Peter Pagin

Stockholm University | SU · Department of Philosophy

This short paper has the character of a critical notice of Una Stojnić’s book Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence (Stojnić 2021). It is mainly concerned with Stojnić’s strong claim that linguistic phenomena related to prominence and coherence, in particular the interpretation of pronouns, are governed by linguistic convention...

This paper concerns the connection between speech act theory, especially the theory of assertion, and deduction, especially Natural Deduction. From a very abstract point of view, an assertion of a content p can be described as the ascription of the property of being p to the actual index, or point of evaluation. This is the abstract characterizatio...

Asserting is the act of claiming that something is the case—for instance, that oranges are citruses, or that there is a traffic congestion on Brooklyn Bridge (at some time). We make assertions to share information, coordinate our actions, defend arguments, and communicate our beliefs and desires. Because of its central role in communication, assert...

Concepts associated with general terms vary substantially between speakers, even between speakers of the same language. There can be differences even about topics as basic as whether the hand is part of the arm, i.e. about the meaning of ‘arm’. Still, such differences are rarely detected in normal communication. Two questions arise. The first is wh...

Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology. Since the 1970s, psychologists have carried out intriguin...

This paper starts from the observation that the standard arguments for compositionality are really arguments for the computability of semantics. Since computability does not entail compositionality, the question of what justifies compositionality recurs. The paper then elaborates on the idea of recursive semantics as corresponding to computable sem...

This essay provides a general, abstract characterization of the content-force connection: the force of an utterance applies the content to the actual index of evaluation, for instance the actual world. It then considers two possible counterexamples to this general connection: Sextus Empiricus’ claim that talk about appearances is not assertoric, de...

This paper presents an account of notional belief attributions, that is, belief attributions where the belief content is fully specified. The proposal combines a Hintikka style possible-worlds semantics for the belief operator and a structured meanings approach for giving a structured mode of presentation of the belief content. The semantics is not...

The standard argument against ordered tuples as propositions is that it is arbitrary what truth-conditions they should have. In this paper we generalize that argument. Firstly, we require that propositions have truth-conditions intrinsically. Secondly, we require strongly equivalent truth-conditions to be identical. Thirdly, we provide a formal fra...

Davidson’s 1965 paper, “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages”, has (at least almost) invariably been interpreted, by others and by myself, as arguing that natural languages must have a compositional semantics, or at least a systematic semantics, that can be finitely specified. However, in his reply to me in the Żegleń volume, Davidson denies...

This article is concerned with the principle of compositionality, i.e. the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its parts and its mode of composition. After a brief historical background, a formal algebraic framework for syntax and semantics is presented. In this framework, both syntactic operations an...

In Pagin 2014 I provided a new account of pragmatic enrichment. Building on the theory of coherence relations defended by Andrew Kehler, I proposed a four step scale of coherence strength. According to the account, free enrichment takes place, subject to constraints, when it raises the degree of coherence. It turned out that there is an intriguing...

In Our Knowledge of the Internal World, Robert Stalnaker describes two opposed perspectives on the relation between the internal and the external. According to one, the internal world is taken as given and the external world as problematic, and according to the other, the external world is taken as given and the internal world as problematic. Analy...

A paper by Dag Westerståhl and myself twenty years ago introduced operators that are both connectives and quantifiers. We introduced two binary operators that are classically interdefinable: one that fuses conjunction and existential quantification and one that fuses implication and universal quantification. We called the system PFO. A complete Gen...

In this paper I draw attention to a number of problems that afflict norm accounts of assertion, i.e. accounts that explain what assertion is, and typically how speakers understand what assertion is, by appeal to a norm of assertion. I argue that the disagreements in the literature over norm selection undermines such an account of understanding. I a...

The idea of higher-order vagueness is usually associated with conceptions of vagueness that focus on the existence of borderline cases. What sense can be made of it within a conception of vagueness that focuses on tolerance instead? A proposal is offered here. It involves understanding ‘definitely’ not as a sentence operator but as a predicate modi...

In this study we tested the fruitfulness of advanced bibliometric methods for mapping subdomains in philosophy. The development of the number of publications on free will and sorites, the two subdomains treated in the study, over time was studied. We applied the cocitation approach to map the most cited publications, authors and journals, and we ma...

In his paper 'Two Notions of Utterance Meaning', Petr Kot'atko criticises Davidson's conception of the relation between meaning and intention. He ascribes the following view (D) to Davidson: "If S makes an utterance in order to perform a certain speech act, he intends and expects that act to be assigned to the utterance in A's interpretation". Kot'...

This paper concerns the phenomenon of pragmatic enrichment, and has a proposal for predicting the occurrence of such enrichments. The idea is that an enrichment of an expressed content c occurs as a means of strengthening the coherence between c and a salient given content c’ of the context, whether c’ is given in discourse, as sentence parts, or t...

