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81Foundational Semantics II: Normative AccountsPhilosophy Compass 7 (6): 410-421. 2012.Descriptive semantic theories purport to characterize the meanings of the expressions of languages in whatever complexity they might have. Foundational semantics purports to identify the kind of considerations relevant to establish that a given descriptive semantics accurately characterizes the language used by a given individual or community. Foundational Semantics I presents three contrasting approaches to the foundational matters, and the main considerations relevant to appraise their merits.…Read more
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600De se thoughts and immunity to error through misidentificationSynthese 195 (8): 3311-3333. 2018.I discuss an aspect of the relation between accounts of de se thought and the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I will argue that a deflationary account of the latter—the Simple Account, due to Evans —will not do; a more robust one based on an account of de se thoughts is required. I will then sketch such an alternative account, based on a more general view on singular thoughts, and show how it can deal with the problems I raise for the Simple Account.
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642Accommodating PresuppositionsTopoi 35 (1): 37-44. 2016.In this paper I elaborate on previous criticisms of the influential Stalnakerian account of presuppositions, pointing out that the well-known practice of informative presupposition puts heavy strain on Stalnaker’s pragmatic characterization of the phenomenon of presupposition, in particular of the triggering of presuppositions. Stalnaker has replied to previous criticisms by relying on the well-taken point that we should take into account the time at which presupposition-requirements are to be c…Read more
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64The supervenience of mental contentProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94 117-135. 1994.Defends the supervenience of mental content under an externalist view of both contents and the supervenience base.
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498Singular Reference in Fictional Discourse?Disputatio 11 (54): 143-177. 2019.Singular terms used in fictions for fictional characters raise well-known philosophical issues, explored in depth in the literature. But philosophers typically assume that names already in use to refer to “moderatesized specimens of dry goods” cause no special problem when occurring in fictions, behaving there as they ordinarily do in straightforward assertions. In this paper I continue a debate with Stacie Friend, arguing against this for the exceptionalist view that names of real entities in f…Read more
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49Empty Representations: Reference and Non-Existence (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2014.The contents of linguistic and mental representations may seem to be individuated by what they are about. But a problem arises with regard to representation of the non-existent - words and thoughts that are about things that don't exist. Fourteen new essays get to grips with this much-debated problem
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33Conventions and Constitutive NormsJournal of Social Ontology 5 (1): 35-52. 2019.The paper addresses a popular argument that accounts of assertion in terms of constitutive norms are incompatible with conventionalism about assertion. The argument appeals to an alleged modal asymmetry: constitutive rules are essential to the acts they characterize, and therefore the obligations they impose necessarily apply to every instance; conventions are arbitrary, and thus can only contingently regulate the practices they establish. The paper argues that this line of reasoning fails to es…Read more
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193Relative truth (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2008.With contributions from some of the key figures in the contemporary debate on relativism this book is about a topic that is the focus of much traditional and ...
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1052Really expressive presuppositions and how to block themGrazer Philosophische Studien 97 (1): 138-158. 2020.Kaplan (1999) argued that a different dimension of expressive meaning (“use-conditional”, as opposed to truth-conditional) is required to characterize the meaning of pejoratives, including slurs and racial epithets. Elaborating on this, writers have argued that the expressive meaning of pejoratives and slurs is either a conventional implicature (Potts 2007) or a presupposition (Macià 2002 and 2014, Schlenker 2007, Cepollaro and Stojanovic 2016). We argue that an expressive presuppositional theor…Read more
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118Semantics of fictional termsTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 38 (2): 73-100. 2019.The paper provides an opinionated survey of recent contributions – roughly, in the last decade – to our understanding of how names and other referring expressions work in fictional discourse and addresses well-known philosophical worries that they raise. Views about the semantics of referring expressions in fictional discourse are usually accompanied by metaphysical views on the ontology of fictional characters, so this will also come under our focus.
