du langage (et de l’esprit)Editions Gallimard. 2008.Philosophie du langage et philosophie de l'esprit constituent désormais un tout indissociable. Les expressions linguistiques «signifient». Qu'est-ce que cela veut dire? François Recanati distingue trois réponses possibles. Selon la première, signifier c'est (pour une expression linguistique) être associée à des représentations mentales. Selon la deuxième, signifier c'est «faire référence» et renvoyer à quelque chose dans le monde – une réalité extralinguistique. Selon la troisième, enfin, signi…Read more
-
3D'un contexte a l'autreCahiers Chronos 20 1-14. 2008.On distingue différents types de "contextes" à l'oeuvre dans l'interprétation des expressions indexicales, de façon à rendre compte du style indirect libre et de phénomènes apparentés.
-
69Reply to Romero and SoriaTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 32 (2): 175-178. 2013.Response to Romero's and Soria's paper in the Symposium on *Truth-Conditional Pragmatics* (OUP 2010).