Peter Hylton: Quine's Naturalism Revisited: Naturalism is Quine's overarching view. In thinking about the world, we must begin where we are; for Quine, that means within a system of knowledge which, as developed and improved, becomes natural science. There is no distinctively philosophical standpoint outside this system. So the philosopher draws on...

As one of the major figures in the philosophy of language and mind during a quarter of a century, Francois Recanati has contributed to speech act theory, the theory of meaning and truth conditions, the theory of primary pragmatic processes, to direct reference theory, and to the accounts of indirect discourse, quotation, definite descriptions, pers...

Naive speakers find some logical contradictions acceptable, specifically borderline contradictions involving vague predicates such as Joe is and isn’t tall. In a recent paper, Cobreros et al. (J Philos Logic, 2012) suggest a pragmatic account of the acceptability of borderline contradictions. We show, however, that the pragmatic account predicts th...

The idea of radical interpretation, using the principle of charity, plays one of the two central roles in Davidson's philosophy of language. It is introduced already in ?Truth and Meaning,? and then developed in a series of papers in the mid-1970s. Ideas shift in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. We shall here focus mostly on the early views.

In logic, there are no morals. Everyone is at liberty to build his own logic, i.e. his own form of language as he wishes. (Carnap, Logical Syntax of Language, 1934, §17) 1 What is the Status of Logic? The articles in this volume discuss the status of logic. What is the status of logic visa `-vis our philosophical aspirations and projects? Is logic...

This chapter discusses the question of whether T-theories explain how it is possible to understand new sentences, or learn an infinite language, as Davidson claimed. It argues against some commentators who claim that for explanatory power we need not require that T-theories are implicitly known or mirror cognitive structures. It is noted, contra Da...

The analysis of the connections between truth, meaning, thought, and action poses a major philosophical challenge--one that Donald Davidson addressed by establishing a unified theory of language and mind. This volume offers a reappraisal of Davidson's intellectual legacy. Twelve specially written essays by leading philosophers in the field illumina...

In earlier work (Glüer, K. and P. Pagin. 2006. Proper names and relational modality. Linguistics & Philosophy 29: 507–35; Glüer, K. and P. Pagin. 2008. Relational modality. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 17: 307–22), we developed a semantics for (metaphysical) modal operators that accommodates Kripkean intuitions about proper names in m...

Is observational indiscriminability non-transitive? This was once an accepted truth, and it was used by philosophers like Armstrong and Dummett to argue against the existence of appearances (sense data, sensory items). It was objected, however, early on by Jackson and Pinkerton, and more recently by vagueness contextualists like Raffman and Fara, t...

In this paper the informativeness account of assertion (Pagin in Assertion. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011) is extended to account for inference. I characterize the conclusion of an inference as asserted conditionally on the assertion of the premises. This gives a notion of conditional assertion (distinct from the standard notion related to...

The principle of compositionality says:

In this paper I present the idea of a kind of externalism different from what is usually considered in the internalism / externalism debate. It is intersubjective in nature, since it concerns representation determined by relations between cognitive subjects. More precisely, it concerns lin-guistic expression types. The basic idea is that the meanin...

A new account of assertion is presented. Rough short statement: an assertion is an utterance that is prima facie informative. The idea of an informative utterance of a sentence is explicated in terms of a process that reliably selects sentences that are true among all sentences of a language (or other large set). To this are added accounts of what...

Natural kind terms have exercised philosophical fancy ever since Kripke, in Nam- ing and Necessity, claimed them to be rigid designators. He there drew attention to the peculiar, name-like behavior of a family of prima facie only loosely related general terms of ordinary English: terms such as 'water', 'tiger', 'heat', and 'red'. Just as for ordina...

In the introduction to their vagueness reader, Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith classified accounts of vagueness with respect to how they handle the sorites paradox. The sorites paradox is set out in the standard way with reference to a sorites sequence s of objects s1, …, sn and an associated vague predicate F. In S, there is a very small and seeming...

Starting from the familiar observation that no straightforward treatment of pure quotation can be compositional in the standard (homomorphism) sense, we introduce general compositionality, which can be described as compositionality that takes linguistic context into account. A formal notion of linguistic context type is developed, allowing the cont...

This is the second part of a two-part article on compositionality, i.e. the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way they are put together. In the first, Pagin and Westerståhl (2010), we provide a general historical background, a formal framework, definitions, and a survey of variants...

This is the first part of a two-part article on semantic compositionality, that is, the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way they are put together. Here we provide a brief historical background, a formal framework for syntax and semantics, precise definitions, and a survey of vari...

