Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska

In the paper I describe John MacFarlane’s version of relativism about truth. I begin by discussing Twardowski’s (1900) and Kokoszynska’s (1948; 1951) arguments against relativism. They think — just as Haack does (see 2011) — that sentences may be relatively true, if they are incomplete, but once they are completed they become true (or false) absolutely. MacFarlane distinguishes between nonindexical contextualism (which was anticipated by Kokoszynska (sic!)) and relativism which requires the introduction of the context of assessment. According to him only the view which postulates double-indexed (to contexts of utterance and to contexts of assessments) truth is able to explain disagreement in subjective domains and contradicting intuitions about the truth-value of future-contingents

Semantic contextualism claims that sentences ascribing knowledge or lack thereof (sentences like "S knows that p" and "S doesn't know that p") are context dependent: they express different propositions in different contexts of utterance. "Knows that" is either indexical or elliptical and refers to different relations in different circumstances. Invariantism argues in turn that the knowing relation is just one and the proposition expressed by a given knowledge ascription does not depend on context. A special case of invariantism is interest-relative invariantism proposed recently by Jason Stanley. According to |R| knowledge is conceptually linked to practical interests. Whether or not true beliefs count as knowledge depends on the costs of being wrong; on the stakes in a given situation (I may know that the bank will be open on Saturday if I have no important business to be done in the bank; if however I have an impending bill coming due I will not count as knowing that the bank will be open on Saturday even though my evidence as regard bank opening hours has not changed). It is argued in the paper that the difference between various contexts in which knowledge ascriptions are made is not a difference in stakes. Moreover knowledge has to be distinguished from willingness to be sure. One may know something but not be sure about it and may be sure about something but not to know it. The higher the stakes the more sure one usually wants to be, but the height of the stakes does not have such an impact on knowledge

W artykule zwracam uwagę na trudności jakie napotyka ktoś, kto chce wcielać w życie postulaty krytycyzmu dotyczące precyzji językowej. Zgodnie z tymi postulatami powinno się mówić jednoznacznie i precyzyjnie, a zatem unikać wyrażeń wieloznacznych, nieostrych i chwiejnych znaczeniowo. Jednakże postulaty te jest znacznie trudniej spełnić niż mogłoby się wydawać, bowiem istotne wątpliwości dotyczą samych zjawisk niejasności, nieostrości czy wieloznaczności. Wydaje się, że chcąc nauczyć innych unikania na przykład wypowiedzi wieloznacznych, powinniśmy dysponować adekwatną charakterystyką wieloznaczności i potrafić ją właściwie diagnozować. Tymczasem, sytuacja jest niesamowicie zagmatwana i w literaturze czy to filozoficznej, czy językoznawczej, nie ma jednej ustalonej definicji, czy choćby zgody co do tego, które wyrażenia są wieloznaczne. Nie ma także zgody co do tego, w jaki sposób charakteryzować polisemię i jak odróżniać ją np. od zależności kontekstowej. Wątpliwości budzi także charakterystyka nieostrości i właściwego klasyfikowania przypadków granicznych wyrażeń nieostrych. Nie ma natomiast wątpliwości, że większość wyrażeń języka naturalnego jest i nieostra, i zależna od kontekstu, i jednocześnie polisemiczna. Co więcej w wielu wypadkach te cechy wcale nie są defektami naszego języka, a wręcz usprawniają komunikację i umożliwiają nam szybkie przekazanie treści. Postulat unikania tego rodzaju wyrażeń jest po prostu nierealizowalny. Kierowanie się zasadami krytycyzmu pozwala jednak na łatwiejsze dostrzeżenie i unikanie wadliwości i uchybień wobec poprawności językowej w tych sytuacjach, gdy takie wadliwości utrudniają sprawną komunikację.

The traditional conception of lying, according to which to lie is to make an assertion with an intention to deceive the hearer, has recently been put under pressure by the phenomenon of bald-faced lies i.e. utterances that _prima facie_ look like lies but because of their blatancy allegedly lack the accompanying intention to deceive. In this paper we propose an intuitive way of reconciling the phenomenon of bald-faced lies with the traditional conception by suggesting that the existing analyses of the phenomenon overlook a non-obvious category of hearers whom the speakers of bald-faced lies intend to deceive. Those hearers are institutions represented by the people involved, such as courts or secret police. We also criticize two recent rival accounts (Jessica Keiser’s and Daniel Harris’s) that attempt to save the traditional conception by saying that some bald-faced lies are not assertions, because they are conventional—rather than illocutionary—speech acts.

