Emma Borg

University of Reading · Department of Philosophy

Contemporary public discourse is saturated with speech that vilifies and incites hatred or violence against vulnerable groups. The term “hate speech” has emerged in legal circles and in ordinary language to refer to these communicative acts. But legal theorists and philosophers disagree over how to define this term. This paper makes the case for, a...

Background: Due to the inherent subjectivity of pain, it is difficult to make accurate judgments of pain in others. Research has found discrepancies between the ways in which perceived "objective" (e.g., medical evidence of injury) and "subjective" information (e.g., self-report) influence judgments of pain. This study aims to explore which potent...

Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields, are often approached with very different methodologies and frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a histo...

Common-sense (or folk) psychology holds that (generally) we do what we do for the reasons we have. This common-sense approach is embodied in claims like ‘I went to the kitchen because I wanted a drink’ and ‘She took a coat because she thought it might rain and hoped to stay dry’. However, the veracity of these common-sense psychological explanation...

There is a well-established social practice whereby we hold one another responsible for the things that we say. Speakers are held liable for the truth of the contents they express and they can be sanctioned and/or held to be unreliable or devious if it turns out what they say is false. In this chapter we argue that a better understanding of this fu...

According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is essentially a mental phenomenon (typically, a kind of conscious experience). In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy (e.g. by Sytsma and Reuter [1-3]) purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an...

By definition, pain is a sensory and emotional experience that is felt in a particular part of the body. The precise relationship between somatic events at the site where pain is experienced, and central processing giving rise to the mental experience of pain remains the subject of debate, but there is little disagreement in scholarly circles that...

During the COVID-19 pandemic governments across the globe have provided unparalleled support to private sector firms. As a result, new oversight mechanisms are urgently needed, to enable society to assess and, if necessary, redress, moves by firms which have taken government aid. Many jurisdictions have seen the introduction of �piecemeal� conditio...

There is a well-established social practice whereby we hold one another responsible for the things that we say. So, if someone utters the sentence “There are biscuits in the cupboard” or “Saddam Hussein developed weapons of mass destruction” they are likely to be held liable for the truth of the content they express and they can be sanctioned and/o...

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://iep.utm.edu/mean-com/

According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is essentially a mental phenomenon (typically, a kind of conscious experience). In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy (e.g. by Sytsma and Reuter [1-3]) purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an...

The “doux commerce” thesis holds that commerce acts as a civilising force, contributing to the advancement and well‐being of societies by inculcating certain core moral values in individuals (such as honesty, tolerance, and fair‐dealing). This idea has a venerable history. However, I suggest that it faces a particular challenge in the current era i...

The ‘question under discussion’ framework is a pragmatic framework that draws on work in the semantics of questions to provide an appealing account of a range of pragmatic phenomena, including the use of prosodic focus in English and restrictions on acceptable discourse moves. More recently, however, a number of proposals have attempted to use the...

A standard objection to so-called ‘minimal semantics’ (Borg 2004, 2012, Cappelen and Lepore 2005) is that minimal contents are explanatorily redundant as they play no role in an adequate account of linguistic communication (those making this objection include Levinson 2000, Carston 2002, Recanati 2004). This paper argues that this standard objectio...

Both patients and clinicians frequently report problems around communicating and assessing pain. Patients express dissatisfaction with their doctors and doctors often find exchanges with chronic pain patients difficult and frustrating. This chapter thus asks how we could improve pain communication and thereby enhance outcomes for chronic pain patie...

In his important recent book, Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis: Why Incompetence is Worse than Greed (2015), Boudewijn de Bruin argues that a key element of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 was a failure of epistemic (i.e. knowledge-based) virtue. To improve matters, then, de Bruin argues we need to focus on the acquisition and exerci...

Philosophers often assume that folk hold pain to be a mental state. However, folk also assign pains bodily locations: unlike most other mental states, pains are held to exist in arms, feet, etc. This has led some to talk of the “paradox of pain,” whereby the folk notion of pain is inherently conflicted. Recently, several authors have rejected the p...

A common deflationary tendency has emerged recently in both philosophical accounts and comparative animal studies concerned with how subjects understand the actions of others. The suggestion emerging from both arenas is that the default mechanism for understanding action involves only a sensitivity to the observable, behavioural (non-mental) featur...

Across a series of seminal works, Ruth Millikan has produced a compelling and comprehensive naturalized account of content. With respect to linguistic meaning, her ground‐breaking approach has been to analyse the meaning of a linguistic term via the function it performs which has been responsible for securing the term's survival. This way of lookin...

In ‘Local pragmatics in a Gricean framework’, Mandy Simons argues that, contrary to the received view, it is possible to accommodate local pragmatic effects utilising just the mechanisms for pragmatic reasoning provided by Grice. Although I agree with this overarching claim, this paper argues that we need to be careful in our understanding of ‘what...

This chapter explores the extent to which philosophy of language can be considered an applied discipline. I consider, first, ways in which sub-sections of philosophy of language may be considered as applied in terms of their subject matter and/or the kinds of questions being addressed (e.g. philosophy of language which deals with derogatory or infl...

'Pragmaticist' positions posit a three-way division within utterance content between: (i) the standing meaning of the sentence, (ii) a somewhat pragmatically enhanced meaning which captures what the speaker explicitly conveys (following Sperber and Wilson, I label this the 'explicature'), and (iii) further indirectly conveyed propositions which the...

The idea that empathy provides an important developmental precursor to moral decision-making possesses significant conceptual appeal. However, the idea of a necessary, diachronic relation between empathy and morality has been rejected recently (by Prinz 2011, amongst others). This article reassesses the strength of the claim that empathy is develop...