Ordinary intuitions that vague predicates are tolerant, or cannot have sharp boundaries, can be formalized in rst-order logic in at least two non-equivalent ways, a stronger and a weaker. The stronger turns out to be false in domains that have a signicant central gap for the predicate in question, i.e. where a suciently large middle segment of the...

1 The problem A straightforward treatment of quotation cannot be compositional. Consider, as we shall in this paper, the simplest case: pure quotation in written language by means of quote marks, 1 as in (1) a. 'Cicero' has six letters b. 'farfalla' is Italian for butterfly c. 'str jd e' is not a sentence d. 'ℵ' is a Hebrew letter Although Cicero i...

In his paper ‘Why assertion may yet be social’ (Pegan, this issue), Philip Pegan directs two main criticisms against my earlier paper ‘Is assertion social?’ (Pagin, 2004). I argued that what I called ‘‘social theories’’, are inadequate, and I suggested a method for generating counterexamples to them: types of utterance which are not assertions by i...

The principle of semantic compositionality, as Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have emphasized, imposes constraints on theories of meaning that it is hard to meet with psychological or epistemic accounts. Here, I argue that this general tendency is exemplified in Michael Dummett's account of meaning. On that account, the so-called manifestability requ...

The term 'meaning holism' (together with variants like 'semantic holism' and 'linguis-tic holism') has been used for a number of more or less closely interrelated ideas. According to one common view, meaning holism (MH) is the thesis that what a linguis-tic expression means depends on its relations to many or all other expressions within the same t...

Dag Prawitz has argued [12] that it is possible intuitionistically to prove the validity of ’ A → there is a proof of ⌌A⌍’ by induction over formula complexity, provided we observe an object language/meta-language distinction. In the present paper I mainly argue that if the object language with its axioms and rules can be represented as a formal sy...

It is often assumed that there is a close connection between Quine’s criticism of the analytic/synthetic distinction, in ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’ and onwards, and his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, in Word and Object and onwards. Often, the claim that the distinction is unsound (in some way or other) is taken to follow from the indet...

Saul Kripke’s thesis that ordinary proper names are rigid designators is supported by widely shared intuitions about the occurrence of names in ordinary modal contexts. By those intuitions names are scopeless with respect to the modal expressions. That is, sentences in a pair like (a) Aristotle might have been fond of dogs (b) Concerning Arist...

In most of our communicative transactions we are confident of success. We read the newspaper and are normally pretty sure that we have understood the text. We usually think we understand what is said in the TV broadcast and in casual conversation, and only rarely do subsequent events make us revise our judgment that we did. But that we are confiden...

Peter PaginThis paper is an attack on the Dummett-Prawitz view that the principle of bivalence has a cru-cial double significance, metaphysical and meaning theoretical. On the one hand it is said that holding bivalence valid is what characterizes a realistic view, i.e. a view in metaphysics, and on the other hand it is said that there are meaning t...

According to the knowledge account of assertion, an assertion that p is correct just in case the speaker knows that p. This is so because of a norm that governs assertion and uniquely characterizes it. Recent opposition to the knowledge account accepts that assertion is governed by a norm, but proposes alternatives to the knowledge norm. In this pa...

1. Irrationality approaches So-called Moorean statements are of statements of the form ... The first case is usually referred to as omissiveand the second as commissive. What is traditionally perceived as paradoxical is that although such statements may well be true, asserting them is clearly absurd. An accountof Moore's Paradox is an explanation o...

Fifteen specially written papers examine the ways in which the content of what we say is dependent on the context in which we say it. At the centre of the current debate on this subject is Cappelen and Lepore's claim that context-sensitivity in language is best captured by a combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism. Using this th...

Abstract

In his recent paper 'Analyticity: An Unfinished Business in Possible-World Semantics' (Rabinowicz 2006), Wlodek Rabinowicz takes on the task of providing a satisfactory definition of analyticity in the framework of possible-worlds semantics. As usual, what Wlodek proposes is technically well-motivated and very elegant. Moreover, his proposal does d...

Treating the principle of charity as a non-empirical, foundational prin- ciple leads to insoluble problems of justification. I suggest instead treating semantic properties realistically, and semantic terms as theoretical terms. This allows us to apply ordinary scientific reasoning in meta-semantics. In particular, we can appeal to widespread verbal...

Saul Kripke’s thesis that ordinary proper names are rigid designators is supported by widely shared intuitions about the occurrence of names in ordinary modal contexts. By those intuitions names are scopeless with respect to the modal expressions. That is, sentences in a pair like (a) Aristotle might have been fond of dogs, (b) Concerning Aristotle...

Ordinary intuitions that vague predicates are tolerant, or cannot have sharp boundaries, can be formalized in first-order logic in at least two non-equivalent ways, a stronger and a weaker. The stronger turns out to be false in domains that have a significant central gap for the predicate in question, i.e. where a suciently large middle segment of...

