María J. Frápolli

University of Granada | UGR · Faculty of Philosophy and Letters

Mostraremos que el desacuerdo entre pesimistas y optimistas sobre la resolución racional de los desacuerdos profundos no se ubica en el nivel del contenido, de lo que están diciendo, sino en uno diferente. Para mostrar por qué es así, proponemos detenernos en el funcionamiento lógico-semántico del término clave en este desacuerdo: “racional”. Inici...

In this paper, I use an extension of Russell’s theory of descriptions to give further support to an analysis of truth ascriptions that stems back to Ramsey and has been further developed by Dorothy Grover and Christopher J. F. Williams. It is the view that the truth predicate vanishes in the logical form of the sentences in which it occurs in favou...

Truth is not one of a kind. Philosophers have widely assumed that truth is mysterious, intractable, troublesome, or else, trivial and redundant. I argue here that none of these alternatives is true. The only sense in which truth is unique is in the treatment that philosophers give to it. On the basis of the same corpus of evidence, we make assumpti...

In this chapter, I explain what is at issue in the debate on the meaning of the logical constants, exposing some weaknesses of the standard way in which logicians approach this subject. I present and discuss the two families of proposals that have been most successful: invariantism, which derives from (Tarski. History Philos Logic, 7, 143–154, 1986...

Informal Logic and Argumentation Theory claim to accept a sense of ‘argument’ that is broader than the sense used in classical logic and mainstream philosophy of language. In this allegedly more general sense, pictures, sounds, gestures, maps, etc. can be premises of arguments, even if conclusions are usually seen as propositional. In this chapter,...

Several principles shape the pragmatist take on logic that I will defend in this book. The essential four are the Principle of Assertion (PA), the Principle of Propositional Priority (PPP), the Principle of Grammar Superseding (PGS), and the Principle of Inferential Individuation (PII). (PA) says that the bearers of logical properties are products...

In this introductory chapter, I set out the background against which the theses and arguments of the rest of this book must be understood. I explain my (minimal) version of pragmatism, and how I use the central concepts that this book is about. My inspiration has been some claims defended or suggested by Frege, and some further developments of Freg...

Frege is the acclaimed father of twentieth-century logic and at the same time the father of the discipline philosophy of language. Both of these paternities arise from a unique and general project grounded on a profound understanding of the many linguistic and conceptual subtleties that govern the use of language. His logical project, which set him...

In this chapter, I discuss an informed pragmatist proposal for characterising the class of logical constants, which I call ‘the inference-marker view’. It includes syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects, all of them essential to the task that ultimately defines logical terms as expressive devices. Logical notions are not objects, nor do they re...

In this chapter I discuss the philosophical presuppositions and consequences of Tarski’s and Frege’s approaches to truth. Tarski’s is the most successful theory of truth ever proposed. Nevertheless, there are serious doubts about the actual effect of its technical details and, above all, about its philosophical significance. Despite starting with s...

There are 16 bivalent binary truth functions, but only two fundamental logical relations between propositions: implying and precluding. In addition, some higher-level concepts express the scope and nature of inferential relations. In this chapter, I will explain Frege’s treatment of these two notions, which are the semantic and pragmatic support fo...

In this chapter, the structural connections between three paradoxes—Goodman’s ‘grue’, Prior’s ‘tonk’, and Russell’s—are traced. It is argued that none of them arises in a context in which the Principle of Propositional Priority holds. To derive them, a strong hypothesis is needed: that all syntactically well-formed expressions express genuine conce...

In this paper, I compare the approach to truth characteristic of pragmatism, often identified with warranted assertability, with the prosentential proposal put forward by Robert Brandom. I argue that Brandom´s is a genuine step forward from pragmatism and analytic philosophy, even though his philosophical take includes classic pragmatist features....

The background of this paper is what I call “pragmatic inferentialism,” a view that I attribute to Robert Brandom. Here, I develop Brandom’s view and argue (i) that it is a kind of subject naturalism, in Price’s sense, and (ii) that the charge of idealism sometimes addressed against it is unwarranted. Regarding (i), I show that pragmatic inferentia...

For some years now, there has been a movement within analytic philosophy to get closer to real practices and to flee from unwarranted idealizations in order to put the conceptual tools developed over the last century at the service of social justice. In the field of philosophy of language, this turn has involved the analysis of natural language exp...

