Eros Corazza

The following thesis will be discussed and defended:An attitude ascription is an empathetic exercise resting on our, more general, imaginative faculty. Sentences of natural language are the best medium we have to classify someone’s mental life.The sentence used to classify one’s mental state is the one the reporter would use to express the attributee’s mental state if the reporter were in the attributee’s situation. A report of the form “A believes/desires/wishes/… that p” captures the attributee’s (A) mental life inasmuch as it conveys the sentence the reporter would use to express her mental state if the latter were in A’s situation.

Descartes, one of the central figure of the rationalist school, brought to the philosophical forum questions such as “What am I?”, “Does one’s mind differ from one’s body?” and if so, “How does the mind interact with the body?”. The Cartesians observed that some phenomena of nature (e.g. the mastery of language) do not fall within the mechanical philosophy of their time: they thus posited a new entity, the res cogitans (the mind) to account for these phenomena. In rejecting the mechanical philosophy, nowadays rationalists are in a position to deal with Descartes’ traditional questions in a new way. In this Chomsky’s foundational works on language (and the cognitive revolution he initiated) play a central role and welcome new solutions and dissolutions to some traditional philosophical puzzles.

It is argued that, contrary to appearances, description-names (e.g.: "The Roman Empire", "The Beatles", "The Holy Virgin",...) do conform to Millianism, i.e. the view that proper names are directly referential expressions, referring regardless of whether the relevant individual satisfies some associated description or not. However, description-names name and describe. Some arguments supporting this peculiarity and a logic to handle description-names are proposed. It will be shown that the best framework with which to accommodate description-names is a multiple-proposition theory, according to which a given utterance may express several propositions

An account of the evaluation of fictional discourse in terms of counterfactuals is sketched which accommodates the insights of D. Lewis and G. Evans but is not committed to the existence of possibilia on the one hand and to taking counterfactuals as barely true on the other hand. By adopting a two-step theory of evaluation which does not evaluate expressions (sentences) across possible worlds modal realism is avoided. And the use of a modified incorporation principle saying that every singular reference made in the scope of a pretence is anaphoric and linked to a quantifier outside the scope allows to incorporate actual individuals within a game of make-believe.

In a recent book, Jeffrey King (King 2001) argues that complexdemonstratives, i.e., noun phrases of the form `this/that F, are not singular terms. As such,they are not devices of direct reference contributing the referent to the proposition expressed.In this essay I challenge King's position and show how a direct reference view can handle the datahe proposes in favor of the quantificational account. I argue that when a complex demonstrativecannot be interpreted as a singular term, it is best understood as a case of deferredreference – in which case it should be viewed as an anaphora inheriting its value from a quantifiedterm – or as an emphatic description.

After discussing some difficulties that contextualism and minimalism face, this paper presents a new account of the linguistic exploitation of context, situationalism. Unlike the former accounts, situationalism captures the idea that the main intuitions underlying the debate concern not the identity of propositions expressed but rather how truth-values are situation-dependent. The truth-value of an utterance depends on the situation in which the proposition expressed is evaluated. Hence, like in minimalism, the proposition expressed can be truth-evaluable without being enriched or expanded. Along with contextualism, it is argued that an utterance’s truth-value is context dependent. But, unlike contextualism and minimalism, situationalism embraces a form of relativism in so far as it maintains that semantic content must be evaluated vis-à-vis a given situation and, therefore, that a proposition cannot be said to be true/false eternally.

We defend the view that an indexical uttered by an actor works on the model of deferred reference. If it defers to a character which does not exist, it is an empty term, just as ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Ophelia’ are. The utterance in which it appears does not express a proposition and thus lacks a truth value. We advocate an ontologically parsimonious, anti-realist, position. We show how the notion of truth in our use and understanding of indexicals (and fictional names) as they appear within a fiction is not a central issue. We claim that our use and understanding of indexicals (and names) rests on the fact that their cognitive contribution is not exhausted by their semantic contribution.

In a recent book, Jeffrey King argues that complex demonstratives, i.e., noun phrases of the form 'this/that _F<D>', are not singular terms. As such, they are not devices of direct reference contributing the referent to the proposition expressed. In this essay I challenge King's position and show how a direct reference view can handle the data he proposes in favor of the quantificational account. I argue that when a complex demonstrative cannot be interpreted as a singular term, it is best understood as a case of deferred reference--in which case it should be viewed as an anaphora inheriting its value from a quantified term--or as an emphatic description. (edited)

Atlas argues that semantic minimalism fails because it cannot deal with semantic non-specificity. I argue that thereis a plausible version of minimalism-viz., situated minimalism-which doesn't succumb to the non-specificity charge insofar as non-specificity can be dealt with at a postsemantic level. Thus, pragmatics plays no rolewhen it comes to determining the proposition expressed. Instead, pragmatic and other extra-semantic considerations enter the scene in characterizing the situation vis-à-vis which the proposition is evaluated. For this reason a plausible form of minimalism must embrace a form of truth-relativism: a proposition is not universally true/false, but true/false only relative to a situation. I show how the position defended is not only more cognitively plausible than either minimalism as proposed by Cappelen & Lepore or the positions appealing to pragmaticintrusion into the proposition expressed, but is also in accordance with ordinary people's intuitions.