Isidora Stojanovic

In recent years, a number of new trends have seen light at the intersection of semantics and philosophy of language. They are meant to address puzzles raised by the context-sensitivity of a variety of natural language constructions, such as knowledge ascriptions, belief reports, epistemic modals, indicative conditionals, quantifier phrases, gradable adjectives, temporal constructions, vague predicates, moral predicates, predicates of personal taste. A diversity of labels have consequently emerged, such as 'contextualism', 'indexicalism', 'invariantism', 'literalism', 'minimalism', and 'relativism', variously qualified. The goal of this essay is to pinpoint the issues that lie at the heart of the recent debates, clarify what is at stake, and provide a snapshot of the current theoretical landscape.

In this paper, I argue against the view there are contingent a priori truths, and against the related view that there are contingent logical truths. I will suggest that in general, predicates ›a priori‹ and ›contingent‹ are implicitly relativized to circumstances, and argue that apriority entails necessity, whenever the two are relativized to the same circumstance. I will then criticize the idea, inspired by David Kaplan's framework, of contingent contents "knowable under a priori characters." I will also argue, against Kaplan, that sentences of the form »The actual F is F« do not deserve the status of logical truths, since what they express is neither necessary nor a priori.

It has been long known (Perry in Philos Rev 86: 474–497, 1977 ; Noûs 13: 3–21, 1979 , Lewis in Philos Rev 88: 513–543 1981 ) that de se attitudes, such as beliefs and desires that one has about oneself , call for a special treatment in theories of attitudinal content. The aim of this paper is to raise similar concerns for theories of asserted content. The received view, inherited from Kaplan ( 1989 ), has it that if Alma says “I am hungry,” the asserted content, or what is said , is the proposition that Alma is hungry (at a given time). I argue that the received view has difficulties handling de se assertion, i.e., contents that one expresses using the first person pronoun, to assert something about oneself. I start from the observation that when two speakers say “I am hungry,” one may truly report them as having said the same thing. It has often been held that the possibility of such reports comes from the fact that the two speakers are, after all, uttering the same words, and are in this sense “saying the same thing”. I argue that this approach fails, and that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to use the same words, or words endowed with the same meaning, in order to be truly reported as same-saying. I also argue that reports of same-saying in the case of de se assertion differ significantly from such reports in the case of two speakers merely implicating the same thing

Philosophers of language distinguish among the lexical or linguistic meaning of the sentence uttered, what is said by an utterance of the sentence, and speaker's meaning, or what is conveyed by the speaker to her audience. In most views, what is said is the semantic or truth-conditional content of the utterance, and is irreducible either to the linguistic meaning or to the speaker's meaning. I will show that those views account badly for people's intuitions on what is said. I will also argue that no distinguished level of what is said is required, and that the notion of linguistic meaning is the best placed to play the role of what is said. This relies on two points. First, our intuitions on what is said cannot be detached from the ways in which we talk about what is said, and from the semantics of speech reports and indirect discourse in general. Second, besides what is said, there is an equally important notion of what what-is-said is said about, or that about which the speaker is talking. These are, then, the three main ingredients needed for the theory of what is said: linguistic meaning, what is talked about, and a semantic account of reported speech

Since Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, the view that there are contingent apriori truths has been surprisingly widespread. In this paper, I argue against that view. My first point is that in general, occurrences of predicates “a priori” and “contingent” are implicitly relativized to some circumstance, involving an agent, a time, a location. My second point is that apriority and necessity coineide when relativized to the same circumstance. That is to say, what is known apriori (by an agent in a circumstance) cannot fail to be the case (in the same circumstance), hence it is necessary.

One of the most promising aspects of Perry 's Reflexive-Referential Theory is its capacity to generate a variety of contents that may be associated with a single utterance, contents that may be used for various explanatory purposes. My concern in this paper is that, as it stands, RRT generates too many contents. The problem is not just that most of those contents will be explanatorily idle, but rather, that nothing in the actual RRT explains why those contents cannot play the roles that their minimally different “neighbors” can play. In Section 1, I discuss two kinds of example that motivate RRT and its multiplicity of contents; the first comes close enough to some of Perry's own examples, but the second is original, and may be therefore viewed as an application of RRT to a problem that has not been discussed by Perry himself. In Section 2, I will show how these examples give rise, in turn, to problems of overgeneration. In other words, just as RRT is able to derive contents that may be used to account for the cases that need explanation, it ought to be able to derive analogous contents that, in turn, give counterintuitive, if not outright wrong predictions. In Section 3, I will tentatively outline a line of response that Perry could take. The overall direction of the paper is thus optimistic, since the problems raised may be viewed as pointing to ways of improving RRT, rather than undermining it.

