•  129
    Crispin Wright and Filippo Ferrari have accused relativism of not accounting for “parity” – the idea that, when we argue over matters of taste, we take our opponents’ opinions to be “as good as ours” from our own, committed perspective. In this paper, I show that i) explaining parity has not been taken to be a desideratum by relativists and thus they cannot be accused of failing to fulfil a promise; ii) Wright’s and Ferrari’s reasons for claiming that parity should be a desideratum are unconvinc…Read more
  •  6
    Illocutionary Disagreement in the Aesthetic Realm
    Filozofia Nauki 30 (4): 41-62. 2022.
    A recent view about disagreement (Karczewska 2021) takes it to consist in the tension arising from proposals and refusals of these proposals to impose certain commitments on the interlocutors in a conversation. This view has been proposed with the aim of solving the problem that “faultless disagreement” – a situation in which two interlocutors are intuited to be both in disagreement and not at fault – poses for contextualism about predicates of taste.In this paper, I consider whether this view a…Read more
  •  2
  •  165
    Many times, what we say proves to be wrong. It might turn out that what we took to be a comforting remark was, in fact, making things worse. Or that a joke was inappropriate. Or that yelling out loud was rude. More importantly for this paper, there are plenty of cases in which what we said turns out to be false: we spoke without paying attention, we were misinformed or tricked, or we made a reasoning mistake. A particular instance of this latter phenomenon is when someone changes their perspecti…Read more
  •  33
    On Wyatt's Absolutist Account of Faultless Disagreement in Matters of Personal Taste
    with Mihai Hîncu
    Theoria 87 (5): 1322-1341. 2021.
    Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 5, Page 1322-1341, October 2021.
  •  82
    This book offers a sustained, interdisciplinary examination of taste. It addresses a range of topics that have been at the heart of lively debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. We are quick to offer familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter--what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad tast…Read more
  •  1428
    "How Propaganda Works": An Introduction
    Disputatio 51 (X). 2018.
    This is the editor’s introduction to the book symposium on Jason Stanley’s influential book "How Propaganda Words" (Oxford University Press, 2015). After a few brief remarks situating the book in the landscape of current analytic philosophy, I offer a detailed presentation of each chapter of the book, in order to familiarize the reader with its main tenets and with the author’s argumentative strategy. I flag the issues that the contributors to the symposium discuss, and describe their main point…Read more
  •  408
    In this paper, I explore a range of existent and possible ameliorative semantic theories of gender terms: invariantism, according to which gender terms are not context-sensitive, contextualism, according to which the meaning of gender terms is established in the context of use, and relativism, according to which the meaning of gender terms is established in the context of assessment. I show that none of these views is adequate with respect to the plight of trans people to use their term of choic…Read more
  •  685
    A rich-lexicon theory of slurs and their uses
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (7): 942-966. 2022.
    ABSTRACT In this paper, I present data involving the use of the Romanian slur ‘țigan’, consideration of which leads to the postulation of a sui-generis, irreducible type of use of slurs. This type of use is potentially problematic for extant theories of slurs. In addition, together with other well-established uses, it shows that there is more variation in the use of slurs than previously acknowledged. I explain this variation by construing slurs as polysemous. To implement this idea, I appeal to…Read more
  •  10
    Temporal Variadic Operators
    Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 38 51-55. 2018.
    In this paper I introduce and develop an approach to tenses and temporal expressions that is a mix between eternalism and temporalism consisting in appeal to ‘variadic operators’. The type of variadic operator I will be concerned with is the expansive variadic operator, which takes as input predicates of a certain adicity and yields new predicates with one additional degree of adicity. Appeal to variadic operators has proven useful in giving the semantics of several types of expressions: adverbs…Read more
  •  296
    Editors’ Introduction: The Challenge from Non-Derogatory Uses of Slurs
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 97 (1): 1-10. 2020.
    The Introduction to "Non-Derogatory Uses of Slurs", special issue of Grazer Philosophische Studien.
