Filippo Domaneschi

What makes social change morally progressive or regressive? Recent debates on moral progress have largely overlooked the “location” issue: which goods are taken to bear the value that makes change progressive or regressive. This paper addresses this issue empirically, asking whether laypeople locate such value in well-being, principles-norms, or virtues, and whether they do so symmetrically across progress and regress. In two experiments, participants rated how much positive or negative changes in these three dimensions made a society more just or unjust. Improvements in principles-norms were judged more progressive than improvements in well-being or virtues. By contrast, losses in well-being and virtues were judged more regressive than losses in principles-norms. We suggest possible interpretations of this asymmetry, asking whether it reflects a rational and defensible structure or a cognitive bias in moral judgments about social change.

In recent decades, the digital age and the Third Industrial Revolution have attracted significant attention in terms of their benefits and risks. Scholars have explored the impact of these changes on autonomy, freedom, human interactions, cognition, and knowledge sharing. However, the influence of the digital communicative environment on civic interactions and public deliberation processes has received limited attention from virtue theorists. This paper aims to address this gap. First, we discuss the challenges posed by the digital communicative environment, and we present recent attempts to revive civility within this context. Then, we propose a twofold account of civility as consisting in the two virtues of civic benevolence and civil deliberation. Finally, we focus on the epistemic side of civility, civil deliberation, and we conduct the first empirical studies on two of its components.

In this paper, we present an experiment that shows conflicting findings from truth-value judgments and eye-tracking data for testing reference assignment of proper names. We argue that if eye-tracking is a more reliable method than truth-value judgment tasks, then our eye-tracking data provide stronger empirical support for Kripke’s causal-historical theory of reference for proper names. We also argue that eye-tracking and truth-value judgments cannot both be reliable techniques for resolving the debate. If they were, they should yield convergent results. Instead, we find that the truth-value judgment data align with the descriptivist prediction, while the eye-tracking results conform to the Kripkean pattern.

Some analyses of lying establish a necessary connection between lies and semantics: the content of a lie needs to be semantically expressed by the liar’s utterance. This necessary connection between lying and semantic holds the potential to strengthen and improve Michaelson’s (2016) proposal of using studies on lying as a supplemental source of data for theorising in semantics. However, several surveys on laypeople’s application of the concept of lying appear to preclude this possibility. Such surveys suggest that laypeople judge deceptive additive particularised conversational implicatures—definitely not a semantic phenomenon—as lies. If those surveys are reliable, they disrupt the necessary connection between lying and semantics and, with it, a promising methodological avenue for semantics. We present the results of a survey that counters the trend of those experiments. Our findings show that laypeople do not classify additive particularised conversational implicatures as lies. Moreover, we provide a diagnosis of why the results of previous empirical surveys yield the opposite conclusion. Our results provide a partial but significant defence of the possibility to overcome the limitation of Michaelson’s proposal to use studies on lying as a source of data for semantics.

Presuppositions bypass epistemic vigilance, but it is unclear if this stems from their encoding or their not‐at‐issue status. In a truth‐value judgment task, participants evaluated false statements from a suspect (low reliability) or a witness (high reliability), varying in linguistic encoding (presupposition vs. assertion) and at‐issueness (at‐issue vs. not‐at‐issue). False information was detected faster and more accurately when at‐issue. False assertions were identified faster, while false presuppositions led to more errors when not‐at‐issue. The difference in response time between assertions and presuppositions was smaller for the unreliable source, suggesting that linguistic encoding and source reliability jointly influence false information detection.

This book discusses developments in the study of implicatures and presuppositions, drawing on recent linguistic and psycholinguistic literature. It provides original discussions of specific formal aspects of the theoretical reconstruction of these phenomena. The authors offer innovative experimental analyses in which crucial processing questions are addressed, and new experimental methodologies are introduced. The result is an advanced debate featuring broad empirical coverage of the issues, as well as an informed discussion of the connections between a Compositional Semantics and a Pragmatic Theory of Implicit Communication, in light of the empirical data coming from Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics. This book will be a worthwhile read for those with interests in both the formal and methodological aspects of these arguments.

According to the Common Ground account proposed by Stalnaker, speakers involved in a verbal interaction have different propositional attitudes towards presuppositions. In this paper we propose an experimental study aimed at estimating the psychological plausibility of the Stalnakerian model. In particular, the goal of our experiment is to evaluate variations in accepting as appropriate a sentence that triggers a presupposition, where different attitudes are taken towards the presupposition required. The study conducted suggests that if a speaker has the attitude of belief towards the content of a presupposition, she may evaluate an utterance as more appropriate in a shorter time than in cases where she holds an attitude of presumption or of assumption. Therefore, data collected support the psychological soundness of what might be considered the main, but also most debated, theory of presupposition on the market.