The Agreement-Based Tests for Context Sensitivity In my paper, I present and discuss Cappelen and Lepore's context sensitivity tests, which appeal to says-that reports. In Relativism and Monadic Truth Cappelen and Hawthorne criticize those tests and propose agreement-based tests instead. I argue that such tests do not fare much better. The original Cappelen and Lepore's tests presupposed a minimal notion of says-that. One might postulate a parallel notion of "thin" agreement, according to which people agree that p if they all believe the minimal proposition that p. In this sense we might say - as opposed to what Cappelen and Hawthorne say - that A and B agree that Nicola is smart, even though A thinks that she is smart because she stands way back against strong servers, while B thinks that she is smart because she invested all her money in penny stocks. The paper ends with a critical gloss concerning the case in which Joe Coach predicates tall of people who are over six-foot-eight and Joe Normal, who applies tall to anyone over six-foot tall. I conclude that agreement and disagreement tests are poor indicators of context sensitivity, since their result depends on the prior theoretical standpoint one adopts.

In my paper I argue that a successful theory of vagueness should be able to account for faultless disagreement concerning borderline cases.Firstly, I claim that out of the traditional conceptions of vagueness the best equipped to account for faultless disagreement areparaconsistent solutions. One worry concerning dialetheism is that it seems to allow not only for faultless disagreements between different speakers, but also for such ‘disagreements’ between the given speaker and himself. Another worry, at least for some people, is that subvaluationism and dialetheism account for faultless disagreements by allowing contradictions. Next, I go on to argue that contextual conceptions, which are free from this latter worry, are equally well able to account for such disagreements. To this aim I offer a new account of the usage of personal taste predicates and suggest that we model the usage of all vague predicates on them. The idea is that in clear cases “a is F” means “a is F simpliciter”, whereas in borderline cases it means “a is F-to-me”. Since the boundary between borderline and nonborderline cases depends on context, my solution weds content-contextualism with truth-contextualism.

In this paper I argue that metalinguistic negotiations are not as common as David Plunkett and Timothy Sundell assume. They make two related controversial claims: the claim that speakers don’t know what they say and the claim that they directly communicate metalinguistic contents. These two claims generate two challenges that the metalinguistic-negotiation view should meet. Firstly, it should clarify why speakers are oblivious to what they are saying and communicating, and secondly, it should explain the mechanism that transforms what seems like a typical object-language disagreement into a metalinguistic dispute. I argue that the way in which Plunkett and Sundell meet these challenges is unsatisfactory. Regarding their answer to the first challenge, I’ll argue that the theoretical cost of postulating massive semantic and pragmatic blindness in otherwise competent speakers is too high. Regarding what they say in relation to the second challenge, I’ll claim that metalinguistic contents can only be conveyed when speakers uttering apparently contradicting claims know that they are using terms with different meanings. If my arguments are correct, then metalinguistic negotiations are certainly not ubiquitous.

Niezdaniowe akty mowy to przynajmniej pozornie niezdaniowe wypowiedzi, za których pomocą mówiący dokonują pewnych aktów illokucyjnych: stwierdzają, pytają, proszą itp. Wśród teoretyków zajmujących się takimi wypowiedziami można wskazać zwolenników podejścia, które głosi, że większość takich wypowiedzi tojednak — wbrew pozorom — wypowiedzi zdaniowe (elipsy), oraz zwolenników stanowiska, zgodnie z którym treść takich wypowiedzi musi być bezpośrednio wzbogacona z kontekstu za pomocą procesów pragmatycznych niekontrolowanych semantycznie. W pierwszej części tej pracy przyglądam się bliżej stanowisku traktującemu wypowiedzi niezdaniowe jako elipsy i zastanowiam się, czy można uznać, że kontekst pozajęzy- kowy może wyznaczać sposób uzupełnienia wyrażenia do pełnego zdania w taki sposób, że pierwotna wypowiedź niezdaniowa może być uznana za elipsę. Następnie przedstawiam stanowisko, zgodnie z którym wypowiedzi niezdaniowe to udane akty illokucyjne niewymagające wzbogacenia pragmatycznego. Argumentuję, że taki pogląd nie jest adekwatny, ponieważ na jego gruncie wypowiedzi niezdaniowych nie można uznać za pełnoprawne akty mowy. W dalszej części pracy proponuję wersję stanowiska pragmatycznego, opartą na relatywizmie umiarkowanym Franęois Recanatiego. Proponowana przeze mnie koncepcja pozwala uznać, że mimo iż wypowiedzi niezdaniowe semantycznie nie wyrażają sądów i nie mają wartości logicznej, to po odpowiednim wzbogaceniu z kontekstu pozajęzykowego mają na tyle określoną treść (i moc), że mogą być uznane za udane akty illokucyjne. Koncepcja ta pozwala również odpowiedzieć na zarzut ze zgodności gramatycznej, który jest jednym z najpoważniejszych zarzutów, z jakimi muszą się zmierzyć wszystkie koncepcje pragmatyczne.

