Ramiro Caso

An account of assertion along truth-relativistic lines is offered. The main lines of relativism about truth are laid out and the problematic features that assertion acquires in the presence of relative truth are identified. These features are the possibility of coherently formulating norms of assertion and the possibility of grounding a rational practice of assertion upon relative truth. A solution to these problems is provided by formulating norms for making and assessing assertions that employ a suitably relativized truth predicate and a perspectival notion of correctness. Two potential objections to this proposal are addressed

Neutral Counterpart Theories of slurs hold that the truth-conditional contribution of a slur is the same as the truth-conditional contribution of its neutral counterpart. In, DiFranco argues that these theories, even if plausible for single-word slurs like ‘kike’ and ‘nigger’, are not suitable for complex slurs such as ‘slanty-eyed’ and ‘curry muncher’, figurative slurs like ‘Jewish American Princess’, or iconic slurring expressions like ‘ching chong’. In this paper, we argue that these expressions do not amount to genuine counterexamples to neutral counterpart theories of slurs. We provide a positive characterization of DiFranco's examples that doesn't deviate from the core of those theories.

Political communication in modern democratic societies often requires the speaker to address multiple audiences with heterogeneous values, interests and agendas. This creates an incentive for communication strategies that allow politicians to send, along with the explicit content of their speech, concealed messages that seek to secure the approval of certain groups without alienating the rest of the electorate. These strategies have been labeled dogwhistling in recent literature. In this article, we provide an analysis of overt intentional dogwhistling. We recognize two main stages within the OIDs’ way of conveying a concealed message: the expression of a perspective together with the transmission of an accompanying positioning message vis-à-vis the OID targeted sub-audience, and the inferential extraction of a set of cognitive and non-cognitive contents inferred on the basis of the former stage. Furthermore, we identify three linguistic mechanisms whereby these contents may be transmitted: conventional meaning, conversational implicature and perlocutionary inferencing. Hence, on our view OIDs are not a uniform category, as they may differ as to what extent the concealed content is speaker-meant, and thus actually communicated by the speaker.

In 'An undermining diagnosis of relativism about truth', Horwich claims that the notion of relative truth is either explanatorily sterile or explanatorily superfluous. In the present paper, I argue that Horwich's explanatory demands set the bar unwarrantedly high: given the philosophical import of the theorems of a truth-theoretic semantic theory, Horwich's proposed explananda, what he calls acceptance facts, are too indirect for us to expect a complete explanation of them in terms of the deliverances of a theory of meaning based on the notion of relative truth. And, to the extent that there might be such an explanation in certain cases, there is no reason to expect relative truth to play an essential, ineliminable role, nor to endorse the claim that it should play such a role in order to be a theoretically useful notion.

Philosophy of language has been witnessing for the last fifteen years or so, if not a turn, at least the rising of a new trend, with its usual methods applied to new non-semantic phenomena linked to language use in the context of politics, and with new methods arising from the distinctive features of the new subject matter. Among these phenomena, dogwhistles have taken somewhat of a center stage (other phenomena include ethnic slurs, testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, propaganda and gender-inclusive language, among others). This special issue is devoted to their study. In this brief introduction, we seek to succinctly review the key aspects of the phenomenon. First, we present some intuitive examples; second, we put forward a preliminary characterization of dogwhistles; then we discuss some of the main issues raised by these examples, as well as some basic notions found in the literature. We close by presenting an overview of the articles to be found in the current issue.

El presente trabajo busca defender la tesis de la subdeterminación semántica de las emisiones lingüísticas. Se argumenta a favor de esta tesis al tratar las aserciones suboracionales como casos paradigmáticos de la existencia de constituyentes no articulados. Se defiende la existencia de aserciones suboracionales genuinas frente a análisis alternativos que se han desarrollado para dar cuenta de este tipo de emisiones y se muestra cómo tiene lugar la interpretación pragmática de este tipo de emisiones. In this paper, I defend the semantic underdetermination thesis for linguistic utterances. I argue in favor of this thesis by treating subsentential assertions as paradigmatic cases of the existence of unarticulated constituents. I defend the existence of genuine subsentential assertions against alternative analyses that have been developed to cope with this kind of utterances, and I explain how the pragmatic interpretation of this kind of utterances goes.