Theoretical accounts of negative expressives such as damn have ascribed two main properties to this type of adjective, namely that they are typically speaker-oriented, and that they can be flexible with regard to their syntactic attachment. However, it is not clear what this means during online sentence processing. For example, is it effortful for comprehenders to derive the speaker's negative attitude conveyed by an expressive adjective, or is it a rapid, automatic process? And do comprehenders understand the speaker's attitude regardless of the expressive's syntactic position? The current work provides the first evidence supporting theoretical claims by investigating the incremental processing of Italian negative expressive adjectives. In an eye-tracking study, we show that expressive content is rapidly integrated with information about the speaker's attitude, resulting in the anticipation of an upcoming referent, regardless of the expressive's syntactic realization. We argue that comprehenders use expressives as an ostensive cue that allows for automatic retrieval of the speaker's negative attitude.

In order to uphold the claim that referential intuitions are a reliable source of evidence for theories of reference, Machery et al. conducted an empirical research by testing truth-value judgments. First, we discuss a conceptual limitation of Machery et al. ’s experiment on truth-value judgments. Then, we present the data of an empirical survey that shows that people’s truth-value judgments are not congruent with their use of proper names. We explain why the results of our empirical research refute the conclusions of Machery et al. ’s experiment on truth-value judgments. We conclude that referential intuitions are still problematic.

In this paper, we present some experimental findings whose best explanation, first of all, provides a positive answer to a philosophical question in ontology as to whether, in the overall domain of beings, there are fictional characters (_ficta_) over and above concrete individuals. Moreover, since such findings arise out of different comparisons between fictional characters and concrete individuals on the one hand and fictional characters again and non-items that do not belong at all to such an overall domain on the other hand, they also suggest that _ficta_ are allowed as inhabiting a particular subrealm of that domain distinct from the one inhabited by concrete individuals, as previous findings in cognitive psychology had suggested.

Since Machery et al. _Cognition_ 92, B1-B12 ( 2004 ) attacked Kripke’s refutation of classical descriptivism, their experiment has been repeated several times, in its original version or in some revised ones, by theorists with contrasting intents. Some repeated the experiment for confirming its results, others for proving them unreliable. One striking characteristic of those surveys is that they mostly replicated the data collected in Machery et al.’s _Cognition_ 92, B1-B12, 2004 experiment: less than 60% of Westerners showed preference for the causal-historical response. We side with the critics of Machery et al.’s experiment. In this paper, we present the results of a survey that tests some hypotheses for explaining that percentage of Westerners’ preferences without taking it as evidence that more than 40% of Westerners have descriptivist intuitions on semantic reference. The aim of our paper is not merely to question the reliability of Machery et al.’s experiment. In sections 4 and 5 we assess the impact of our survey on the current debate in experimental semantics. We provide a novel account of the nature of the epistemic ambiguity that affects experiments in theory of reference and explain the consequences that our account of the epistemic ambiguity has for subsequent works trying to avoid ambiguities.

Martí argued that referential intuitions are not the right kind of empirical evidence for testing theories of reference. Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc replied with a survey aimed at providing evidence that referential intuitions are in sync with truth‐value judgments and argued that truth‐value judgments provide empirical data from linguistic usage. We present the results of a survey indicating that Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc's experiment fails to overcome Martí's objection: The truth‐value judgements tested by Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc do not provide data relevant for testing theories of reference.

We present two experimental studies on the Italian expressive ‘stronzo’. The first study tests whether, and to which extent, the acceptability of using an expressive is sensitive to the information available in the context. The study looks both at referential uses of expressives and predicative uses of expressives. The results show that expressives are sensitive to contextual information to a much higher degree than the non-expressive control items in their referential use, but also, albeit to a lesser degree, in their predicative use. The second study tests whether the lower acceptability of expressives in their predicative use may be simply due to saying something negative about someone. A comparison between expressives, such as ‘jerk’, and non-expressive negative terms, such as ‘nasty’ or ‘unbearable’, suggests that it is the expressive nature of these terms, rather than the mere negative valence, that affects acceptability. Our studies present a major challenge to the existing accounts of expressives, and raise several theoretical issues that still call for an answer.

