Stephen Schiffer

The contribution by Avramides focuses on Gricean elements in Schiffer’s thought, whereas the contribution by Bach focuses on descriptions and reference. Neale’s paper is interested in whether Schiffer’s account of aphonic reference is compatible with an overall Gricean approach to meaning. The current chapter is an extended response to all three contributions. Avramides’ contribution argues for the continuing significance of the Gricean program, providing Schiffer with an opportunity to update his reasons for rejecting it. Turning to Neale: Schiffer points out that if we reject Grice’s account of expression-meaning, then it no longer serves as a constraint on aphonic reference. Finally, Bach’s essay takes issue with Schiffer’s attacks on Russell’s theory of descriptions, developing a version of the theory that he claims to be immune to Schiffer’s arguments. In his response, Schiffer denies this, but also provides independent arguments he takes to be fatal to this version of Russell’s theory.

This chapter offers a sustained commentary on Crispin Wright’s paper “On Being in a Quandary: Relativism, Vagueness, Logic Revisionism.” It begins by giving a brief introduction to the issues surrounding vagueness and the sorites paradox before going on to reconstruct the main argument of Wright’s paper “Vagueness: A Fifth Column Approach”. It then proceeds to endorse Wright’s principal reasons for discounting epistemicist and supervaluationist treatments of vagueness. The chapter then develops a critique of Wright’s technical notion of quandary and of his attempt to solve the Sorites Paradox along intuitionistic lines. Despite venturing some criticisms, the chapter concludes that Wright is correct in thinking that vagueness needs to be explained in terms of the sort of quandary state one is in when one takes a proposition to be borderline.

Crucial to Schiffer’s approach to vagueness is his distinction between vagueness-related partial belief (VPB), which doesn’t conform to the axioms of classical probability theory, and standard partial belief (SPB), which does conform to those axioms. He uses the notion of VPB to define the notion of a borderline proposition and the validity of vague arguments, and to explain the relation between indeterminacy and knowledgeability. The current chapter responds to critical remarks in the contributions by Edgington, Field, and Wright concerning the relation between VPB and the knowledgeability of borderline propositions, the laws determining the formation of complex VPBs and the interaction of VPBs and SPBs, and the use of VPB to define borderline propositions and the validity of vague arguments.

According to Schiffer, a proposition has the relativity feature “provided it’s an x-dependent proposition the entertainment of which requires different people, or the same person at different times or places, to think of x in different ways”. In his contribution, Ray Buchanan argues that this feature is best accommodated by taking the objects of meaning and belief to be proposition templates. Schiffer argues that Buchanan’s proposal conflicts with face-value data—data that any adequate theory should seek to capture.

In their contributions, Amie Thomasson, Thomas Hofweber, Ian Rumfitt, and Michael Smith investigate various aspects of the pleonastic ontology defended in Schiffer’s recent work. The current chapter responds to these essays, focusing on (i) the relation of the pleonastic theory to Thomasson’s easy ontology, (ii) a comparison with an ontological framework, favored by Hofweber, more akin to _Remnants of Meaning_ than the pleonastic ontology of _Things_, (iii) the question of a criterion of identity for pleonastic propositions, and (iv) the bearing of the pleonastic theory on moral cognitivism.

Ostertag’s contribution questions whether Schiffer’s current theory of belief reports—the face-value theory of belief reports combined with the pleonastic theory of propositions—fares better against the meaning-intention problem than the hidden-indexical theory. He also argues that the current theory fails to provide an adequate account of disagreement. The current essay addresses both concerns, showing how the pleonastic theory avoids the meaning-intention problem and arguing that Ostertag’s criticism of the account of _de re_ belief reports in Chapter 2 of _Things_ is based on a misreading.

Chapters 1–7 represent a chronologically ordered selection of Brian Loar’s work in the philosophy of language: the semantics of propositional-attitude reports and the dual role of referential singular terms in them (Chapter 1); the Gricean program of intention-based semantics, which aimed to reduce the semantic to the psychological (Chapter 2); a version of the description theory of names and other referring expressions that is immune to the objections in Kripke’s _Naming and Necessity_ (Chapter 3); a theory of propositional-attitude content that explains, rather than is explained by, the meanings of mentalese sentences (Chapter 4); the difference between the role of names in thought and in reporting thoughts (Chapter 5); metaphysical realism and Michael Dummett’s anti-realist conception of meaning (Chapter 6); and the distinction, proprietary to Loar, between ‘social content’ and ‘psychological content’ and its bearing on the reductionist aspirations of intention-based semantics (Chapter 7).

‘Quandary’ labels a psychological state that is characteristic of taking a thing to be a borderline instance of a property. _Q-Constraint_ is the claim that there need be nothing incorrect about being in Quandary. A truth-status theory of vague properties assigns a particular truth-status (e.g. being true or false, being neither true nor false) to the proposition _that x is an instance of φ_ when _x_ is a borderline instance of _φ_. This chapter argues that no truth-status theory is consistent with Q-Constraint and sketches a non-truth-status theory of vague properties that satisfies Q-Constraint. A crucial feature of the sketch is that vague properties are individuated in a way that affords us epistemic and linguistic access to them by the very use-practices that determine which vague properties words express.