Steffen Borge

Nord University
  •  222
    Conversational implicatures and cancellability
    Acta Analytica 24 (2): 149-154. 2009.
    In this paper I argue against a criticism by Matthew Weiner to Grice’s thesis that cancellability is a necessary condition for conversational implicature. I argue that the purported counterexamples fail because the supposed failed cancellation in the cases Weiner presents is not meant as a cancellation but as a reinforcement of the implicature. I moreover point out that there are special situations in which the supposed cancellation may really work as a cancellation.
  •  89
    An Agon Aesthetics of Football
    Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 9 (2): 97-123. 2015.
    In this article, I first address the ethical considerations about football and show that a meritocratic-fairness view of sports fails to capture the phenomenon of football. Fairness of result is not at centre stage in football. Football is about the drama, about the tension and the emotions it provokes. This moves us to the realm of aesthetics. I reject the idea of the aesthetics of football as the disinterested aesthetic appreciation, which traditionally has been deemed central to aesthetics. I…Read more
  •  125
    The myth of self-deception
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 41 (1): 1-28. 2003.
  •  119
    Horwich on Natural and Non-Natural Meaning
    Acta Analytica 29 (2): 229-253. 2014.
    Paul Horwich’s Use Theory of Meaning (UTM) depends on his rejection of Paul Grice’s distinction between natural and non-natural meaning and his Univocality of Meaning Thesis, as he wishes to deflate the meaning-relation to usage. Horwich’s programme of deflating the meaning-relation (i.e. how words, sentences, etc., acquire meaning) to some basic regularity of usage cannot be carried through if the meaning-relation depends on the minds of users. Here, I first give a somewhat detailed account of …Read more
  •  31
    A Modal Defence of Strong AI
    The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 6 127-131. 2007.
    John Searle has argued that the aim of strong AI to create a thinking computer is misguided. Searle's "Chinese Room Argument" purports to show that syntax does not suffice for semantics and that computer programs as such must fail to have intrinsic intentionality But we are not mainly interested in the program itself, but rather the implementation of the program in some material. It does not follow by necessity from the fact that computer programs are defined syntactically that the implementatio…Read more
  •  581
    Communication, Conflict and Cooperation
    ProtoSociology 29. 2012.
    According to Steven Pinker and his associates the cooperative model of human communication fails, because evolutionary biology teaches us that most social relationships, including talk-exchange, involve combinations of cooperation and conflict. In particular, the phenomenon of the strategic speaker who uses indirect speech in order to be able to deny what he meant by a speech act (deniability of conversational implicatures) challenges the model. In reply I point out that interlocutors can aim at…Read more
  •  41
    Stanley on the Knowledge-Relation
    SATS 9 (1): 109-124. 2008.
    The latest newcomer on the epistemology scene is Subject-Sensitive Invariantism (SSI), which is the view that even though the semantics of the verb “know” is invariant, the answer to the question of whether someone knows something is sensitive to factors about that person. Factors about the context of the purported knower are relevant to whether he knows some proposition p or not. In this paper I present Jason Stanley's version of SSI, a theory Stanley calls Interest-Relative Invariantism (IRI).…Read more