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61Assertions in FictionsGrazer Philosophische Studien 96 (3): 445-462. 2019.The author of this paper contrasts the account he favors for how fictions can convey knowledge with Green’s views on the topic. On the author’s account, fictions can convey knowledge because fictional works make assertions and other acts such as conjectures, suppositions, or acts of putting forward contents for our consideration; and the mechanism through which they do it is that of speech act indirection, of which conversational implicatures are a particular case. There are two potential points…Read more
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25Voltolini's FictaDialectica 63 (1): 57-66. 2009.This is a critical review of Alberto Voltolini, How Ficta Follow Fiction. A Syncretistic Account of Fictional Entities, Springer, Dordrecht, 2006
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41Relativism and Monadic Truth. By Cappelen, H. and Hawthorne, J.. ( Oxford UP, 2009, Pp. viii + 148, Price £28.00 (hardcover), £15 (paperback).) (review)Philosophical Quarterly 63 (252): 597-602. 2013.This is a critical review of Relativism and Monadic Truth. By Cappelen, H. and Hawthorne, J., Oxford UP, 2009
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83On the Nature of Fiction-Making: Austin or Grice?British Journal of Aesthetics 59 (2): 203-210. 2019.Only Imagine is a wonderful book. Clear and tersely written, it provides a compelling defence of a rather unpopular view : namely, extreme intentionalism about the determination of fictional content and the nature of fictionality. It thus unquestionably advances the philosophical debate. It is also a pleasure to read for those of us who like fictions and not just the philosophy thereof: Stock discusses for her arguments many examples from real fictions, systematically making perceptive remarks. …Read more
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23Constructing the World by Chalmers, David J.: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. xxvi + 494, £30.00 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (2): 388-391. 2014.
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295Las normas y su puesta en vigor: respuesta a Josep CorbíCritica 49 (145): 113-132. 2017.En su discusión “Obras de ficción, formas de conciencia y literatura”, Josep Corbí formula una serie de críticas certeras a mis ideas sobre la distinción que he hecho entre ficción y no ficción en Relatar lo ocurrido como invención. En esta nota de respuesta expongo primero de forma sucinta el núcleo de esas ideas y después proporciono las que considero las razones más decisivas para adoptarlas, a pesar de las dificultades que señala Corbí.
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63Pure Quotation Is Demonstrative ReferenceJournal of Philosophy 115 (7): 361-381. 2018.In a paper published recently in the Journal of Philosophy, Mario Gómez-Torrente provides a methodological argument for the “disquotational,” Tarski-inspired theory of pure quotation. Gómez-Torrente’s previous work has greatly contributed to making this theory perhaps the most widely supported view of pure quotation in recent years, against all other theories including the Davidsonian, demonstrative view for which I myself have argued. Gómez-Torrente argues that rival views make quotation “an ec…Read more
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140On the Nature of Presupposition: A Normative Speech Act AccountErkenntnis 85 (2): 269-293. 2020.In this paper I provide a new account of linguistic presuppositions, on which they are ancillary speech acts defined by constitutive norms. After providing an initial intuitive characterization of the phenomenon, I present a normative speech act account of presupposition in parallel with Williamson’s analogous account of assertion. I explain how it deals well with the problem of informative presuppositions, and how it relates to accounts for the Triggering and Projection Problems for presupposit…Read more
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42Indirect Reports and Pragmatics in the World Languages (edited book)Springer. 2018.This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on th…Read more
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45Self-Experience: Essays on Inner Awareness (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2023.Recent debates on phenomenal consciousness have shown renewed interest for the idea that experience generally includes an experience of the self – a self-experience – whatever else it may present the self with. When a subject has an ordinary experience (as of a bouncing red ball, for example), the thought goes, she is not just phenomenally aware of the world as being presented in a certain way (a bouncy, reddish, roundish way in this case); she is also phenomenally aware of the fact that it is p…Read more
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696Indexicals as token-reflexivesMind 107 (427): 529-564. 1998.Reichenbachian approaches to indexicality contend that indexicals are "token-reflexives": semantic rules associated with any given indexical-type determine the truth-conditional import of properly produced tokens of that type relative to certain relational properties of those tokens. Such a view may be understood as sharing the main tenets of Kaplan's well-known theory regarding content, or truth-conditions, but differs from it regarding the nature of the linguistic meaning of indexicals and als…Read more
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26The grounds for the model-theoretic account of the logical propertiesNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 34 (1): 107-131. 1992.
