Manuel García-Carpintero

In this paper we take up the question of the explanatory significance of the notion of propositional content. Our first goal is to disentangle two types of approach: According to what we call inflationism, propositions should be taken seriously enough to expect explanatory payoffs from them. The alternative deflationary approach rejects this claim. Our second goal is to explore the inflationism vs. deflationism contrast in depth by focusing on the distinction between singular and general propositions. We argue that inflationism fails and outline a variety of deflationism that offers the best prospects for explaining the singular/general divide.

Manuel García Carpintero defends a form of antirealism for the explicit talk and thought both about fictional entities and scientific models: a version of StephenYablo’s figuralist brand of factionalism. He argues that, in contrast with pretense-theoretic fictionalist proposals, on his view, utterances in those discourses are straightforward assertions with straightforward truth-conditions, involving a particular kind of metaphors or figurative manner. But given that the relevant metaphors are all but “dead”, this might suggest that the view is after all realist, committed to referents of some sort for singular terms in the relevant discourses. He revisits these issues from the perspective of the more recent work on them and applies his view to recent debates in semantics on the role and adequacy of supervaluationist models of indeterminacy.

The paper distinguishes between two conceptions of kinds defined by constitutive rules, the one suggested by Searle, and the one invoked by Williamson to define assertion. Against recent arguments to the contrary by Maitra, Johnson and others, it argues for the superiority of the latter in the first place as an account of games. On this basis, the paper argues that the alleged disanalogies between real games and language games suggested in the literature in fact don’t exist. The paper relies on Rawls’s distinction between types of practices and institutions defined by constitutive rules, and those among them that are actually in force, and hence are truly normative; it defends along Rawlsian lines that a plurality of norms apply to actual instances of rule-constituted practices, and uses this Rawlsian line to block the examples that Maitra, Johnson and others provide to sustain their case.

Some speech acts are made indirectly. It is thus natural to think that assertions could also be made indirectly. Grice’s conversational implicatures appear to be just a case of this, in which one indirectly makes an assertion or a related constative act by means of a declarative sentence. Several arguments, however, have been given against indirect assertions, by Davis (1999), Fricker (2012), Green (2007, 2015), Lepore & Stone (2010, 2015) and others. This paper confronts and rejects three considerations that have been made: arguments based on the distinction between lying and misleading; arguments based on the ordinary concept of assertion; and arguments based on the testimonial knowledge that assertions provide

In recent work, Walton has abandoned his very influential account of the fictionality of p in a fictional work in terms of prescriptions to imagine emanating from it. He offers examples allegedly showing that a prescription to imagine p in a given work of fiction is not sufficient for the fictionality of p in that work. In this paper, both in support and further elaboration of a constitutive-norms speech-act variation on Walton’s account that I have defended previously, I critically discuss his objections. In addition to answering his concerns and developing the account further, I provide additional abductive support for its explanatory virtues vis-à- institutional accounts like Walton’s, and Gricean speech-act proposals.

In the core chapters 4–6, Iacona (2018) argues against the “Uniqueness Thesis” (UT), stating that “there is a unique notion of logical form that fulfils both the logical role and the semantic role” (39), where the former “concerns the formal explanation of logical properties and logical relations, such as validity or contradiction” (37), and the latter “concerns the formulation of a compositional theory of meaning” (ibid.). He argues for this on the basis of relations of coreference among referential expressions, names and indexicals. From what I take to be a fundamental agreement on most relevant issues, here I will nonetheless press him to clarify the notions of intrinsicness and the logical and semantic role of logical form on which he relies.

Several philosophers advance substantive theories of propositions, to deal with several issues they raise in connection with a concern with a long pedigree in philosophy, the problem of the unity of propositions. The qualification ‘substantive’ is meant to contrast with ‘minimal’ or ‘deflationary’ – roughly, views that reject that propositions have a hidden nature, worth investigating. Substantive views appear to create spurious problems by characterizing propositions in ways that make them unfit to perform their theoretical jobs. I will present in this light some critical points against Hanks’ (2015, 2019) act-theoretic view, and Recanati’s (2019) recent elaboration of Hanks’ notion of cancellation. Both Hanks and Recanati, I’ll argue, rely on problematic conceptions of fiction and pretense.

