-
83Contextualizing Meaning Through EpistemologyProceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 39 7-11. 2008.Epistemological contextualism and semantic contextualism are two distinct but closely entangled projects in contemporary philosophy. According to epistemological contextualism, our knowledge attributions are context-sensitive. That is, the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing sentences – sentences of the form of (1) S knows that p - vary depending on the context in which they are uttered. Contextualism admits the legitimacy of several epistemic standards that vary with the context of use of (…Read more
-
Recensioni/Reviews-Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta. An Essay on MetarepresentationEpistemologia 27 (2): 337-339. 2004.
-
130How to do things with (recorded) wordsPhilosophical Studies 167 (2): 485-495. 2014.The aim of this paper is to evaluate which context determines the illocutionary force of written or recorded utterances—those involved in written texts, films and images, conceived as recordings that can be seen or heard in different occasions. More precisely, my paper deals with the “metaphysical” or constitutive role of context—as opposed to its epistemic or evidential role: my goal is to determine which context is semantically relevant in order to fix the illocutionary force of a speech act, …Read more
-
47John Langshaw AustinInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2013.J. L. Austin was one of the more influential British philosophers of his time, due to his rigorous thought, extraordinary personality, and innovative philosophical method. According to John Searle, he was both passionately loved and hated by his contemporaries. Like Socrates, he seemed to destroy all philosophical orthodoxy without presenting an alternative, equally comforting, orthodoxy. Austin is best known for two major contributions to contemporary philosophy: first, his ‘linguistic phenomen…Read more
-
361Indexicals, speech acts and pornographyAnalysis 68 (4): 310-316. 2008.In the last twenty years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions (see Smith 1989, Predelli 1996, 1998a,1998b, 2002, Corazza et al. 2002, Romdenh-Romluc 2002). In particular, the intention-based approach proposed by Stefano Predelli has proven to bear interesting relations to several major questions in philosophy of language. In a recent paper (Saul 2006), Jennifer Saul draws on the literature on index…Read more
-
121Context of utterance and intended contextLecture Notes in Computer Science 2116 73-86. 2001.In this paper I expose and criticise the distinction between pure indexicals and demonstratives, held by David Kaplan and John Perry. I oppose the context of material production of the utterance to the “intended context” (the context of interpretation, i.e. the context the speaker indicates as semantically relevant): this opposition introduces an intentional feature into the interpretation of pure indexicals. As far as the indexical I is concerned, I maintain that we must distinguish between the…Read more
-
944How to Refer: Objective Context vs. Intentional ContextIn P. Blackburn, C. Ghidini, R. Turner & F. Giunchiglia (eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (Context'03), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 2680, Springer. 2003.In "Demonstratives" Kaplan claims that the occurrence of a demonstrative must be supplemented by an act of demonstration, like a pointing (a feature of the objective context). Conversely in "After-thoughts" Kaplan argues that the occurrence of a demonstrative must be supplemented by a directing intention (a feature of the intentional con-text). I present the two theories in competition and try to identify the constraints an intention must satisfy in order to have semantic rele-vance. My claim is…Read more
-
110Meaning, Contexts and JustificationIn T. R. Roth-Berghofer D. C. Richardson B. Kokinov (ed.), Modeling and Using Context. 6th International and Interdisciplinary Conference, CONTEXT '07, LNAI 4635, Springer. pp. 69--81. 2007.Contextualism in philosophy of language and in epistemology are two distinct but closely entangled projects. The epistemological thesis is grounded in a semantic claim concerning the context-sensitivity of the predicate “know”: we gain insight into epistemological problems by investigating our linguistic intuitions concerning knowledge attribution sentences. Our aim here is to evaluate the plausibility of a project that takes the opposite starting point: the general idea is to establish the sema…Read more
-
1Recording Speech ActsEtica E Politica 11 (1): 361-368. 2009.Indexicality is at the core of many major philosophical problems.1 In the last years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions.2 In this paper, I argue that a parallel may be drawn between the determination of the reference of the indexical expressions in recorded messages or written texts, and the determination of the illocutionary force of recorded or written utterances. To this aim, I will endorse th…Read more
-
781Implicating, as it is conceived in recent pragmatics, amounts to conveying a (propositional) content without saying it – a content providing no contribution to the truth-conditions of the proposition expressed by the sentence uttered. In this sense, implicating is a notion closely related to the work of Paul Grice (1913-1988) and of his precursors, followers and critics. Hence, the task of this article is to introduce and critically examine the explicit/implicit distinction, the Gricean notion o…Read more
-
1851ContextualismHandbook of Pragmatics Online. 2010.Contextualism is a view about meaning, semantic content and truth-conditions, bearing significant consequences for the characterisation of explicit and implicit content, the decoding/inferring distinction and the semantics/pragmatics interface. According to the traditional perspective in semantics (called "literalism" or "semantic minimalism"), it is possible to attribute truth-conditions to a sentence independently of any context of utterance, i.e. in virtue of its meaning alone. We must then …Read more
Claudia Bianchi
Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele (Milan)
-
Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele (Milan)Professor
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Philosophy of Language |
Pragmatics |
Reference |
Speech Acts |
Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction |
Performatives |