Matej Drobňák

In this paper I discuss a common ambiguity in the specification of the content of implicatures either in terms of mental states “BELS(ψ)” or in terms of simple propositions “ψ”. The aim of this paper is to argue for a pluralistic view that acknowledges the coexistence of both specifications as distinct implicatures. As I argue, both specifications have different functions in communication, and there are conversational situations in which the speaker and hearer are motivated to rely on one or the other selectively. Moreover, I argue that taking the distinction between them seriously a) sheds new light on the debates between the Gricean approach to and the grammatical theory of scalar implicatures, and b) opens new questions regarding the (mutual) derivability of both specifications.

The idea that natural languages are shared by speakers within linguistic communities is often taken for granted. Several philosophers even take the notion of shared language as fundamental and that allows them to use it in further explanations. However, to justify the claim that speakers share a language, it should be possible to demarcate the shared language somehow. In this paper, I discuss: A) the explanatory role which the notion of shared language can play, and B) a strategy for demarcating shared languages from within the linguistic production of speakers. The aim of this paper is to show that the indeterminate nature of meaning in natural languages problematizes the intuitive idea of natural languages as shared.

This paper contributes to the field of evolutionary pragmatics by proposing a hearer-oriented approach to the evolution of human communication. Traditionally, the evolution of human communication has been viewed from a speaker-oriented perspective that emphasizes the role of signalers in developing Gricean ostensive-inferential communication. This paper supplements that view by arguing that the evolution of normative practices, and the associated norm psychology, played a crucial role in this process. Specifically, it suggests that receivers, through their normative behaviors such as punishment and social ostracization, created evolutionary pressure on signalers to develop strategies for avoiding negative reactions, thereby driving the emergence of ostensive-inferential communication. The hearer-oriented approach is supported by recent research in pragmatics and social cognition, which highlights the significant role of hearers in determining communicated content and emphasizes the normative aspects of human communication. The paper further discusses how this approach complements existing speaker-oriented models, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the evolutionary dynamics that led to the development of uniquely human communication.

In this paper, I focus on a common equivocality in how the content of conversational, especially scalar, implicatures is specified and I argue that there is a substantial difference between the belief specification BELS(¬ψ) (“The speaker believes that ¬ψ”) and the content specification ¬ψ. The main argument for taking the distinction between the specifications seriously is that, in most cases, both BELS(¬ψ) and ¬ψ can be derived as the implicatures of the same sentence but they have different consequences for how the hearer plans her future actions and manages expectations about the future actions of the speaker. As I argue further, the commitment-based approaches can provide an explanation of how the content specification is derived in contexts in which the speaker does not have beliefs required for the derivation of the belief specification and because of that they have an advantage over the standard Gricean approach.

According to the objection raised by Fodor and Lepore, inferentialism is untenable because it cannot provide a distinction between meaning-constitutive and ‘utterly contingent’ inferences. As they argue, without the distinction, the meanings of expressions cannot be shared and, without the shared meanings, the successfulness of communication cannot be explained. In other words, without the distinction, inferentialism becomes committed to holism. The aim of this paper is to show that if we understand communication in terms of the coordination of actions, then partial sharing of meanings, i.e. sharing of contextually relevant aspects of meanings, is a sufficient requirement for communication to be successful. As I argue, if we accept such a view of communication, then inferentialism can explain the successfulness of communication without relying on the notion of shared meanings and so it can navigate the muddy waters of holism.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in Rich Meaning Approaches (RMA) that understand the meanings of words as rich conceptual structures, such as Pustejovsky’s generative lexicon. The reason for this is based on compositionality, as rich meanings have been shown to be indispensable for explaining conflict resolution in compositional processes. However, while the benefits of postulating rich meanings to explain conflict resolution are undeniable, the overall contribution of rich meanings to sentence comprehension has not yet been discussed. This paper aims to show that inferentialism counts as a version of RMA and that, once this is recognised, it can provide a robust rationale for the role of rich meanings in sentence comprehension. The rationale is based on the idea that rich meanings are indispensable for pragmatic purposes as they play a role in facilitating communication. As I argue, rich meanings not only assist in composing the semantic (truth-conditional) content of complete sentences, but also provide crucial information for determining the discursive commitments and entitlements established by utterances. Consequently, examining the implications of inferentialism for compositional processes a) offers new insights into their function and outputs and b) presents an alternative to the representationalist perspective on sentence comprehension.

The aim of this paper is to establish a specific view of linguistic understanding based on the framework of normative inferentialism. Normative inferentialism is presented as an overspecification (rich) account of meaning—the meaning of a sentence is understood as a cluster of context‐dependent contents. The standard psychological mechanism responsible for reaching understanding of an utterance depends on the ability to eliminate contextually irrelevant aspects/parts of meaning. The advantages of the view are that the mechanism can (a) explain a wide range of linguistic phenomena including polysemy, homonymy, and conversational implicatures, and (b) explain partial understanding of an utterance.