The mirror neuron system is widely held to provide direct access to the motor goals of others. This paper critically investigates this idea, focusing on the so-called 'intentional worry'. I explore two answers to the intentional worry: first that the worry is premised on too limited an understanding of mirror neuron behaviour (Sections 2 and 3), se...

This book examines some recent answers to the questions of how and where to draw the divide between semantics (roughly, features of the literal meaning of linguistic items) and pragmatics (roughly, features emerging from the context within which such items are being used). In particular, the book defends what is commonly known as 'minimal semantics...

My aim in this chapter is to explore one point of similarity between an approach to semantic theorizing known as minimal semantics and an earlier approach to meaning proposed by Paul Grice. Before I set out the structure of the chapter in more detail, however, I would like to say something by way of an introduction to minimal semantics. Minimal sem...

I aim to show that a semantic minimalist need not also be a semantic internalist. §I introduces minimalism and internalism and argues that there is a prima facie case for a minimalist being an internalist. §II sketches some positive arguments for internalism which, if successful, show that a minimalist must be an internalist. §III goes on to reject...

There is a sense in which it is trivial to say that one accepts intention- (or convention-)based semantics. For if what is meant by this claim is simply that there is an important respect in which words and sentences have meaning (either at all or the particular meanings that they have in any given natural language) due to the fact that they are us...

Grice's distinction between what is said by a sentence and what is implicated by an utterance of it is both extremely familiar and almost universally accepted. However, in recent literature, the precise account he offered of implicature recovery has been questioned and alternative accounts have emerged. In this paper, I examine three such alternati...

What are the Constraints on Formal Representations?What is the Relationship between a Natural Language Sentence and its Formal Representation?

Mirror neurons are neurons which fire in two distinct conditions: (i) when an agent performs a specific action, like a precision grasp of an object using fingers, and (ii) when an agent observes that action performed by another. Some theorists have suggested that the existence of such neurons may lend support to the simulation approach to mindreadi...

In *Insensitive Semantics*, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore argue for a minimalist approach to semantics and against the currently more popular contextualist stance. I agree with this overall outlook, but will suggest in this chapter that their way of framing the debate between these two semantic programmes actually serves to obscure some key issu...

The pragmatic determinants of what is said are those elements drawn from the context of utterance which contribute to the literal meaning, sometimes called the 'semantic content,' of linguistic utterances. These contributions come in two varieties: those which are triggered by something in the syntax of the sentence (e.g., the referent for an index...

In this paper I want to explore the arguments for so-called 'unarticulated constituents' (UCs). Unarticulated constituents are supposed to be propositional elements, not pre- sented in the surface form of a sentence, nor explicitly represented at the level of its logical form, yet which must be interpreted in order to grasp the (proper) meaning of...

Seeks to defend a formal (e.g. truth-conditional) approach to semantic theorizing from advocates of so-called ‘dual pragmatics’ (e.g. relevance theorists or contextualists). I argue, first, that formal semantics is preferable to pragmatically saturated approaches since only formal accounts are compatible with a modularity view of linguistic underst...

Seeks to defend a formal (e.g. truth-conditional) approach to semantic theorizing from advocates of so-called ‘dual pragmatics’ (e.g. relevance theorists or contextualists). I argue, first, that formal semantics is preferable to pragmatically saturated approaches since only formal accounts are compatible with a modularity view of linguistic underst...

Seeks to defend a formal (e.g. truth-conditional) approach to semantic theorizing from advocates of so-called ‘dual pragmatics’ (e.g. relevance theorists or contextualists). I argue, first, that formal semantics is preferable to pragmatically saturated approaches since only formal accounts are compatible with a modularity view of linguistic underst...

Seeks to defend a formal (e.g. truth-conditional) approach to semantic theorizing from advocates of so-called ‘dual pragmatics’ (e.g. relevance theorists or contextualists). I argue, first, that formal semantics is preferable to pragmatically saturated approaches since only formal accounts are compatible with a modularity view of linguistic underst...

Seeks to defend a formal (e.g. truth-conditional) approach to semantic theorizing from advocates of so-called ‘dual pragmatics’ (e.g. relevance theorists or contextualists). I argue, first, that formal semantics is preferable to pragmatically saturated approaches since only formal accounts are compatible with a modularity view of linguistic underst...

Seeks to defend a formal (e.g. truth-conditional) approach to semantic theorizing from advocates of so-called 'dual pragmatics' (e.g. relevance theorists or contextualists). I argue, first, that formal semantics is preferable to pragmatically saturated approaches since only formal accounts are compatible with a modularity view of linguistic underst...

The aim of this paper is to explore the proper content of a formal semantic theory in two respects: clarifying first, which uses of expressions a formal theory should seek to accommodate, and, second, how much information the theory should contain. I explore these two questions with respect to occurrences of demonstratives and pronouns—the so–calle...

It is often held that a correct semantic theory should assign a semantic content, p, to a given sentence, s, just in case a speaker who utters s says that p - thus 'what is said' is taken to be a semantically significant notion. This paper explores what exactly such a claim amounts to and offers five versions of the relationship between a semantic...

Can we draw apart questions of what it is to be a singular term (a metaphysical issue) from questions about how we tell when some expression is a singular term (an epistemological matter)? Prima facie, it might seem we can't: language, as a man-made edifice, might seem to prohibit such a distinction, and, indeed, some popular accounts of the semant...

The aim of this thesis is to argue for a unified stance on noun phrase classification; whereby, given a common-sense syntactic category like demonstrative or description, if one member of the category belongs to a given semantic kind, then all do. The thesis begins by drawing a parallel between two debates which are not always brought together: the...

The contention of this thesis is that there are good reasons for preferring a Russellian analysis of descriptions to any other account, but that there exists a fundamental problem to be overcome for such an approach. This is the issue of incompleteness, for the quantificational treatment makes an appeal to uniqueness which is often not satisfied by...