Presento una extensión del marco de Stalnaker para modelar los efectos conversacionales de la aserción, de modo que este pueda aplicarse a la aserción de proposiciones cuya verdad es relativa a parámetros adicionales respecto de un mundo posible. Desarrollo dos maneras de aplicar este marco a la aserción de proposiciones evaluativas, según la apreciación de las emisiones evaluativas mismas refleje una concepción relativista moderada de sus condiciones de corrección o una concepción radical. Argumento que, en virtud de la diferencia que existe a la hora de concebir la aserción, el relativismo radical tiene una ventaja por sobre el relativismo moderado, dado que el relativismo moderado tiene inconvenientes a la hora de interpretar los desacuerdos evaluativos. I present an extension of Stalnaker's framework for modeling the conversational effects of assertion, so that it may be applied to the assertion of propositions whose truth is relative to parameters beyond a possible world. I develop two ways in which the new framework may be applied to the assertion of evaluative propositions, depending on whether the assessment of evaluative utterances reflects a moderate or a radical conception of their correctness conditions. I argue that, in virtue of this difference in the conceptualization of assertion, radical relativism has an advantage over moderate relativism, for moderate relativism faces problems with respect to the interpretation of evaluative disagreement.

e presenta el debate entre reduccionismo y no reduccionismo respecto de la probabilidad objetiva y se identifican las cargas dialécticas adquiridas por cada posición: el problema de la motivación y el problema de la explicación. Se argumenta que, mientras que el problema de la motivación no presenta ningún desafío para los no reduccionistas, los reduccionistas no son capaces de responderlo exitosamente. Contrariamente a lo que se ha sugerido, ambos lados comparten el problema de la explicación. Se argumenta que los no reduccionistas pueden responderlo exitosamente, mientras que los reduccionistas no son capaces de hacerlo. Por lo tanto, el lado no reduccionista tiene una ventaja dialéctica importante.

Horwich (Mind 123(491), 2014) has argued that only someone with inflationary tendencies could feel inclined to endorse truth relativism. In doing so, he argues that deflationism about truth entails the denial of relativism. If sound, Horwich’s argument could entail that truth relativism is incompatible with any conception of our ordinary truth predicate according to which there is some sort of equivalence between a ground-language claim that p and the corresponding claim that p is true. Arguably, any story the relativist might give about our ordinary truth predicate, it should entail some such equivalence. Hence, there is a problem for truth relativism that needs to be addressed. Horwich (Mind 123(491), 2014) has argued that only someone with inflationary tendencies could feel inclined to endorse truth relativism. In doing so, he argues that deflationism about truth entails the denial of relativism. If sound, Horwich’s argument could entail that truth relativism is incompatible with any conception of our ordinary truth predicate according to which there is some sort of equivalence between a ground-language claim that p and the corresponding claim that p is true. Arguably, any story the relativist might give about our ordinary truth predicate, it should entail some such equivalence. Hence, there is a problem for truth relativism that needs to be addressed.

The aim of the paper is to evaluate the prospects for an aesthetically informed assessment-sensitive semantic account of thick aesthetic predicates (TAPs) such as 'intense', 'sombre', ‘balanced’, ‘harmonious’, etc. We distinguish two meaning dimensions concerning TAPs, truth-conditional and use-conditional or expressive, and provide a dualist semantics that posits assessment sensitivity at both levels. Then we evaluate the extent to which assessment sensitivity is an apt rendition of aesthetic discourse involving TAPs. We distinguish between experiential TAPs (‘intense’, ‘sombre’) and theoretical TAPs (‘balanced’, ‘dynamic’), and argue that there is evidence for a relativistic construal both at the truth-conditional and the expressive level for experiential TAPs, but not for theoretical TAPs. Thus, an upper bound is found on how much assessment sensitivity characterises aesthetic discourse.