The paper discusses the criticism of externalist theories of content which, on the basis of "Twin Earth" considerations, claims that such theories cannot make intentional properties supervenient on basic, intrinsic properties of the organism -- while supervenience is a necessary condition for the causal efficacy of any macro-property. The paper accepts the supervenience requirement, understood as arising from a requirement that macro- properties should be explained by micro- properties. It points out, however, that as a consequence of this, the modality in the concept of supervenience should be understood as "nomic", not conceptual. Then the paper attempts to show that the usual thought- experiments do not establish that such variety of supervenience does not hold for psychological properties -- at least with regard to a particular, teleo- functional way of interpreting them.

As the subtitle “A Syncretistic Account of Fictional Entities” makes clear, Alberto Voltolini intends in this book to argue for a syncretic view of the ontology and the semantics of fiction. In the process, he offers sympathetic and clear presentations of the main contenders in the field, discussing first ontological matters (chapters 1–4) and then semantic questions (chapters 5–6), and concluding with an ‘ontological’ argument for the allegedly syncretic brand of realism about fictional entities he has by then endorsed. The book will therefore be very useful for all those who want to have a guided overview of the state of the art in the field, and very helpful if used as a main text for an introductory graduate course

Two-dimensional semantics is a framework that helps us better understand some of the most fundamental issues in philosophy: those having to do with the relationship between the meaning of words, the way the world is, and our knowledge of the meaning of words. This selection of new essays by some of the world's leading authorities in this field sheds fresh light both on foundational issues regarding two-dimensional semantics and on its specific applications. Contributors: Richard Breheny, Alex Byrne, David Chalmers, Martin Davies, Gareth Evans, Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Josep Maci`, Martine Nida-Rumelin, Christopher Peacocke, James Pryor, Francois Recanati, Scott Soames, Cara Spencer, Robert Stalnaker, Kai-Yee Wong, Stephen Yablo.

This paper argues for a conditional claim concerning a famous argument—developed by Church in elucidation of some remarks by Frege to the effect that the bedeutung of a sentence is the sentence’s truth-value—the Frege–Gödel–Church argument, or FGC for short. The point we make is this :if, and just to the extent that, Arthur Smullyan’s argument against Quine's use of FGC is sound, then essentially the same rejoinder disposes also of Davidson's use of FGC against ‘correspondence’ theories of truth. We thus dispute a contention by Professor Davidson that it is coherent to accept that Smullyan’s rejoinder takes away the force of Quine’s version of FGC, while still consistently using FGC to establish that if true sentences (or utterances) correspond to anything, they all correspond to the same thing. We show that the differences between the cases discussed by Smullyan and Davidson’s version of FGC on which Davidson relies for his contention are irrelevant to the point under dispute

Some contemporary semantic views defend an asymmetry thesis concerning defi-nite descriptions and indexicals. Semantically, indexicals are devices of singular refer-ence; they contribute objects to the contents of the speech acts made with utterances including them. Definite descriptions, on the other hand, are generalized quantifiers, behaving roughly the way Russell envisaged in “On Denoting”. The asymmetry thesis depends on the existence of a sufficiently clear-cut distinction between semantics and pragmatics, because indexicals and descriptions are often used in ways that apparently contradict the asymmetry thesis; the semantics/pragmatics distinction is invoked to see behind the appearances. The paper critically examines arguments by Schiffer against the asymmetry thesis, based on referential uses of incomplete descriptions.

Discuto en este trabajo el adecuado tratamiento de un interesante problema semántico, largamente tratado por David Kaplan (1973). El problema fue propuesto originalmente por Richard Cartwright. Después de exponerlo, presento y comento cuatro soluciones. Las soluciones proceden del trabajo de Kaplan; me he tomado no obstante algunas licencias en su presentación. Paso después a proponer una nueva solución al problema de Cartwright, en consonancia con puntos de vista, hasta cierto punto contradictorios con los de Kaplan, que he venido defendiendo en trabajos previos sobre la semántica de indéxicos y nombres propios. El objetivo principal que el trabajo persigue es ofrecer una confirmación indirecta para tales puntos de vista, en tanto que sobre la base teórica que nos proporcionan podemos ofrecer una solución a la paradoja de Cartwright más satisfactoria que las otras hasta ahora propuestas.