In the paper Evans’s argument concerning indeterminate identity statements is presented and discussed. Evans’s paper in which he formulated his argument is one of the most frequently discussed papers concerning identity. There are serious doubts concerning what Evans wanted to prove by his argument. Theorists have proposed two competing and incompatible interpretations. According to some, Evans purposefully constructed an invalid argument in order to demonstrate that the vague objects view cannot diagnose the fallacy and is therefore untenable. According to others, Evans wanted to formulate a (valid) argument to the effect that there cannot be vague identity statements whose vagueness is due solely to the existence of vague objects. As it has been argued, if it is the former interpretation which is correct, than the argument really is invalid, but it is doubtful whether it achieves its aim. It might be claimed that “the vague objects view” it refutes is not the view that most vague objects theorists hold. The main part of the paper is devoted to the second interpretation and the discussions concerning the validity of the argument on this interpretation. It appears that the vague objects theorist is in a position to object to the validity of every single step of the proof

This paper is an attempt to show that the subvaluation theory isnot a good theory of vagueness. It begins with a short review of supervaluation and subvaluation theories and procedes to evaluate the subvaluation theory. Subvaluationism shares all the main short-comings of supervaluationism.Moreover, the solution to the sorites paradox proposed by subvaluationists isnot satisfactory. There is another solution which subvaluationists could availthemselves of, but it destroys the whole motivation for using a paraconsistentlogic and is not different from the one offered by supervaluationism.

In this article I propose a view which explains how it is possible that the disagreement concerning clear cases of a given vague predicate is genuine, whereas that concerning borderline cases is faultless. I take the possibility of faultless disagreement concerning borderline cases to be an important characteristic of vague predicates and in my view any adequate theory of vagueness should account for it. My proposal might be called “contextual supervaluationism” and it is inspired by Kölbel's relativist view from his paper “Vagueness as Semantic”. Following Kölbel I claim that the range of admissible sharpenings assumed by supervaluationism is context‐dependent, but contrary to him I maintain that we need supertruth as well as truth at a sharpening. Moreover – again unlike Kölbel – I argue that utterances concerning borderline cases are permissible. I claim, however, that such utterances should be assertives rather than assertions, since they express only a weak belief of the speaker. It is the different illocutionary forces of utterances concerning clear cases and borderline cases that make it possible to explain the distinct nature of disagreements over such cases.

In the first part of my paper I briefly present Jerzy Pelc’s functional approach to logical semiotics of natural language. This approach focuses on the use of natural language expressions and on its dependence on context and conversational situation. One of the important goals of this analysis is to appreciate the role of sentences in natural language and stress that it is by means of sentences that language fulfills its main roles. However, for Pelc almost any expression can be used as a sentence, despite not being a grammatical sentence. In the second part I try to place Pelc’s standpoint within the framework of contemporary semantic minimalism – contextualism debate. I pay special attention to his treatment of subsentential expressions used to express propositions and argue that his view belongs to pragmatics-oriented approaches to subsentential speech acts.

In this paper I criticise some aspects of the view that Ernie Lepore and Mathew Stone propose in their book Imagination and Convention. I concentrate on their analysis of indirect speech acts and contrast it with the view held by Searle. I point out some problems that arise for Lepore and Stone’s ambiguity view and argue that admitting conventions of usage that are not meaning conventions allows one to avoid postulating global ambiguity, which in my opinion threatens the view proposed in Imagination and Convention. In addition, if one admits that there might be such conventions of usage, one is in a position to provide an adequate analysis of sub-sentential speech acts and semantic underdetermination as well as indirect speech acts.