Mark Richard

On the one hand, we hold reasoners responsible for their conclusions, and responsibility is usually taken to be a mark of agency. On the other hand, much reasoning seems to be subpersonal, something that it is implausible that we “do.” One can be responsible for something even if it’s not the result of one’s direct or indirect agency—so, at least, this chapter argues. So, responsibility for inference doesn’t show that inference is not by and large a matter of quick, more or less automatic processes that we may review but not directly control. This runs counter to the idea that essential to inference is that an agent _take_ one thing to follow from some others. Careful consideration of humdrum inference, the chapter argues, shows that there’s little reason to endorse the taking requirement. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how far down in phylogenesis or ontogenesis one might find processes that deserve to be called reasoning.

Observing Clark Kent, so dressed, entering a phone booth and Superman, so dressed, exiting it, most people say (1) is true, (2) false (1) Clark Kent entered the phone booth and Superman came out. (2) Clark Kent entered the phone booth and Clark Kent came out. Why? Some say it’s semantics: the sentences say different things. Others say it’s pragmatics: uses of the sentences (non-semantically) convey different things. Yet others say it’s differing associations speakers make with the sentences. I defend the plausibility of a semantic explanation of our intuitions, arguing that linguistic competence and the meaning it tracks is constituted by something more like a process than a persisting, relatively unvarying state. While it is an empirical matter which explanation is correct, the picture of competence and meaning as things process like is, I argue, preferable to views of them as static.

Ameliorative philosophical analysis elucidates a concept by looking at the purposes it has for its users. It evaluates them, and gives an analysis on the basis of the purposes the analyst thinks ought to control the concept’s use. As such it can look wildly revisionary, an attempt not to tell us what we mean but to change the subject. This chapter sketches a view of meaning on which ameliorative analysis can be understood as not at all subject changing: a word’s meaning is the evolving collection of presuppositions its users make, and expect to be recognized as made, when the word is used. Focusing on Sally Haslanger’s ameliorative accounts of race and gender, this chapter argues that ameliorative analysis is best understood not as a project that is successful only if it results in the concept’s reference reflecting the ameliorative analysis. Conceptual amelioration and engineering are attempts to foster a kind of evolution within a population, a change in the presuppositions that (it is common knowledge) accompany the concept’s use. This can be achieved and have worthwhile effects even while no shift in reference occurs.

It seems “part of the meaning” of a slur that it is a device for displaying contempt. And this seems part of the explanation of differences between slurs and their “neutral counterparts.” But some people, making no linguistic mistake, use slurs in a jocular way, or without animus as interchangeable with their counterparts. And even if the illocutionary “fact” were in _some_ sense “part of meaning,” one might doubt that it is relevant to what is said by an utterance. But information about illocution _can_ be part of “what is said.” This chapter sketches an account of meaning in the sense of _what needs to be grasped in order to be a competent speaker_; and meaning in this sense is intimately connected with _what determines what is “literally said” by an utterance_. This provides a natural explanation of why the use of slurs gives rise to a distinctive sort of offense.

This chapter begins with a critical discussion of Mark Schroeder’s book _Being For_. The primary worry about the content of Schroeder’s book is that he has an impoverished view of how an expressivist might explain how mental states are related to the sentences that in one or another way express them. The chapter sketches very informally the account of this that I think the expressivist ought to give. On this account, an expressivist semantics associates with each sentence aptness conditions for the commitments undertaken by utterances of those sentences. Also included is an appendix that gives a few quasi-technical details.

This chapter argues for the following theses. There are perfectly possible meanings (ones of a sort one would think are possessed by many vague predicates) which would necessitate a predicate's being gappy. Many arguments against the coherence of truth value gaps depend on a very narrow picture of saying, which ignores the possibility of such things as _sui generis_ denial. Frege/Geach objections to things like _sui generis_ denial dissolve once we observe that ‘not’ and other sentence compounding devices lead a double life, sometimes contributing to sense, sometimes to force. There is a simple compositional story about how (for instance) embedding a denial operator within a ‘force conditional’ makes _if not A, then B_ fit to perform a sort of speech act which, when combined with B's denial, commits one to the aptness of asserting A. The trisection thesis — predicates trisect their domains into three groups, those they are true of, those they are false of, and the rest — is correct. The objection to the trisection thesis —that it is inconsistent with the idea that there are no sharp boundaries in a Sorites series — is not compelling: there is no conception of a ‘sharp boundary’ on which it's plausible, _both_ that there are no sharp boundaries in a Sorites series, _and_ that trisection involves the creation of sharp boundaries. Once we recognize that talk of indeterminacy is contrastive, we also recognize that higher order vagueness is not inconsistent with trisection. We also, once we think of indeterminacy as contrastive, come to see that indeterminacy itself is indeterminate: if it is indeterminate whether _p_, that indeterminacy itself is not something that is settled, but is itself indeterminate.