En este trabajo exploramos las com-patibilidades e incompatibilidades entre dos enfoques del conocimiento distintos y de gran éxito. El primero es el análisis del conocimiento que ofrece el pragmatismo epistémico de Bran-dom [PE]. El segundo es el punto de vista que se deriva de la obra seminal de Fricker sobre la ética del conocimiento [EC]. [PE]...

ABSTRACT We argue in this paper for three intertwined theses. The first one is that the debt of the Tractarian semantics with Frege's is deeper than it is commonly assumed. The identification of an inferentialist metasemantics for, at least, non-elementary sentences in Wittgenstein's Tractatus is the second one. And from it, the third one follows:...

Introduction: Expressivisms, Knowledge and Truth - Volume 86 - M. J. Frápolli

To be a proposition is to possess propositional properties and to stand in inferential relations. This is the organic intuition, [OI], concerning propositional recognition. [OI] is not a circular characterization as long as those properties and relations that signal the presence of propositions are independently identified. My take on propositions...

We propose a new approach to conditional donkey sentences that allows us to face successfully the often called proportion problem. The main ingredients of the proposal are van Benthem's generalized quantifier approach to conditionals (van Benthem, 1984), and Barwise's situation semantics (Barwise, 1989). We present some experimental data supporting...

We identify two senses of 'pragmatics' and related terms that give rise to two different methods of propositional individuation. The first one is the contextualist approach that essentially acknowledges contextual information to take part in the determination of what is said by the utterance of a sentence. In this sense, Pragmatics relies on the Pr...

The purpose of this paper is to show that, pace (Field, 2009), MacFarlane’s assessment relativism and expressivism should be sharply distinguished. We do so by arguing that relativism and expressivism exemplify two very different approaches to context-dependence. Relativism, on the one hand, shares with other contemporary approaches a bottom–up, bu...

This paper is an attempt to convince anti-realists that their correct intuitions against the metaphysical inflationism derived from some versions of mathematical realism do not force them to embrace non-standard, epistemic approaches to truth and existence. It is also an attempt to convince mathematical realists that they do not need to implement t...

The aim of this note is to discuss several aspects of Broome's analysis of 'ought', as it appears in the key principle of Enkrasia. First, we defend that if Enkrasia is going to play a role in answering the motivation question, it needs to contain two quasi-indicators. Second, it is argued that these pronouns mark de se ascriptions, where a Lewisia...

Resumen Este artículo discute el problema de la localización, tal como Price lo ha definido. En el se distinguen diferentes versiones de naturalismo y se defiende el naturalismo del sujeto. Se asume que el sistema de conceptos humano se ha desarrollado en interacción con el medio natural y social. Por esta razón no podemos evitar ser realistas y re...

En el presente artículo se analiza la cuestión de si la verdad matemática o, en general, la verdad en las ciencias formales puede identificarse con la prueba que permite la aseveración de contenidos en estas ciencias. La respuesta que se defiende es negativa, y se argumenta explicitando el significado de la noción de verdad de acuerdo con la teoría...

The purpose of the following pages is to show that the rejection of Metaphysical Correspondentism doesn't force us to reject Default Correspondentism and that the rejection of Metaphysical Realism doesn't force us to reject Default Realism. As a consequence, we aim to disentangle the analysis of the (standard, robust, ordinary but also scientific)...

Resumen El presente artículo tiene como objetivo desarrollar y hacer explícitas las consecuencias del tratamiento fregeano de los cuantificadores. Defendere-mos (i) que «existir» significa lo mismo en todos los contextos, que no es un concepto ambiguo, y (ii) que su significado no guarda ninguna relación ni con la constitución del mundo físico, ni...

This monographic section contains the three papers delivered by Philip Kitcher as Raimundus Lullius Lectures during the VII Conference of the Spanish Society of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, that took place in Santiago de Compostela (July 18th-20th, 2012). It also includes three of the contributions presented to the Symposium on Ki...

The semantics of truth-ascriptions has been dealt with in Chap. 3. The following pages will cover their pragmatics. The relative boundaries between pragmatics and semantics, as academic disciplines, are blurry to the extent that the question of their delimitation has turned out to be one of the most pressing tasks in contemporary philosophy of lang...