In epistemology and in philosophy of language there is fierce debate about the role of context in knowledge, understanding, and meaning. Many contemporary epistemologists take seriously the thesis that epistemic vocabulary is context-sensitive. This thesis is of course a semantic claim, so it has brought epistemologists into contact with work on co...

In epistemology and in philosophy of language there is fierce debate about the role of context in knowledge, understanding, and meaning. Many contemporary epistemologists take seriously the thesis that epistemic vocabulary is context-sensitive. This thesis is of course a semantic claim, so it has brought epistemologists into contact with work on co...

There have been several attempts to understand the nature of assertion in social terms, i.e. in terms of the intended social effect of making an assertion. For instance, it has been suggested that to assert that p is to perform a speech act in which one commits oneself to the truth of the proposition that p. Such social theories of assertion are fa...

On what seems to be the best interpretation, what Quine calls 'the problem of synonymy' in Two Dogmas is the problem of approximating the extension of our pretheoretic concept of synonymy by clear and respectable means. Quine thereby identified a problem which he himself did not think had any solution, and so far he has not been proven wrong. Some...

Ordinary semantic compositionality (meaning of whole determined from meanings of parts plus composition) can serve to explain how a hearer manages to assign an appropriate meaning to a new sentence. But it does not serve to explain how the speaker manages to find an appropriate sentence for expressing a new thought. For this we would need a princip...

Some theories of linguistic meaning, such as those of Paul Grice and David Lewis, make appeal to higher–order thoughts: thoughts about thoughts. Because of this, such theories run the risk of being empirically refuted by the existence of speakers who lack, completely or to a high degree, the capacity of thinking about thoughts. Research on autism d...

The main purpose of this paper is to propose and defend anew definition of synonymy. Roughly (and slightly misleadingly), theidea is that two expressions are synonymous iff intersubstitutions insentences preserve the degree of doxastic revisability. In Section 1 Iargue that Quine''s attacks on analyticity leave room for such adefinition. The defini...

We consider two formalisations of the notion of a compositional semantics for a language, and find some equivalent statements in terms of substitutions. We prove a theorem stating necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a “canonical” ...

Donald Davidson was among the most important philosophers of mind and language of the of the 20th Century. His articulation of the position he called "anomalous monism" and his ideas for unifying the general theory of linguistic meaning with semantics for natural language both set new agendas in the field. This book collects original essays on his...

Are sensation ascriptions descriptive, even in the first person present tense? Do sensation terms refer to, denote, sensations, so that truth and falsity of sensation ascriptions depend on the properties of the denoted sensations? That is, do sensation terms have a denotational semantics? As I understand it, this is denied by Wittgenstein. Wittgens...

As I understand professor Quine, he thinks that the answer to this question is yes.1 I shall provide some support for this interpretation. Personally, I believe that the answer is no, but I shall not try to establish that answer. I don’t know how to do that, or even if it is possible to do it.

Can there be rules of language which serve both to determine meaning and to guide speakers in ordinary linguistic usage, i.e., in the production of speech acts? We argue that the answer is no. We take the guiding function of rules to be the function of serving as reasons for actions, and the question of guidance is then considered within the framew...

This paper deals with three prima facie problems for the compatibility of the principle of semantic compositionality with semantic holism. The first problem concerns the order and mode of determination of the meaning of complex expressions. The second concerns the individuation of meanings, and, as a consequence, the possibility of communication. T...

If proofs are nothing more than truth makers, then there is no force in the standard argument against classical logic (“there is no guarantee that there is either a proof forA or a proof fornot A”). The standard intuitionistic conception of a mathematical proof is stronger: there are epistemic constraints on proofs. But the idea that proofs must be...

A new formalism for predicate logic is introduced, with a non-standard method of binding variables, which allows a compositional formalization of certain anaphoric constructions, including donkey sentences and cross-sentential anaphora. A proof system in natural deduction format is provided, and the formalism is compared with other accounts of this...

The second section of this paper presents the basics of a presuppositional account of proper names in belief contexts. The first section provides some background motivation. The third elaborates on the notion of a normal name employed in the account. The final section contains brief discussions of some possible objections.

Over the years, compositional semantics has been heavily attacked by contextualists. The common stance has been that the use of lan-guage is much richer and much less systematic than formal semantics can account for. The semanticist response, since Grice's theory of im-plicatures, has been to separate a core semantic interpretation, which delivers...

This paper contains a discussion of how the concept of compositionality is to be extended from context invariant to context dependent meaning, and of how the compo-sitionality of natural language might conflict with context dependence. Several new dis-tinctions are needed, including a distinction between a weaker (e-) and a stronger (ec-) concept o...