Our paper discusses Recanati’s application of the mental files apparatus to reports of beliefs and other attitudes. While mental files appear early on in Recanati’s work on belief-reports, his latest book introduces the concept of indexed files (a.k.a. vicarious files) and puts it to work to explain how we can report other people’s attitudes and to account for opacity phenomena. Our goal is twofold: we show that the approach in Recanati’s Mental Files (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) departs significantly from his earlier proposals as well as from the very spirit of truth-conditional pragmatics; and we argue that the indexed files approach, qua an attempt to provide a semantics for belief-reports, is untenable.

This paper is driven by the idea that the contextualism-relativism debate regarding the semantics of value-attributions turns upon certain extra-semantic assumptions that are unwarranted. One is the assumption that the many-place predicate of truth, deployed by compositional semantics, cannot be directly appealed to in theorizing about people's assessments of truth value, but must be supplemented (if not replaced) by a different truth-predicate, obtained through certain "postsemantic" principles. Another is the assumption that semantics assigns to sentences not only truth values (as a function of various parameters, such as contexts, worlds and times), but also semantic contents, and that what context-sensitive expressions contribute to content are certain contextually determined elements. My first aim in this paper will be to show how the two assumptions have shaped two ways of understanding the debate between contextualism and relativism, as regards value-attributions. My second aim will be to show that both assumptions belong outside semantics, and are moreover questionable.

One of the most important and, at the same time, most controversial issues in metasemantics is the question of what semantics is, and what distinguishes semantic elements (features, properties, phenomena, mechanisms, processes, or whatever) from the rest. The issue is tightly linked with the debate over the semantics-pragmatics distinction, which has been vibrant for a decade or two, but seems to be reaching an impasse. I suggest that this impasse may be due to the failure to recognize a distinct realm that should not be subsumed either under semantics or pragmatics, but may be labeled "prepragmatics". My ultimate goal is to put forward and defend a novel picture of our language architecture, according to which: semantic content is strictly poorer than the lexically encoded content (and therefore does not involve any contextually determined material - not even the reference of demonstratives); pragmatic mechanisms require being able to reason about one's beliefs and intentions and do not affect truth-conditions or truth-value; and, finally, there is a distinct prepragmatic level, which takes into account various kinds of contextual information and makes it possible to evaluate a sentence (as used on a particular occasion) for a truth value. I shall take as a case study, one of the "stumbling stones" in the semantics-pragmatics literature: the case of demonstrative reference. The upshot will be to show that if there is indeed room for a family of linguistic phenomena that are neither semantic nor yet fully pragmatic, the resolution of demonstrative reference is a candidate par excellence to belong there.

One of the most interesting and fruitful applications of logics, classical or other, has been in supplying formal frameworks for the semantics of natural language. In this paper, I discuss the following puzzle: there seem to be arguments that are logically valid - more precisely, that are instances of the rule of universal instantiation, and yet, the utterance of the premise is intuitively true while the conclusion is false. I will discuss two strategies, developed in response to different sorts of problems, that seem immediately applicable to this puzzle. While the so-called contextualist strategy blocks the puzzle at the level of syntax, the index-shifting strategy actually embraces the apparently paradoxical claim that there are logically valid arguments with premises whose utterances are true and a conclusion whose utterance is false, but insists that different points of evaluation come into play in determining the truth values of the utterances involved in the alleged counter-instances to rules of logic.

Philosophers used to model belief as a relation between agents and propositions, which bear truth values depending on, and only on, the way the world is, until John Perry and David Lewis came up with cases of essentially indexical belief; that is, belief whose expression involves some indexical word, whose reference varies with the context. I shall argue that the problem of the essential indexical at best shows that belief should be tied somehow to what is subsequently acted upon, and must make room for other relations than those properly predicated. But it does not show that belief cannot be modeled as a binary relation between an agent and some suitable object, nor that this object cannot be a proposition.