The criterion of naturalness represents David Lewis’s attempt to answer some of the sceptical arguments in (meta-) semantics by comparing the naturalness of meaning candidates. Recently, the criterion has been challenged by a new sceptical argument. Williams argues that the criterion cannot rule out the candidates which are not permuted versions of an intended interpretation. He presents such a candidate – the arithmetical interpretation (a specific instantiation of The criterion of naturalness represents David Lewis’s attempt to answer some of the sceptical arguments in (meta-) semantics by comparing the naturalness of meaning candidates. Recently, the criterion has been challenged by a new sceptical argument. Williams argues that the criterion cannot rule out the candidates which are not permuted versions of an intended interpretation. He presents such a candidate – the arithmetical interpretation (a specific instantiation of Henkin’s model), and he argues that it opens up the possibility of Pythagorean worlds, i.e. the worlds similar to ours in which the arithmetical interpretation is the best candidate for a semantic theory. The aim of this paper is a) to reconsider the general conditions for the applicability of Lewis’s criterion of naturalness and b) to show that Williams’s new sceptical challenge is based on a problematic assumption that the arithmetical interpretation is independent of fundamental properties and relations. As I show, if the criterion of naturalness is applied properly, it can respond even to the new sceptical challenge.

In this paper, I discuss a specific approach to measuring and comparing the simplicity of theories that is based on Lewis’s notion of fundamental properties. In particular, I discuss the criterion of simplicity as stated by Williams. According to Williams, the best candidate for a theory is the one which has the shortest definition in terms of fundamental properties. The aim of this paper is to show that the criterion thus specified has two constraints. First, the criterion is not applicable to cases in which candidates for theories that specify fundamental properties are compared. Secondly, the applicability of the criterion in social sciences seems to be unwarranted.

In this paper, I show how normative inferentialism could be used to explain several phenomena related to natural languages. First, I show how the distinction between the inferential potential and the inferential significance fits the standard distinction between the meaning of a sentence and the content of an utterance. Second, I show how the distinction could be used to explain ambiguity and free pragmatic enrichment from the perspective of normative inferentialism. The aim of this paper is to establish theoretical foundations that enable normative inferentialism to enter the discussions within the literalism-contextualism debate. As I argue, the biggest advantage of inferentialism is that it provides one general framework for the representation of meaning/content that naturally incorporates contextual information and so it can be used to represent meanings of various types of context-dependent sentences.

According to the standard interpretation of Lewis’s theory of predicate meaning (the U&N theory), the naturalness of meaning candidates should be stated metaphysically - as a length of definition in terms of fundamental properties. Recently, Weatherson has criticized the U&N theory and argued that the criterion of naturalness should be stated epistemologically - as the amount of evidence needed to form a belief. Despite the criticism, his attitude towards the U&N theory is quite relaxed. According to Weatherson, the U&N theory can be used as a good heuristic for delivering the correct verdicts when doing applied semantics, i.e., when we try to determine the best meaning candidate for a particular predicate. In this paper, I try to show that the “good heuristic strategy” is of no use because A) there is no guarantee that the epistemological and the metaphysical criteria of naturalness deliver the same verdicts and B) even if they deliver the same verdicts, the difference in their theoretical backgrounds may affect arguments which rely on the verdicts. The difference will be shown by drawing on the example of Theodore Sider and his use of the U&N theory.

ABSTRACT: A traditional objection to inferentialism states that not all inferences can be meaning-constitutive and therefore inferentialism has to comprise an analytic-synthetic distinction. As a response, Peregrin argues that meaning is a matter of inferential rules and only the subset of all the valid inferences for which there is a widely shared corrective behaviour corresponds to rules and so determines meaning. Unfortunately, Peregrin does not discuss what counts as “widely shared”. In the paper, I argue for an empirical plausibility of Peregrin’s proposal. The aim of the paper is to show that we can find examples of meaning-constitutive linguistic action, which sustain Peregrin’s response. The idea is supported by examples of meaning modulation. If Peregrin is right, then we should be able to find specific meaning modulations in which a new meaning is publicly available and modulated in such a way that it has a potential to be widely shared. I believe that binding modulations – a specific type of meaning modulations – satisfy this condition.

In this paper, I discuss Quine’s views on language sharing and linguistic communities. It is sometimes explicitly and often implicitly taken for granted that Quine believes that speakers can form communities in which they share a language. The aim of the paper is to show that this is a misinterpretation and, on the contrary, Quine is closer to linguistic individualism – the view according to which there is no guarantee that speakers within a community share a language and the notion of idiolect is more fundamental than the notion of shared language.