Marián Zouhar

The paper aims to weaken a widespread argument against indexical contextualism regarding matters of personal taste. According to indexical contextualism, an utterance of “T is tasty” (where T is an object of taste) expresses the proposition that T is tasty for J (where J is a judge). This argument suggests that indexical contextualism cannot do justice to our disagreement intuitions regarding typical disputes about personal taste because it has to treat conversations in which one speaker utters “T is tasty” and another responds with “T is not tasty” (referred to as ‘judge-non-specific conversations’ in this paper) as being on a par with conversations in which one speaker utters “T is tasty to me” and another responds with “T is not tasty to me” (referred to as ‘judge-specific conversations’). The argument has it that judge-specific conversations, unlike judge-non-specific conversations, do not contain disagreement between speakers. To defend indexical contextualism, some philosophers have proposed accounts (here referred to as ‘dual-proposition theories’) according to which utterances of “T is tasty” are used to communicate both the above kinds of semantically expressed proposition and some other kinds of proposition (like superiority propositions or metalinguistic propositions) that could be used to explain disagreements about taste. The paper defends two claims: First, it is argued that judge-specific conversations, or at least some of them, do contain disagreement between speakers, contrary to what the anti-indexical-contextualist argument supposes. Second, it is argued that dual-proposition indexical-contextualist theories fail to explain judge-specific conversations that are intuitively interpreted as containing disagreement.

It is quite popular nowadays to postulate various kinds of unarticulated constituents that have essential bearing on truth conditions of utterances. F. Recanati champions an elaborated version of contextualism according to which one has to distinguish two kinds of unarticulated constituents: those that are articulated at the level of the logical form of a given sentence and those that are truly unarticulated. Recanati offers a theory which explains the manner of incorporating truly unarticulated constituents into the propositions expressed. This theory invokes variadic functions. The present paper shows that variadic functions are unnecessary because no constituents are truly unarticulated in the sense assumed by Recanati. An alternative explanation is offered according to which all propositional constituents are either explicitly or implicitly represented at the syntactic level.

The author tries to outline Fregeś semantics for indexical expressions. The task is rather problematic because there seems to be some inconsistency between general principles of Fregeś semantics and requirements posed by him for semantics of indexicals. The main problem arises when we ask which kind of sense ought to be expressed by an indexical expression. Two proposals as possible answers are discussed, one suggested by John Perry, the other by Pavel Tichý. Both proposals are in part right but there are some arguments against their general validity. Then the author sketches another suggestion which preserves the main contributions of the above proposals but nullifies their mistakes

The paper aims at the identification of the most important events that are vital for the development of the analytical philosophy. The role of modern logic is well-known in this connection, but it is argued that there is another occurrence relevant in this respect, i. e. the rise of modern physics. Unlike the philosophical physics, its predecessor, the modern physics utilizes mathematical apparatus, and thus both of them can achieve better results and be a measure of scientific rationality. The role of modern logic for philosophy is taken as analogous to the role of mathematics for physics

Fregean thoughts (i.e. the senses of assertoric sentences) are structured entities because they are composed of simpler senses that are somehow ordered and interconnected. The constituent senses form a unity because some of them are ?saturated? and some ?unsaturated?. This paper shows that Frege's explanation of the structure of thoughts, which is based on the ?saturated/unsaturated? distinction, is by no means sufficient because it permits what I call ?wild analyses?, which have certain unwelcome consequences. Wild analyses are made possible because any ?unsaturated? sense that is a mode of presentation of a concept together with any ?saturated? sense forms a thought. The reason is that any concept can be applied to any object (which is presented by a ?saturated? sense). This stems from the fact that Frege was willing to admit only total functions. It is also briefly suggested what should be done to block wild analyses

The paper addresses the problem which consists in that the semantic content of an utterance is often much richer than the content fixed by the semantic conventions and compositionality. The semantic content of an utterance is, therefore, supposed to involve so-called unarticulated constituents, over and above those articulated at the linguistic level. It is often claimed that this problem undermines traditional conceptions of semantics. The paper shows that every unarticulated constituent has to be determined at the syntactic level. Consequently, there are no unarticulated constituents tout courts. This claim is resulting from a careful specification of the notions used to show that there are unarticulated constituents . Given these specifications, it is possible to develop a theory of syntactic ellipsis as a viable solution to the above mentioned problem

The aim of the paper is to argue against well-known Fregean idea according to which the meaning of a proper name determines the referent of the name, and the consequence thereof that semantically interesting proper names can be characterized independently of the notion of referent. The claim that it is meaningful to formulate a theory of meaning only for those names that has referents is defended. Several important morals concerning proper names follow from the claim. 1. The role of a theory of meaning is in fact radically different than it is supposed by Fregean approaches. 2. The meaning of a name cannot determine its referent, and therefore mediate the relation of reference between a name and an object. 3. A theory of reference of proper names, contrary to Fregean point of view, should be taken as primary to a theory of meaning

The article concerns some pragmatic features of proper names and their behaviour in communication. Its central aim is to develop a version of the historical theory of reference and to find a proper place for the main notions of the theory, such as naming, the first use and the communication chain. It is argued that the primary theoretical importance is to be attached to the act of naming, the act of name-introduction. Contrary to some wide-spread views, naming should be dissociated from the first use of a proper name; this step enables one to avoid some counter-arguments. Partial changes are suggested also with respect to the communication chain of name-uses. The final part is concerned with a discussion about criteria of identity of proper names; the best ones, to my mind, are those based on the notion of naming

The historical theory is one of the most successful and elaborated theories dealing with the referential behaviour of proper names. The aim of the article is mainly a negative one. The introduction presents a general point of view concerning proper names and their place within a language. The second and the third parts are devoted to an outline of a version of the historical theory; the main stress is placed on the well-known devices of the theory, i.e. the naming-relation and the communication chain of name uses. The fourth part contains several critical remarks concerning both of the devices: it is pointed out that the naming-relation is unable to explain the reference of proper names and that the idea of communication chain is vague and cannot serve to its proper aims

The article contains several applications of the version of the historical theory of proper names presented in the previous article . They are designed to defend its epistemologically meager point of view . It is argued that the distinction between reference of an expression and that of a speaker which lies in the very heart of the theory enables one to handle with many well-known examples . Then bounds of referential uses of proper names are tested with respect to some other examples as well . The point is that the theory is neither too narrow nor too broad: it does not exclude, on the one hand, those uses of a name that are demonstrably referrential and it does not, on the other hand, count as referring clearly non-referrential “uses” of a name