Katharina Felka

There are easy arguments for numbers: Arguments that derive the existence of numbers in a few, simple steps from uncontroversial premises like the premise that I have ten fingers. In recent literature some authors have argued that easy arguments rely on a mistaken linguistic analysis of number sentences like ‘The number of my fingers is ten’: While such sentences are traditionally considered as identity sentences, they are rather specificational sentences. However, @barlew_j:2017 has disputed this line of argument: He argues that in easy argument contexts the pertinent number sentences function as identity sentences even though they function as specificational sentences in their standard use. Hence, Barlew concludes, the rebuttal of easy arguments fails. The aim of the present paper is to defend the linguistic objection to easy arguments against Barlew’s criticism.

Some authors have observed that the derogatory content conveyed by slurs exhibits features that are shared by conventionally implicated content and have thus inferred that derogation of slurs is conventionally implicated. However, Nunberg (Oxford University Press 273–295, 2018) has argued that there are special manner implicatures that exhibit the same features as conventional implicatures and that slurs give rise to such manner implicatures. The present paper closely examines manner implicatures and argues that (i) Nunberg’s claim is correct that manner implicatures behave similarly to conventional implicatures but that (ii) the view that slurs invoke such an implicature gives rise to a major difficulty. Hence, the paper concludes, a conventional implicature view of slurs is superior to a manner implicature view.

As has often been observed in the literature, an utterance of a generic such as ‘Boys don’t cry’ can convey a normative behavioral rule that applies to boys, roughly: that boys shouldn’t cry. This observation has led many authors to the claim that generics are ambiguous: they allow both for a descriptive as well as a normative reading. The present paper argues against this common assumption: it argues that the observation in question should be addressed at the level of pragmatics, rather than at the level of semantics. In particular, the paper argues that the normative force of utterances of generics results from the presence of a conversational implicature. This result should somewhat alleviate the task of finding a proper semantic analysis of generics since it shows that at least one of their intriguing features need not be reflected in their truth-conditions.

In this chapter, Katharina Felka and Alex Steinberg consider a problem for structured accounts of content articulated by Stephen Schiffer and Adam Pautz. The problem has to do with the idea of reference shift—that is, the idea that material embedded in the complementizer clauses of propositional attitude ascriptions must function semantically to refer to something other than what it refers to in unembedded contexts. Focusing in particular on Frege’s theory of content, Felka and Steinberg state the problem as follows: If ‘Hesperus’ in the sentence ‘Ben believes that Hesperus is a planet’ refers not to Venus but rather to the sense associated with the lexical item ‘Hesperus’, and if existential quantification works in the normal way, then the sentence ‘There is something such that Ben believes that it is a planet’ would seem to be true just in case there is a sense which Ben believes to be a planet. But, unless Ben is a peculiar individual indeed, he would never mistake a sense for a planet. So it seems that certain intuitively true sentences are predicted to be false by theories that posit reference shift. Felka and Steinberg suggest that the best response to this kind of argument for proponents of reference shift is to hold that the value of a variable relative to an assignment function shifts in propositional attitude ascriptions just like the value of any other kind of expression.

Based on utterances of sentences that contain predicates of taste hearers typically infer that the speaker has first-hand experience with the object being evaluated. That is, utterances of such sentences invoke an acquaintance inference. Various authors have argued that the acquaintance inference is due to peculiarities of predicates of taste. In the paper we critically discuss these proposals and reject them in favour of a version of an epistemic account, according to which the acquaintance inference results from peculiarities of knowledge about taste.

In recent literature many theorists, including Eklund (2011), endorse or express sympathy towards the view that the evaluative content of thick terms is not asserted with utterances of sentences containing them but rather part of their secondary content. In this article we discuss a number of features of thick terms which speak against this view. We further argue that these features are not shared by another, recently much-discussed, class of hybrid evaluative terms, so-called slurs, and that the evaluative contents of these might thus very well be secondary.

This paper is concerned with an intuitive contrast that arises when we consider sentences containing empty definite descriptions. A sentence like ‘The king of France is bald’ appears neither true nor false, while a sentence like ‘My friend was visited by the king of France’ appears false. Recently, Stephen Yablo has suggested an account of this intuitive contrast. Yablo’s account is particularly interesting, since it has important consequences for the ontological commitments of number sentences like ‘The number of planets is even’. However, the paper argues that Yablo’s account is not convincing and that it can thus not establish these consequences. Further, it develops a Strawsonian account of the intuitive contrast. The developed account allows us to draw important conclusions regarding the correct analysis of definite descriptions and of existence sentences containing definite descriptions.

This paper concerns Yablo’s theory of asserted content as it is developed in his new book Aboutness. Yablo’s central idea is that in order to specify the asserted content of a sentence, we have to subtract those parts of its full semantic content that concern irrelevant subject matters. The paper argues that it is doubtful whether Yablo’s account successfully deals with its most basic envisaged application: to account for a difference of apparent truth value in cases of ordinary presupposition failure. In addition, some doubts are raised concerning the success of the extension of Yablo’s account to fictional talk, the informativeness of identity statements, and ontological commitments of number talk.

A realist view of numbers often rests on the following thesis: statements like ‘The number of moons of Jupiter is four’ are identity statements in which the copula is flanked by singular terms whose semantic function consists in referring to a number (henceforth: Identity). On the basis of Identity the realists argue that the assertive use of such statements commits us to numbers. Recently, some anti-realists have disputed this argument. According to them, Identity is false, and, thus, we may deny that the relevant statements commit us to numbers. The present paper argues that the correct linguistic analysis of the relevant number statements supports the anti-realist view that Identity is false. However, as will further be shown, pace the anti-realist, this analysis does not establish that such statements do not commit us to numbers after all