This paper is partly inspired by a well-known debate between Ruth Barcan Marcus, Terence Parsons and W. V. 0. Quine in the sixties> concerning the extent to which Quantified Modal Logic is committed to Essentialism; the issue nevertheless goes back to the origins of "analytic philosophy'', to the reflections of Frege, Russell, and the earlier Wittgenstein on the nature of logic. By elaborating on a suggestion by Quine, we purport to show that there is a relevant and interesting way to look at the ontological commitments of logical systems such that they are stronger than they are usually taken to be.

The paper offers a model for the conventionality of illocutionary forces. It focuses on the argument that accounts of assertion in terms of constitutive norms are incompatible with conventionalist claims about assertion. The argument appeals to an alleged modal asymmetry, and is in that respect related to well-known arguments that the notion of truth by convention is misguided: while 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 there is no such modal asymmetry, by appealing to a distinction between the non-discriminating "existence" across all possible worlds of practices defined by constitutive rules, and the discriminating sense in which only some of them are actually "in force" in the actual world; the necessity of practices defined by constitutive rules concerns the former, while conventionalist claims concern the latter.

This paper discusses the proper taxonomy of the semantics-pragmatics divide. Debates about taxonomy are not always pointless. In interesting cases taxonomic proposals involve theoretical assumptions about the studied field, which might be judged correct or incorrect. Here I want to contrast an approach to the semantics-pragmatics dichotomy, motivated by a broadly Gricean perspective I take to be correct, with a contemporary version of an opposing “Wittgensteinian” view. I will focus mostly on a well-known example: the treatment of referential uses of descriptions and descriptive uses of indexicals. The paper is structured as follows. I will start by characterizing in the first section the version of the Gricean approach I favor; in the second section, I will illustrate the differences between the two views by focussing on the example, and in the third section I will object to what I take to be the main Wittgensteinian consideration.

This paper gives a new twist to already familia refutations of Putnam's "model-theoretic" argument against realism. Recent attempts to defend the model-theoretic argument in the face of those criticisms indicate that the main point of previous rebuttals of the argument can be easily missed. The paper expounds the same point again in a different guise, by having recourse to ideas on models and the model-theoretic account of the logical properties developed by the author in earlier work. Some writers appear to think that the charge of previous criticisms is that Putnam's argument begs the question, by involving as premise a proposition which all too obviously entails the falsity of realism--precisely what the argument is designed to establish. They then defend it by claiming that Putnam does not simply _take for granted<D> the truth of the offending premise, but _argues for<D> it. This, however, does not defend Putnam's argument against the _pragmatic<D> charges of irrelevancy and potential for provoking confusion--which, the paper shows, can be taken as the main criticisms levelled against it by previous writers. The point is that, if Putnam has an independent argument for the question-begging premise, one not involving any model-theoretic considerations, then this is all that is needed; the specifically model-theoretic considerations are irrelevant and could lead to spurious debates

Schiffer has given an argument against supervaluationist accounts of vagueness, based on reports of vague contents. Suppose that Al tells Bob ‘Ben was there’, pointing to a certain place, and later Bob says, ‘Al said that Ben was there’, pointing in the same direction. According to supervaluationist semantics, Schiffer contends, both Al’s and Bob’s utterances of ‘there’ indeterminately refer to myriad precise regions of space; Al’s utterance is true just in case Ben was in any of those precisely bounded regions of space, and Bob’s is true just in case Al said of each of them that it is where Ben was. However, while the supervaluationist truth-conditions for Al’s utterance might be satisfied, those for Bob’s cannot; for Al didn’t say, of any of those precisely delimited regions of space, that it is where Ben was. In an earlier version of the material presented here (García-Carpintero 2000) I replied to Schiffer’s argument that supervaluationism has an independently well-motivated defense. The response is essentially based on the point that the occurrence of ‘there’ in Bob’s utterance (and of ‘tall’ in Wright’s argument) occurs in indirect discourse, and supervaluationists may allow that it shifts its referent there. Schiffer’s reply to this response shows that it was not made sufficiently clearly. In this paper I will try to improve on that score. In his more recent reply, Schiffer (2000b, 325) dismisses a proposal like the one I will make, mainly because it “undermines … a leading virtue of supervaluationism … its implication that vagueness is … not a feature of the world.” I will argue that my reply does not undermine the fundamental contentions of the supervaluationist account.