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574The Deferred Ostension Theory of QuotationNoûs 38 (4). 2004.I defend a Deferred Ostension view of quotation, on which quotation-marks are the linguistic bearers of reference, functioning like a demonstrative; the quoted material merely plays the role of a demonstratum. On this view, the quoted material works like Nunberg’s indexes in his account of deferred ostensión in general. The referent is obtained through some contextually suggested relation; in the default case the relation will be … instantiates the linguistic type __, but there are other possibi…Read more
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5Por la" quineación" de los qualia cartesianosAnálisis Filosófico 19 (2): 101-142. 1999.Dennett (1988) provides a much discussed argument for the nonexistence of qualia, as conceived by philosophers like Block, Chalmers, Loar and Searle. My goal in this paper is to vindicate Dennett’s argument, construed in a certain way. The argument supports the claim that qualia are constitutively representational. Against Block and Chalmers, it rejects the detachment of phenomenal from information-processing consciousness; and against Loar and Searle, the argument defends that qualia are consti…Read more
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103Dretske on the causal efficacy of meaningMind and Language 9 (2): 181-202. 1994.The object of this paper is to discuss several issues raised by Fred Dretske’s account of the causal efficacy of content, as given in his book Explaining Behavior. To warrant the causal efficacy of folk-psychological properties while keeping attached to a naturalistic framework, Fred Dretske proposes that these properties are causes of a peculiar type, what he calls structuring causes. Structuring causes are not postulated ad hoc, to somehow account for the causal efficacy of content. Dretske cl…Read more
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613The Conventional and the AnalyticPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 78 (2): 239-274. 2009.Empiricist philosophers like Carnap invoked analyticity in order to explain a priori knowledge and necessary truth. Analyticity was “truth purely in virtue of meaning”. The view had a deflationary motivation: in Carnap’s proposal, linguistic conventions alone determine the truth of analytic sentences, and thus there is no mystery in our knowing their truth a priori, or in their necessary truth; for they are, as it were, truths of our own making. Let us call this “Carnapian conventionalism”, conv…Read more
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42On an incorrect understanding of tarskian truth definitionsPhilosophical Issues 8 45-56. 1997.Criticism of Soames' understanding of Tarskian theories of truth.
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53Vagueness and Indirect DiscourseNoûs 34 (s1). 2000.This paper offers a rejoinder to an argument by Schiffer against semantic accounts of vagueness (typically relying on supervaluationist techniques) based on indirect discourse. The argument, as far as I know original with Schiffer, occurs in “Two Issues of Vagueness” (Schiffer 1998). It is not addressed at supervaluationism as such, but at the philosophical account of vagueness which typically relies on it. Supervaluationism is not by itself a theory, but a logical technique with several applica…Read more
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219Qualia that it is right to QuinePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2): 357-377. 2003.Dennett provides a much discussed argument for the nonexistence of qualia, as conceived by philosophers like Block, Chalmers, Loar and Searle. My goal in this paper is to vindicate Dennett's argument, construed in a certain way. The argument supports the claim that qualia are constitutively representational. Against Block and Chalmers, the argument rejects the detachment of phenomenal from information-processing consciousness; and against Loar and Searle, it defends the claim that qualia are con…Read more
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603Fiction-making as a Gricean illocutionary typeJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (2). 2007.There are propositions constituting the content of fictions—sometimes of the utmost importance to understand them—which are not explicitly presented, but must somehow be inferred. This essay deals with what these inferences tell us about the nature of fiction. I will criticize three well-known proposals in the literature: those by David Lewis, Gregory Currie, and Kendall Walton. I advocate a proposal of my own, which I will claim improves on theirs. Most important for my purposes, I will argue o…Read more
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Areas of Interest
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Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |