Emma Borg

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions and, specifically, how we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area.

In his important recent book, Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis: Why Incompetence is Worse than Greed, Boudewijn de Bruin argues that a key element of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 was a failure of epistemic virtue. To improve matters, then, de Bruin argues we need to focus on the acquisition and exercise of epistemic virtues, rather than to focus on a more ethical culture for banking per se. Whilst this is an interesting suggestion and it is indeed very plausible that an increased focus on proper knowledge-related behaviour will be part of a solution, we are sceptical both about de Bruin’s overarching theoretical claims and about his practical suggestions for change. Instead we argue that change in this sector is best promoted by reconceiving of the relationship between financial institutions and the societies they serve, and that this is fundamentally not an epistemic but a moral issue.

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers.

A common deflationary tendency has emerged recently in both philosophical accounts and comparative animal studies concerned with how subjects understand the actions of others. The suggestion emerging from both arenas is that the default mechanism for understanding action involves only a sensitivity to the observable, behavioural (non-mental) features of a situation. This kind of ‘smart behaviour reading’ thus suggests that, typically, predicting or explaining the behaviour of conspecifics does not require seeing the other through the lens of mental state attribution. This paper aims to explore and assess this deflationary move. In §1 I clarify what might be involved in a smart behaviour reading account via looking at some concrete examples. Then in §2 I critically assess the deflationary move, arguing that, at least in the human case, it would in fact be a mistake to assume that our default method of action understanding proceeds without appeal to mental state attribution. Finally in §3 I consider briefly how the positive view proposed here relates to discussions about standard two-system models of cognition.

According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is an essentially mental phenomenon (typically, a kind of conscious experience). In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy, such as that by Justin Sytsma and Kevin Reuter, purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an essentially bodily phenomenon—specifically, a quality of bodily disturbance. In response to this bodily view, other recent experimental studies have provided evidence that the ordinary (‘folk’) concept of pain is more complex than previously assumed: rather than tracking only bodily or only mental aspects of pain, the ordinary concept of pain can actually track either of these aspects. The polyeidic (or ‘many ideas’) analysis of the folk concept of pain, as proposed by Emma Borg et al., captures this complexity. Whereas previous empirical support for the polyeidic view has focused on the context-sensitivity of the folk concept of pain, here we discuss individual differences in people’s ‘pain priors’—namely, their standing tendencies to think of pain in relatively mind-centric or body-centric ways. We describe a preliminary empirical study and present a small number of findings, which will be explored further in future work. The results we discuss are part of a larger programme of work which seeks to integrate philosophical pain research into clinical practice. For example, we hypothesise that variations in how patients with chronic pain are thinking about pain could help predict their responses to treatment.

Minimal semantics is sometimes characterised as a ‘neo-Gricean’ approach to meaning. This label seems reasonable since a key claim of minimal semantics is that the minimal contents possessed by sentences (akin to Grice’s technical notion of ‘what is said by a sentence’) need not be (and usually are not) what is communicated by a speaker who utters those sentences. However, given an affinity between the two approaches, we might expect that a well-known challenge for the Gricean – namely that their account fails to fit with the psychological evidence concerning linguistic understanding – could also be levelled at the minimalist, and indeed this seems to be the basis of Recanati’s challenge to minimalism from his ‘availability principle’ (Recanati 2004). This paper aims to explore the relationship between semantics and psychology and show how both Gricean and minimalist approaches can avoid the challenge from psychological evidence. I conclude by suggesting that the way in which minimalism avoids this challenge also helps the account to defuse Clapp’s ‘naturalistic objection’ (Clapp 2007) that there are no grounds for selecting a correct minimal semantic theory

During the COVID-19 pandemic governments across the globe have provided unparalleled support to private sector firms. As a result, new oversight mechanisms are urgently needed, to enable society to assess and, if necessary, redress, moves by firms which have taken government aid. Many jurisdictions have seen the introduction of ‘piecemeal’ conditionality on different pots of aid. This paper argues that a better response would be to adopt a more unified approach. In particular, the paper explores the social licence framework as a potential way to ‘build back better’. It is argued that the nature of the implicit social contract between society and the private sector provides the normative force underpinning demands for a social purpose for business, and that this purpose in turn can be used to specify the conditions firms must meet to legitimise their operations. The paper then considers three core elements involved in any introduction of a social licence framework, and surveys the potential benefits and challenges that might emerge in moving towards a social licence framework.

This paper examines the role of speaker intentions in issues of reference determination for context-sensitive expressions, focusing on demonstratives. Intuitively, the referent of a token utterance of ‘that’ is fixed by the speaker’s intentions. However, if this is right it causes a potential problem for so-called formal theories of meaning. I begin by setting out the nature of this problem and proceed to explore three putative solutions. First, the assumption that speaker intentions fix reference in these cases may be rejected; second, it may be held that current speaker intentions are relevant but that they can be accommodated within a formal semantic theory; third, reference determination and semantic content may be held strictly apart. I reject the first two of these moves, termed respectively ‘conventionalism’ and ‘non-inferentialism’, but argue that the third move provides an appealing way for the formal semanticist to accommodate the content of context-sensitive expressions.Este artigo examina o papel das intenções do falante no que diz respeito à determinação da referência para expressões, concentrando-se nos demonstrativos. Intuitivamente, o referente de um proferimento-token de ‘aquilo’ é fixado pelas intenções do falante. Se isto é correto, no entanto, temos um problema potencial para as chamadas teorias formais do significado. Eu começarei fixando a natureza deste problema e, em seguida, explorarei três supostas soluções. Primeiro, a assunção de que a intenção do falante fixa a referência nestes casos pode ser rejeitada; segundo, pode ser sustentada a tese de que as intenções correntes do falante são relevantes, mas podem ser acomodadas em uma teoria semântica formal; terceiro, a determinação da referência e o conteúdo semântico podem ser mantidos estritamente separados. Eu rejeito as duas primeiras possibilidades acima, chamadas respectivamente de ‘convencio-nalismo’ e ‘não-inferencialismo’, mas argumento que a terceira provê uma forma atraente para o semanticista formal de acomodar o conteúdo de expressões sensíveis ao contexto

Ruth Garrett Millikan is one of the most important thinkers in philosophy of mind and language of the current generation. Across a number of seminal books, and in the company of theorists such as Jerry Fodor and Fred Dretske, she has championed a wholly naturalistic, scientific understanding of content, whether of thought or words. Many think that naturalism about meaning has found its most defensible form in her distinctively “teleological” approach, and in Language: A Biological Model she continues the expansion and defence of her general position, turning her attention to the role of rule-following in language and the ensuing understanding of issues that lie at the boundary of semantics and pragmatics

Across a series of seminal works, Ruth Millikan has produced a compelling and comprehensive naturalised account of content. With respect to linguistic meaning, her ground breaking approach has been to analyse the meaning of a linguistic term via the function it performs which has been responsible for securing the term’s survival. This way of looking at things has significant repercussions for a number of recent debates in philosophy of language. This paper explores these repercussions through the lens of what is known as semantic minimalism, using the tenets of minimalism to draw out some questions for Millikan’s approach to the semantics/pragmatics divide.

Communication is crucial for us as human beings – much of what we know or believe, we learn through hearing or seeing what others say or express, and arguably part of what makes us human is our desire to communicate our thoughts and feelings to others. A core part of our communicative activity concerns linguistic communication, where we use the words and sentences of natural languages to communicate our ideas. But what exactly is going on in linguistic communication and what is the relationship between what we say and what we think? This entry explores these issues.

According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is an essentially mental phenomenon. In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy, such as that by Justin Sytsma and Kevin Reuter, purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an essentially bodily phenomenon—specifically, a quality of bodily disturbance. In response to this bodily view, other recent experimental studies have provided evidence that the ordinary concept of pain is more complex than previously assumed: rather than tracking only bodily or only mental aspects of pain, the ordinary concept of pain can actually track either of these aspects. The polyeidic analysis of the folk concept of pain, as proposed by Emma Borg et al., captures this complexity. Whereas previous empirical support for the polyeidic view has focused on the context-sensitivity of the folk concept of pain, here we discuss individual differences in people’s ‘pain priors’—namely, their standing tendencies to think of pain in relatively mind-centric or body-centric ways. We describe a preliminary empirical study and present a small number of findings, which will be explored further in future work. The results we discuss are part of a larger programme of work which seeks to integrate philosophical pain research into clinical practice. For example, we hypothesise that variations in how patients with chronic pain are thinking about pain could help predict their responses to treatment.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 234. H/b £?.??, $?.??, P/b £?.??, $?.??. If asked for an example of a rigid designator it is likely that one would suggest a name, like ‘Aristotle’ or ‘Tony Blair’, or a demonstrative, like ‘that book’ said whilst pointing at a certain text. Intuitively, what these expressions have in common is the central role they accord to perception of an object: you can see the book you want to talk about, there are people around in our community who have bumped into Tony, and, although no one alive today perceived Aristotle directly, it seems plausible to claim that our ability to use the name now relies on the fact that someone, sometime, did perceive him directly. However, as anyone at all familiar with rigid designation knows, not all such expressions follow this model. Kripke himself stressed that certain definite descriptions have a constant extension across all possible worlds (for example, ‘the smallest prime number’, ‘the actual prime minister of Great Britain now’) and thus meet the criterion for being rigid designators; while Kaplan emphasized the role of a descriptive rule in determining the referent for a token utterance of an indexical, like ‘I’ or ‘tomorrow’

Common-sense (or folk) psychology holds that (generally) we do what we do for the reasons we have. This common-sense approach is embodied in claims like ‘I went to the kitchen because I wanted a drink’ and ‘She took a coat because she thought it might rain and hoped to stay dry’. However, the veracity of these common-sense psychological explanations has been challenged by experimental evidence (primarily from behavioural economics and social psychology) which appears to show that individuals are systematically irrational—that often we do not do what we do because of the reasons we have. Recently, some of the same experimental evidence has also been used to level a somewhat different challenge at the common-sense view, arguing that the overarching aim of reasoning is not to deliver better or more reason-governed decisions for individual reasoners, but to improve group decision making or to protect an individual’s sense of self. This paper explores the range of challenges that experimental work has been taken to raise for the common-sense approach and suggests some potential responses. Overall, I argue that the experimental evidence surveyed should not lead us to a rejection of individual rationality.

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions and, specifically, how we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area.