Tomasz Puczyłowski

This article explores the connection between questions and conversational implicatures. We put forward a theoretical argument to the effect that questions can contain such implicatures. We also present extensive empirical material that confirms this hypothesis. The article focuses on a class of utterances used simultaneously to express an epistemic stance toward a state of affairs stated in a subordinate clause and to receive a response from an interlocutor, like in the following example: Don’t you think Peter should be going home now?

The paper concerns the semantics of belief reports. The following definition is proposed: if rational agent x does not accept any sentence, which is true under x’s interpretation of expressions iff not-p, and x does not reject any sentence, which is true under x’s interpretation iff p, then (x believes that p iff x accepts  which is true under x’s interpretation iff p). The term ‘x’s interpretation of an expression e’ is to be understood: something which x actually refers to by using e (rather than a object she intends to refer). This is to say that to ascribe a belief to rational agent one should use words which have the same reference as words used by the agent. We believe it could solve Krpike’s puzzles about belief on the price that sometimes names used by the agent refer to others entities than when we use them.

The Gettier problem concerns the definition of knowledge as justified true belief. In the paper I argue that Gettier's cases are not cases of justified true belief because Gettier's examples rely on some problematic assumptions. The first is rather elementary definition of justification and the other is that justification is preserved by entailment, that is, (A) for all agents X, if X is justified in believing that p , and X realizes that the truth of p entails the truth of q , then X would also be justified in believing that q . For the simplistic conception of justification has some alarming consequences we pursue more adequate definition of justification which would satisfy the idea that a necessary condition of justification is to entail or to be entailed by a true proposition. We also show that the (A) is not necessary to provide an elegant counter-example to the definition of knowledge if the elementary definition of justification is adopted