Carlos Mario Márquez Sosa

In this critical notice we review Bozickovic's recent attempt to settle two interrelated issues: (i) the issue of the cognitive significance of indexical thoughts expressed at a time in the face of difficulties posed by cases in which the subject either mistakes two objects for one or one for two different objects; (ii) that of the cognitive dynamics of temporal indexical thoughts in the face of difficulties posed by cases in which the belief seems to be retained while the proper adjustments fail to be made (that is, in cases such as Rip Van Winkle's). We argue that, despite its elegance and merits, the proposal falls short of accounting for the problematic cases in their full complexity. For one thing, the intended non-modal construal of Frege's Criterion of Difference promoted by Bozickovic does not block, in our view, the "proliferation" of senses brought about by the occasion-sensitivity of the individuation of demonstrative thoughts. For another, the proposal fails to appreciate the need for the subject to have an adequate conception of the object of her thought when it comes to orienting herself in space and time. That being so, we conclude that neither (i) nor (ii) is settled.

Starting from Brentano’s classical characterization of intentionality, we review the radical enactivist proposal about basic cognition and show that the underlying assumption that stripping teleosemantics of its representationalist commitments results in no explanatory loss is unwarranted. Significant features of basic cognition are lost, or so we argue, with the RECtification of teleosemantics that are retrieved by means of an alternative dubbed metaphysically non-committal content-ascriptivism.

Modelling the semantic behaviour of expressives in such a way that one be in a position to predict some, at least, of their distinctive properties is the purpose of any theory aiming at accounting for so-called expressive meaning. In this paper, we review a semantic framework coined by its author the Theory of Bias. We show that the two-tiered account of the meaning of expressives (notably, sentential interjections and pejorative epithets) favored by this framework has the resources to provide a consistent explanation of their semantic behaviour in prima facie awkward statements such as ‘alas, I am unfavorably disposed towards something’ or ‘that stupid Trump isn’t stupid’. On the critical side, we argue that, not being intended to account for the meaning of expressives alone, the theory has hard times explaining the unshiftability of their bias, as opposed to the shiftability of the bias of discourse particles —a further member, according to some authors, of the category of expressives lato sensu— and that it fails to pinpoint unpluggability as the crucial test for expressive content. We conclude that, in spite of its merits, the theory need be theoretically enhanced and methodologically sharpened.