In this paper, we suggest a strategy for modelling cognitive context within a truth‐conditional semantics, using Asher's model of predication. This allows us to introduce the notion of type presupposition intended as a lexical constraint to the composition of the truth‐conditional content. More specifically, we suggest that this model of predication produces a notion of truth‐conditional meaning where the cognitive context fixes a set of lexical restrictions and forced modifications. We conclude that this model might offer an intermediate position between Minimalism and Contextualism: an account that provides intuitive truth conditions within a formal semantic theory.

The business of a sentence is not only to describe some state of affairs but also to perform other kinds of speech acts like ordering, suggesting, asking, etc. Understanding the kind of action performed by a speaker who utters a sentence is a multimodal process which involves the computing of verbal and non-verbal information. This work aims at investigating if the understanding of a speech act is affected by the gender of the actor that produces the utterance in combination with a certain facial expression. Experimental data collected show that, as compared to men, women are less likely to be perceived as performers of orders and are more likely to be perceived as performers of questions. This result reveals a gender bias which reflects a process of women’s subordination according to which women are hardly considered as holding the hierarchical social position required for the correct execution of an order.

Il linguaggio permea la nostra vita quotidiana: quando chiediamo un caffè al bar, quando discutiamo con i nostri amici, quando salutiamo qualcuno o ci presentiamo a un colloquio di lavoro, comunichiamo utilizzando parole ed espressioni di una certa lingua. Conversare è un'attività spontanea e apparentemente elementare, ma che coinvolge meccanismi estremamente complessi e sofisticati. Tramite numerosi esempi e illustrando le teorie linguistiche e filosofiche più recenti, questo libro vuole fornire al lettore una "cassetta degli attrezzi" utile per comprendere e analizzare il funzionamento di quel particolare tipo di azione che è l'agire linguistico.

In this paper I deal with the process involved in understanding metaphors. My aim is to show how synaesthetic sentences moderate the conflict between the minimalist point of view and the radical contextualist standpoint. Synaesthetic sentences are constituted by a term that belongs to a perceptual domain which is defined by a term that corresponds to another perceptual domain (for example “caressing voice”, “dark sound”, or “sweet smell”). In particular, I will defend two claims: first, against radical contextualism, it is possible to maintain the distinction between “what is literal” and “what is metaphorical”. Second, against the minimalist view, the literal meaning of a metaphorical utterance is not necessarily computed as a first step by default.

Mind the Gap Presupposition has been a widely discussed topic in the philosophical and linguistic tradition since the beginning: Frege, in Über Sinn und Bedeutung, claims that the use of a singular term presupposes the existence of the individual denoted. The Fregean example was that to give a truth value to the sentenceKepler died in miserywe need to take for granted the truth of the propositionKepler existedTherefore, is a semantic presupposition of. Since the Fregean stance, analytic scholars have given the following definition: a sentence p semantically presupposes a sentence q if we need the truth of q in order to treat p as endowed with sense, that is, as either true or false. If the presupposition is lacking, then the sentence p lacks a truth value. Russell, in On Denoting, launched a strong criticism of the Fregean theory of semantic presupposition, contrasting the Fregean view with..

This volume contains essays that explore explicit and implicit communication through linguistic research. Taking as a framework Paul Grice's theories on "what is said," the contributors explore a number of areas, including: the boundary between semantics and pragmatics; the concept of implicit communication; the idea of the logical form of our assertions; the notion of conventional meaning; the phenomenon of deixis, which refers to when an utterance require context in order to be understood fully; the treatment of definite descriptions; and the different kinds of pragmatic processes.

Presuppositions and Appropriateness of AssertionsIn this paper I aim to compare and evaluate two theoretic approaches to pragmatic presuppositions: the Common Ground account and Propositional Context account. According to the Common Ground account proposed by Stalnaker (2002), it is appropriate to assert a sentence p that requires a presupposition q only if q is mutually believed as accepted as true and taken for granted by the interlocutors. Otherwise, Gauker (2002, 2008) claims that the ground of propositions taken for granted coincides with what he calls the objective propositional context, that is the set of objectively relevant propositional elements that speakers ought to share in order to evaluate the appropriateness of utterances so as to reach the goal of a conversation.The main purpose of my paper is to show that, according to the Propositional Context account, a theory of presupposition has to take into account a normative-objective notion of context. Secondly, I aim to develop a criticism of Gauker's point of view claiming that the Propositional Context account does not account for the number of ways in which a proposition can be taken for granted by the speakers depending on the context. Finally, I propose to integrate Gauker's account with a further condition for appropriateness of assertion which states that: in order to appropriately assert a sentence p that requires a presupposition q, speakers ought to recognize how they should justify q in a specific communicative context.