What kind of semantic enigma hides in the following toy-conversation?The answer to this question, which we will disclose throughout this book, is straightforward: none. There is no intractable feature in the functioning of truth expressions in natural languages, although the notion truth is complex enough as to require a highly sophisticated concep...

The semantics of the expressions in which truth shows its usefulness is not straightforward, and its complexity partially explains the multiplicity of accounts available in the bibliography. The functioning of truth ascriptions cannot be explained and understood without having at hand a theory of meaning that makes room for different aspects of the...

Once our approach has been disclosed and its theoretical background explained, it is time to reply to the standard criticisms that have been levelled at theories similar to ours (pro-sentential theories and also “minimalist” and “deflationist” views) and that will certainly target our theory as well. This task will be undertaken in the next three s...

What does syntax teach us about language? As a discipline, syntax studies the rules that govern the well-formedness of the complexes of words, or in general the well-formedness of strings of signs. Regardless of whether one considers the syntax of natural languages as a representation of the configuration of the human brain or as an abstract formal...

Possibly, the simplest formulations of the Liar Paradox are (1) and (2)

When the name of Frank Ramsey is pronounced, one of the (few) things that come to everybody’s mind is the theory of truth as redundancy. In this section, we will argue that Ramsey never supported such a theory, but rather an analysis of truth noticeably similar to the prosentential account we are defending.

El artículo ofrece una caracterización de las constantes lógicas, [CL], analizando el significado de las expresiones que son sus contrapartidas en el lenguaje natural. [CL] recoge los rasgos sintácticos, semánticos y pragmáticos individualmente necesarios y conjuntamente suficientes para que una expresión sea una constante lógica. Se obtendrá la si...

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first we outline a version of non-descriptivism, ‘minimal expressivism’, leaving aside certain long-standing problems associated with conventional expressivist views. Second, we examine the way in which familiar expressivist results can be accommodated within this framework, through a particular interpretation...

There is currently no universally accepted general definition of logical constanthood. With a view to addressing this issue, we follow a pragmatist rationale, according to which, some notion can be identified as a logical constant by considering the way in which it is used in our everyday reasoning practices, and argue that a logical constant has t...

El artículo ofrece una caracterización de las constantes lógicas, [CL], analizando el significado de las expresiones que son sus contrapartidas en el lenguaje natural. [CL] recoge los rasgos sintácticos, semánticos y pragmáticos individualmente necesarios y conjuntamente suficientes para que una expresión sea una constante lógica. Se obtendrá la si...

In this paper, an enriched prosentential account of truth is sketched. An account of the meaning of truth has to pay attention to syntactical aspects, semantic contributions, and pragmatic roles. The enriched view has the virtue of placing together several ideas that proceed from different approaches to truth, and show how they can co-exist in a co...

Este artículo trata sobre la teoría de la verdad de Ramsey y su propósito es doble: por un lado, explicar cuál es la posición sobre la verdad que Ramsey realmente defiende; y, por otro lado, perseguir algunas intuiciones originarias de Ramsey en la filosofía del siglo XX. Cuando se menciona el nombre de Frank Ramsey, una de las ideas que vienen a l...

A correct understanding of the functioning of truth ascriptions, in the context of the contemporary philosophy of language, permits the assumption of different pragmatist approaches to truth that seem, at first glance, incompatible. In particular, some theses defended by Haack can be maintained together with some claims made by Rorty. Using a pragm...

Grice es el padre de dos posiciones enfrentadas en la filosofía del lenguaje contemporánea: Contextualismo (Bach, Perry, Recanati) y Semanticismo (Stanley, Szabó y Cappelen y Lepore). El debate que mantienen ambas concepciones tiene que ver con lo que una proferencia dice literalmente. Los contextualistas, siguiendo un principio griceano bautizado...

HOW PARADOXICAL IS THE LIAR PARADOX? María J. FRÁPOLLI Department of Philosophy I University of Granada, Spain Abstract: The Liar Paradox has been generally understood as a serious difficulty for semantics and particularly for an adequate treatment of the notion of truth. Given the present state of language studies, this diagnostic is utterly unwar...

RESUMEN El propósito de este artículo es mostrar que el significado de cierto grupo de expresiones, marcadores de inferencia, que se consideran habitualmente como desen-cadenantes de implicaturas convencionales, pueden explicarse de una manera que es independiente de cualesquiera otros niveles de significado ––lo que se dice, lo que se implica conv...