It has been long known (Perry (1977, 1979), Lewis (1981)) that de se attitudes, such as beliefs and desires that one has about oneself, call for a special treatment in theories of attitudinal content. The aim of this paper is to raise similar concerns for theories of asserted content. The received view, inherited from Kaplan (1989), has it that if Alma says "I am hungry," the asserted content, or what is said, is the proposition that Alma is hungry (at a given time). I argue that the received view has difficulties handing de se assertion, i.e. contents that one expresses using the first person pronoun, to assert something about oneself. I start from the observation that when two speakers say "I am hungry," one may truly report them as having said the same thing. It has often been held that the possibility of such reports comes from the fact that the two speakers are, after all, uttering the same words, and are in this sense "saying the same thing". I argue that this approach fails, and that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to use the same words, or words endowed with the same meaning, in order to be truly reported as same-saying. I also argue that reports of same-saying in the case of de se assertion differ significantly from such reports in the case of two speakers merely implicating the same thing. Finally, I outline a new account of the content of assertion, similar to Lewis's account of de se attitudes. The proposal is, roughly, when Alma says "I am hungry", the asserted content just the property of being hungry, and it is a property that Alma asserts of herself. I then propose to generalize the account to the other cases in a way that departs from Lewis's account, and I close by showing how my proposal handles the cases discussed in the first part of the paper

In this paper, I argue that there are good motivations for a relativist account of the domain-sensitivity of quantifier phrases. I will frame the problem as a puzzle involving what looks like a logically valid inference, yet one whose premises are true while the conclusion is false. After discussing some existing accounts, literalist and contextualist, I will present and argue for an account that may be said to be relativist in the following sense: (i) a domain of quantification is required for determining truth value, but is idle in determining semantic content, and (ii) the same sentence, as used on one and the same occasion, may receive different truth values relative to different domains

The received view about indexicals holds that they are directly referential expressions, and that the semantic contribution of an indexical consists of that thing or individual to which the indexical refers in the context of its utterance. The aim of this paper is to put forward a different picture. I argue that direct reference and indexicality are distinct and separate phenomena, even if they cooccur often. Still, it is the speaker who directly refers to the things that she is talking about, and those things matter for the truth of her utterance. Indexicals, on the other hand, merely help the interpreter identify the speaker's intended reference. Typically, indexicals encode descriptive conditions that the context must meet to make the utterance true. For example, the demonstrative 'this' encodes the condition that the subject matter, ie that about which one is talking, should be salient and proximal to the speaker. The semantic contribution of an indexical, I suggest, consists precisely of such descriptive conditions. I will offer a formal account, dubbed contextual update semantics, and show how it captures the main conceptual motivation and how it handles embedded indexicals, which may seem problematic at a first glance.

This chapter aims at defending semantic relativism from a general methodological viewpoint. In the classic non-relativistic approach, the parameters relevant for the interpretation of indexical expressions coincide with the parameters involved in the definition of truth. It is argued that this identification is grounded on an illicit confusion between genuinely semantic (and hence logical) considerations on the one hand, and issues pertaining to the use of language on the other. Certain characteristic semantic consequences of relativism are then taken into consideration, and are contrasted with the logical outcomes of the classic, non-relativistic treatment of indexical languages.

In this paper, I take issue with an idea that has emerged from recent relativist proposals, and, in particular, from Lasersohn, according to which the correct semantics for taste predicates must use contents that are functions of a judge parameter rather than implicit arguments lexically associated with such predicates. I argue that the relativist account and the contextualist implicit argument-account are, from the viewpoint of semantics, not much more than notational variants of one another. In other words, given any sentence containing a taste predicate, and given any assignment of values to the relevant parameters, the two accounts predict the same truth value and are, in that sense, equivalent. I also look at possible reasons for preferring one account over the other. The phenomenon of "faultless disagreement" is often believed to be one such reason. I argue, against Kölbel and Lasersohn, that disagreement is never faultless: either the two parties genuinely disagree, hence if the one is right then the other is wrong, or the two parties are both right, but their apparent disagreement boils down to a misunderstanding. What is more, even if there were faultless disagreement, I argue that relativism would fail to account for it. The upshot of my paper, then, is to show that there is not much disagreement between a contextualist account that models the judge parameter as an implicit argument to the taste predicate, and a relativist account that models it as a parameter of the circumstances of evaluation. The choice between the two accounts, at least when talking about taste, is thus, to a large extent, a matter of taste.