  •  432
    Minimal Disagreement
    Philosophia 48 (4): 1649-1670. 2020.
    In the recent debate about the semantics of perspectival expressions, disagreement has played a crucial role. In a nutshell, what I call “the challenge from disagreement” is the objection that certain views on the market cannot account for the intuition of disagreement present in ordinary exchanges involving perspectival expressions like “Licorice is tasty./no, it’s not.” Various contextualist answers to this challenge have been proposed, and this has led to a proliferation of notions of disagre…Read more
  •  481
    Subject-Contextualism and the Meaning of Gender Terms
    Journal of Social Ontology 6 (1): 69-83. 2020.
    In this paper, I engage with a recent contextualist account of gender terms proposed by Díaz-León, E. 2016. “Woman as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle.” Hypatia 31 : 245–58. Díaz-León’s main aim is to improve both on previous contextualist and non-contextualist views and solve a certain puzzle for feminists. Central to this task is putting forward a view that allows trans women who did not undergo gender-affirming medical procedures to use the gender terms of their choice…Read more
  •  158
    Overcoming the Obstacles to the Relativity of Truth
    Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 14 (2): 232-241. 2007.
    This is a reply to Tomas Marvan's paper "Obstacles to the Relativity of Truth", published in the same issue, in which I attempt to provide an interpretation of the relativist schema "x is true relative to y" by understanding x as ranging over propositions and y as ranging over circumstances of evaluation, as in the familiar Kaplanian picture of semantics. I then answer some of Marvan's worries and reject certain views considered relativist on the basis that they are, in fact, different views in …Read more
  •  23
    The Semantics of Implicit Content
    Dissertation, University of Barcelona. 2011.
    The main aim of the thesis is to give a semantic account of implicit content – the kind of content that plays a crucial role in implicit communication. Implicit communication is a species of communication in which a speaker communicates certain contents that go over and above the contents retrievable from the linguistic meaning of the words used. The focus of the thesis is a certain kind of implicit communication involving locations (when sentences such as “It is raining” are used to communicate…Read more
  •  145
    Faultless Disagreement
    In Martin Kusch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism, Routledge. pp. 486-495. 2020.
    In this entry, I tackle the phenomenon known as "faultless disagreement", considered by many authors to pose a challenge to the main views on the semantics of subjective expressions. I first present the phenomenon and the challenge, then review the main answers given by contextualist, absolutist and relativist approaches to the expressions in question. I end with signaling two issues that might shape future discussions about the role played by faultless disagreement in semantics.
  •  275
    Perspectival Plurality, Relativism, and Multiple Indexing
    In Rob Truswell, Chris Cummins, Caroline Heycock, Brian Rabern & Hannah Rohde (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21, Semantics Archives. pp. 1353-1370. 2018.
    In this paper I focus on a recently discussed phenomenon illustrated by sentences containing predicates of taste: the phenomenon of " perspectival plurality " , whereby sentences containing two or more predicates of taste have readings according to which each predicate pertains to a different perspective. This phenomenon has been shown to be problematic for (at least certain versions of) relativism. My main aim is to further the discussion by showing that the phenomenon extends to other perspect…Read more
  •  476
    The Use of the Binding Argument in the Debate about Location
    In Sarah-Jane Conrad & Klaus Petrus (eds.), Meaning, Context and Methodology, Mouton De Gruyter. pp. 191-212. 2017.
    In this paper I inquire into the methodological status of one of the arguments that have figured prominently in contemporary debates about the semantics of a variety of expressions, the so-called “Binding Argument”. My inquiry is limited to the case of meteorological sentences like “It is raining”, but my conclusion can be extended to other types of sentences as well. Following Jason Stanley, I distinguish between three interpretations of the argument. My focus is on the third, weakest interpret…Read more
  •  27
    In this paper, we offer a novel solution to the much discussed " answering machine puzzle " and similarly problematic cases for the Kaplanian view of temporal indexicals. The solution we propose consists in an appeal to a well-established and (for many still) useful framework: Reichenbach's theory of tense and aspect. Starting from some more recent articulations of the theory in its application to temporal adverbials, we show how it can be applied to 'now' so that to provide an easy and intuitiv…Read more
  •  64
    Multiple Indexing Relativism about Predicates of Taste
    Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía 51 (151): 5-34. 2019.