I review but don’t endorse Marcus’ arguments that impossible beliefs are impossible. I defend her claim that belief’s objects are, in some important sense, not the bearers of truth and falsity, discuss her dispositionalism about belief, and argue it’s a good fit with the idea that belief’s objects are Russellian states of affairs.Reviso, pero no suscribo, los argumentos de Marcus a favor de que las creencias imposibles son imposibles. Defiendo su tesis de que los objetos de las creencias no son, en algún sentido importante, los soportes de la verdad y la falsedad; discuto su disposicionalismo acerca de las creencias y argumento que encaja bien con la idea de que los objetos de las creencias son estados de cosas russellianos.

_Meaning_ brings together some of the most significant philosophical work on linguistic representation and understanding, presenting canonical essays on core questions in the philosophy of language. Brings together essential readings which define and advance the literature on linguistic representation and understanding. Examines key topics in philosophy of language, including analyticity; translational indeterminacy; theories of reference; meaning as use; the nature of linguistic competence; truth and meaning; and relations between semantics and metaphysics. Includes classic articles by key figures such as Frege, Quine, Putnam, Kripke, and Davidson; and recent reactions to this work by philosophers including Mark Wilson, Scott Soames, James Higginbotham, Frank Jackson, Alex Byrne, and Paul Bogohossian.

_Meaning_ brings together some of the most significant philosophical work on linguistic representation and understanding, presenting canonical essays on core questions in the philosophy of language. Brings together essential readings which define and advance the literature on linguistic representation and understanding. Examines key topics in philosophy of language, including analyticity; translational indeterminacy; theories of reference; meaning as use; the nature of linguistic competence; truth and meaning; and relations between semantics and metaphysics. Includes classic articles by key figures such as Frege, Quine, Putnam, Kripke, and Davidson; and recent reactions to this work by philosophers including Mark Wilson, Scott Soames, James Higginbotham, Frank Jackson, Alex Byrne, and Paul Bogohossian.

Talia Mae Bettcher argues that gender terms like ‘woman’ have multiple meanings, as different speakers use these terms to pick out different classes—some use ‘woman’ to pick out (roughly) the class of those assigned female at birth; some use it to pick out a class including both that class and trans women. Bettcher is correct, I argue: it is undeniable that ‘woman’ has quite different referents in different speakers' mouths; there is furthermore a kind of conventional meaning which varies across speakers associated with gender terms, one which tracks and varies with these different referential practices.

David Hunter’s On Believing is a rich and worthwhile defense of a distinctive view about the objects and nature of belief. In these comments, I discuss three aspects of the book. I agree with Hunter that the objects of belief are properties or (as I prefer to refer to them) states of affairs. But I argue that he has too narrow a view of the range of possible objects of belief. I defend the idea that belief is in part a matter of representing the world, an idea Hunter appears to criticize. And I defend the idea that one or another truthy property provides a norm for evaluating beliefs.

Cappelen and Lepore argue against the principle P: A semantic theory ought to assign p to S if uttering S is saying p. An upshot of P’s falsity, they allege, is that some objections to Davidson’s programme (such as Foster’s) turn out to be without force. This essay formulates and defends a qualified version of P against Cappelen and Lepore’s objections. It distinguishes P from the more fundamental Q: A semantic theory ought to assign p to S iff literal utterance of S literally says p. Without some objection to Q—which Cappelen and Lepore do not supply—Foster’s objection to Davidson’s programme stands.

Many trans women (men) say that they know that they are women (men). Anti-trans activists deny the claims trans people say they know. Many say that social kinds like woman, Latinx, and consent are in some important sense constructed in the social world and are thus open to a certain amount of engineering. I think the claims to knowledge trans people make are correct, and I think it correct that such things as gender, race, and consent are constructed by society and so are prime candidates for what philosophers these days call conceptual engineering. But it is not all that easy to see how the claim about knowledge and the claim that what is known is determined by the vagaries of the social world are to be reconciled. In this paper I argue that this is a real problem, that it has a solution, and that the solution tells us something important about what happens when we contest norms or engineer concepts.