Mark Richard

Is the point of belief and assertion invariably to think or say something true? Is the truth of a belief or assertion absolute, or is it only relative to human interests? Most philosophers think it incoherent to profess to believe something but not think it true, or to say that some of the things we believe are only relatively true. Common sense disagrees. It sees many opinions, such as those about matters of taste, as neither true nor false; it takes it as obvious that some of the truth is relative. Mark Richard's accessible book argues that when it comes to truth, common sense is right, philosophical orthodoxy wrong. The first half of the book examines connections between the performative aspects of talk, our emotions and evaluations, and the conditions under which talk and thought qualifies as true or false. It argues that the performative and expressive sometimes trump the semantic, making truth and falsity the wrong dimension of evaluation for belief or assertion. Among the topics taken up are: racial slurs and other epithets; relations between logic and truth; the status of moral and ethical talk; vagueness and the liar paradox. The book's second half defends the idea that much of everyday thought and talk is only relatively true or false. Truth is inevitably relative, given that we cannot work out in advance how our concepts will apply to the world. Richard explains what it is for truth to be relative, rebuts standard objections to relativism, and argues that relativism is consistent with the idea that one view can be objectively better than another. The book concludes with an account of matters of taste and of how it is possible for divergent views of such matters to be equally valid, even if not true or false. When Truth Gives Out will be of interest not only to philosophers who work on language, ethics, knowledge, or logic, but to any thoughtful person who has wondered what it is, or isn't, for something to be true.

Most linguists and philosophers will tell you that whatever meaning is, it determines the reference of names, the satisfaction conditions of nouns and verbs, the truth conditions of sentences; in linguist speak, meaning determines semantic value. So a change in semantic value implies a change in meaning. So the semantic value a meaning determines is essential to that meaning: holding contributions from context constant, if two words have different semantic values they cannot mean the same thing. If this is correct, then in a fairly straightforward sense reference is essential to meaning. In this paper I argue that reference is not essential to meaning by giving an example in which groups in different circumstances use a phrase with the same meaning but a different reference.

Many trans women (men) say that they know that they are women (men). Anti-trans activists deny the claims trans people say they know. Many say that social kinds like woman, Latinx, and consent are in some important sense constructed in the social world and are thus open to a certain amount of engineering. I think the claims to knowledge trans people make are correct, and I think it correct that such things as gender, race, and consent are constructed by society and so are prime candidates for what philosophers these days call conceptual engineering. But it is not all that easy to see how the claim about knowledge and the claim that what is known is determined by the vagaries of the social world are to be reconciled. In this paper I argue that this is a real problem, that it has a solution, and that the solution tells us something important about what happens when we contest norms or engineer concepts.

Cappelen and Lepore argue against the principle P: A semantic theory ought to assign p to S if uttering S is saying p. An upshot of P’s falsity, they allege, is that some objections to Davidson’s programme (such as Foster’s) turn out to be without force. This essay formulates and defends a qualified version of P against Cappelen and Lepore’s objections. It distinguishes P from the more fundamental Q: A semantic theory ought to assign p to S iff literal utterance of S literally says p. Without some objection to Q—which Cappelen and Lepore do not supply—Foster’s objection to Davidson’s programme stands.

_ Meaning_ brings together some of the most significant philosophical work on linguistic representation and understanding, presenting canonical essays on core questions in the philosophy of language. Brings together essential readings which define and advance the literature on linguistic representation and understanding. Examines key topics in philosophy of language, including analyticity; translational indeterminacy; theories of reference; meaning as use; the nature of linguistic competence; truth and meaning; and relations between semantics and metaphysics. Includes classic articles by key figures such as Frege, Quine, Putnam, Kripke, and Davidson; and recent reactions to this work by philosophers including Mark Wilson, Scott Soames, James Higginbotham, Frank Jackson, Alex Byrne, and Paul Bogohossian

Talia Mae Bettcher argues that gender terms like ‘woman’ have multiple meanings, as different speakers use these terms to pick out different classes—some use ‘woman’ to pick out (roughly) the class of those assigned female at birth; some use it to pick out a class including both that class and trans women. Bettcher is correct, I argue: it is undeniable that ‘woman’ has quite different referents in different speakers' mouths; there is furthermore a kind of conventional meaning which varies across speakers associated with gender terms, one which tracks and varies with these different referential practices.

There seems to be a lot of opacity in our language. Quotation is opaque. The modal idioms are apparently opaque. Propositional attitude ascriptions seem opaque, as do the environments created by verbs such as ‘seeks’ and ‘fears’. Opacity raises a number of issues — first and foremost, whether there is such a thing. This article concentrates on the question of whether there is any opacity to be found in natural language, examining various reasons one might have for denying that apparent opacity is genuine.

This paper responds to discussions of my book When Truth Gives Out by Michael Lynch, Nenad Miščević, and Isidora Stojanović. Among the topics discussed are: whether relativism is incoherent (because it requires one to think that certain of one’s views are and are not epistemically superior to views one denies); whether and when sentences in which one slurs an individual or group are truth valued; whether relativism about matters of taste gives an account of “faultless disagreement” superior to certain “absolutist” accounts of the matter.

David Hunter’s On Believing is a rich and worthwhile defense of a distinctive view about the objects and nature of belief. In these comments, I discuss three aspects of the book. I agree with Hunter that the objects of belief are properties or (as I prefer to refer to them) states of affairs. But I argue that he has too narrow a view of the range of possible objects of belief. I defend the idea that belief is in part a matter of representing the world, an idea Hunter appears to criticize. And I defend the idea that one or another truthy property provides a norm for evaluating beliefs.

This book collects nine seminal essays by Mark Richard published between 1980 and 2014, alongside four new essays and an introduction that puts the essays in context. Each essay is an attempt, in one way or another, to understand the idea of a proposition. Part I discusses whether the objects of thought and assertion can change truth value over time. Part II develops and defends a relativist view of the objects of assertion and thought; and Part III discusses issues having to do with relations between sentential and propositional structure.

This book collects nine seminal essays by Mark Richard published between 1980 and 2014, alongside four new essays and an introduction that puts the essays in context. Each essay is an attempt, in one way or another, to understand the idea of a proposition. Part I discusses whether the objects of thought and assertion can change truth value over time. Part II develops and defends a relativist view of the objects of assertion and thought; it includes discussions of the nature of disagreement, moral relativism, and responds to important objections to relativism. It also explores the idea that thoughts and assertions may be neither true nor false. Part III discusses issues having to do with relations between sentential and propositional structure. Among the topics discussed in Part III are the semantics of quotation, 'mixed quotation', opacity, philosophical analysis and propositional structure, and the semantics of demonstratives and clausal complements.