    Focusing on predicates of taste, this paper puts forward a novel version of relativism, motivated by a recently discussed phenomenon: perspectival plurality. After showing that the phenomenon is problematic for at least some versions of relativism and discussing several possible answers on behalf of the relativist, I put forward my own version. The main feature of the proposal is the introduction in the index not of a single parameter for perspectives, but of a (possibly infinite) sequence of su…Read more
  •  392
    Temporalism and Composite Tense Operators
    Disputatio 5 (37): 323-328. 2013.
    This is my contribution to a symposium on Berit Brogaard's book "Transient Truths" in which I criticize her treatment of various linguistic phenomena related to tense.
  •  891
    Relativism about predicates of personal taste and perspectival plurality
    with Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer and Agustin Vicente
    Linguistics and Philosophy 40 (1): 37-60. 2017.
    In this paper we discuss a phenomenon we call perspectival plurality, which has gone largely unnoticed in the current debate between relativism and contextualism about predicates of personal taste. According to perspectival plurality, the truth value of a sentence containing more than one PPT may depend on more than one perspective. Prima facie, the phenomenon engenders a problem for relativism and can be shaped into an argument in favor of contextualism. We explore the consequences of perspecti…Read more
  •  36
    Relativism and Alethic Functionalism
    Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 14 (1): 53-71. 2007.
    The essay is an attempt to offer a version of conceptual relativism that escapes Donald Davidson’s decisive criticisms of the notion of “conceptual scheme”. Two variants of relativism are distinguished, a weaker and a stronger one, and a clear formulation of what a strong version amounts to is put forward. The concrete proposal involves accepting a version of alethic pluralism. After discussing alethic pluralism in general, and after exploring both strong and weak versions of it, a suitable vers…Read more
  •  60
    Context Sensitivity: Indexicalism, Contextualism, Relativism
    In T. R. Roth-Berghofer D. C. Richardson B. Kokinov (ed.), Modeling and Using Context, Springer. pp. 545--557. 2007.
    The paper is primarily concerned with laying out the space of positions that purport to account for semantic context sensitivity of natural language expressions and with making a prima facie case for relativism. I start with distinguishing between pre-semantic, semantic and post-semantic context sensitivity. In the following section I briefly present the classic picture of indexicals due to David Kaplan and assess some arguments for the introduction of certain parameters in the circumstances of …Read more
  •  106
    Contextualist Answers to the Challenge from Disagreement
    Phenomenology and Mind 12 62-73. 2017.
    In this short paper I survey recent contextualist answers to the challenge from disagreement raised by contemporary relativists. After making the challenge vivid by means of a working example, I specify the notion of disagreement lying at the heart of the challenge. The answers are grouped in three categories, the first characterized by rejecting the intuition of disagreement in certain cases, the second by conceiving disagreement as a clash of non-cognitive attitudes and the third by relegating…Read more
  •  76
    This short paper follows up on the exchange between Ray Buchanan and Wayne Davis concerning the theory of speaker meaning put forward by Davis in previous work. I briefly present Davis' main tenets, Buchanan's objections, Davis' replies, and then offer a new case that enforces the problem raised by Buchanan to Davis' theory for speaker meaning
  •  98
    Introduction: “Relativism about Value”
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 (4): 529-537. 2012.
    This is our introduction to the 50 years Anniversary Issue of The Southern Journal of Philosophy on "Relativism about Value". Contributors: Berit Brogaard, Andy Egan, Ragnar Francén Olinder, Karl Schafer, Isidora Stojanovic, Folke Tersman.