I provide a variation on ideas presented by Walton and Currie, elaborating the view that fictive utterances are characterized by a specific form of illocutionary force in the family of directives – a proposal or invitation to imagine. I make some points on the relation between the proposal and the current debates on intentionalist and conventionalist views, and I discuss interesting recent objections made by Stacie Friend to the related, but crucially different, Gricean view of such force advanced by Currie and others.

Este trabajo propone y defiende una posición racionalista moderada sobre el conocimiento a priori en general y el filosófico en particular, intermedia entre el racionalismo radical y el naturalismo radical. Por racionalismo radical entiendo la tesis de que la justificación de las respuestas a las cuestiones centrales de la filosofía depende sólo de métodos filosóficos de investigación – argumentos intuitivamente válidos que parten de premisas intuitivamente verdaderas, siendo las intuiciones en cuestión de un carácter particular –, no de la ciencia; la filosofía es así autónoma respecto de la ciencia empírica, y goza de una autoridad propia frente a ella.

The truth of a statement depends on the world in two ways: what the statement says is true if the world is as the statement says it is; on the other hand, what the expressions in the statement mean depends on what the world is like (for instance, on what conventions are in place). Each of these two kinds of dependence of truth on the world corresponds to one of the dimensions on the two-dimensional semantic framework, developed in the 1970’ in the work of Evans, Kaplan, Kripke and Stalnaker. The introduction provides a systematic overview of the framework, the ideas of its earlier originators, recent developments and criticism. Finally, it gives a brief overview over the contributions to the volume.

En este comentario se ofrece una explicación alternativa a la que dio Guillermo Hurtado en su diagnóstico de la filosofía analítica actual en general y de su ejercicio en el mundo latinoamericano, y, por consiguiente, se concluye con una muy diferente apreciación de los méritos de la filosofía analítica. This note provides an alternative explanation to the one offered by Guillermo Hurtado in his diagnostics of present-day Analytic Philosophy and its practice in the Latin-American world, and as a result offers a very different appraisal of its merits

I critically discuss some aspects of Mark Sainsbury's Reference without Referents, from an otherwise sympathetic viewpoint. My objections focus on the adequacy of the truth-conditional framework that Sainsbury presupposes. I argue that, as semantic theories, truth-conditional accounts are both too ambitious, and too austere to be fully explanatory, and that both problems have consequences for an account of reference. The latter problem has to do with the difficulties to capture in a truth-conditional framework the descriptive contribution of indexicals and, in my view, proper names. The former has to do with the non-semantic contribution of context to the determination of truth-conditions in general and reference in particular. /// En este artículo discuto críticamente algunos aspectos del libro de Mark Sainsbury Reference without Referents, desde una perspectiva por lo demás próxima. Mis objeciones se centran en la adecuación del marco que Sainsbury presupone: la semántica de condiciones de verdad. Argumento que tales propuestas son, en tanto que teorías semánticas, a la vez demasiado ambiciosas y demasiado austeras para ser genuinamente explicativas, y que ambos problemas tienen consecuencias en lo que respecta a la explicación de la referencia. El segundo problema tiene que ver con las dificultades para representar la contribución descriptiva de los deícticos y, en mi opinión, de los nombres propios también en el marco de condiciones de verdad. El primero tiene que ver con la contribución no semántica del contexto a la determinación de las condiciones de verdad en general y la referencia en particular.