Pavel Materna, "Conceptual Systems", Logos Verlag, Berlin 2004, pp. 190.

The author tries to outline Fregeś semantics for indexical expressions. The task is rather problematic because there seems to be some inconsistency between general principles of Fregeś semantics and requirements posed by him for semantics of indexicals. The main problem arises when we ask which kind of sense ought to be expressed by an indexical expression. Two proposals as possible answers are discussed, one suggested by John Perry, the other by Pavel Tichý. Both proposals are in part right but (...) there are some arguments against their general validity. Then the author sketches another suggestion which preserves the main contributions of the above proposals but nullifies their mistakes. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that contextualism cannot explain (dis)agreements concerning matters of personal taste because it treats sentences involving predicates of taste as indexical. I aim to weaken this charge. Given the idea that people sometimes use indexical sentences to express (dis)agreements about taste, two kinds of (dis)agreement are distinguished, namely doxastic and non-doxastic. Taste (dis)agreements are better explained in terms of the later kind, in which case they become amenable to contextualist treatment. It is argued that if something instantiates (...) a taste property (like being tasty for A), it has to instantiate a corresponding attitudinal property (like being liked by A). Based on this, utterances of taste sentences express propositions that concern tastiness of something (e.g., that X is tasty for A) and these propositions entail other propositions that concern non-doxastic attitudes the speakers bear toward something (e.g., that X is liked by A). One speaker is claimed to (dis)agree with another speaker provided their respective entailed propositions feature (in)compatible non-doxastic attitudes. Although this explanation is similar to hybrid accounts that are currently growing in popularity, it departs from them in some notable respects. (shrink)

The article contains several applications of the version of the historical theory of proper names presented in the previous article . They are designed to defend its epistemologically meager point of view . It is argued that the distinction between reference of an expression and that of a speaker which lies in the very heart of the theory enables one to handle with many well-known examples . Then bounds of referential uses of proper names are tested with respect to some (...) other examples as well . The point is that the theory is neither too narrow nor too broad: it does not exclude, on the one hand, those uses of a name that are demonstrably referrential and it does not, on the other hand, count as referring clearly non-referrential “uses” of a name. (shrink)

The paper presents an argument against referential treatment of definite descriptions' semantics. Referentialism with respect to semantics of definite descriptions claims that when descriptions are used referentially, then they are semantically referring expressions. It is argued that this picture does not lead to a satisfactory representation of propositions expressed by utterances involving definite descriptions. For if propositions are what primarily enters the relation of entailment, then referentialism is commited to the view that (i) some inferences usually taken as valid are (...) claimed to be invalid; (ii) some inferences usually taken as invalid are claimed to be valid; (iii) some inferences that are by no means trivially valid must be taken to be such. It is argued that Russellian‐ism with respect to definite descriptions gives us a better representation of propositions expressed by utterances involving descriptions. (shrink)

V tomto príspevku sa obhajujú niektoré argumenty proti kontextualizmu, ktoré sa pokúsil spochybniť Lukáš Likavčan v článku (Likavčan, 2012). Ukazuje sa, že (i) kontextualizmus neposkytuje v niektorých prípadoch správne predikcie vyjadreného obsahu; (ii) kontextovú citlivosť postuluje aj tam, kde to nie je potrebné; a (iii) buď predpokladá pravdivosť verzie konkurenčného sémantického minimalizmu, alebo je jeho obhajoba kruhová.

[In defence of the causal theory of proper names].

According to S. Kripke, an expression is rigid provided it refers to the same object in all possible worlds in which the object exists. On the other hand, H. Putnam claims that an expression is rigid provided it refers to the same object in all possible worlds in which it refers to anything at all. The paper shows that the two notions of rigidity are not equivalent because Putnam's rigidity is much broader than Kripke's; unlike Putnam's rigidity, Kripke's is interwoven (...) with essentialism; and identity statements between rigid designators in Putnam's sense need not be necessarily true. (shrink)

It is possible to construct situations (with a suitable kind of setting) in which one speaker utters ‘This is tasty’ and another speaker responds with ‘That’s not true’. The aim of this paper is to motivate the idea that typical (broadly) expressivist accounts of taste disagreements are not in a position to explain such situations (although some of them can successfully explain disagreements in which another kind of dissent phrase—like ‘Nuh-uh’—is employed). This is because utterances of ‘That’s not true’ are (...) typically used to ascribe falsehood to propositions. Taste expressivism has it, however, that when one utters ‘This is tasty’, one typically manifests her evaluative attitude (which is non-propositional) toward something rather than describes what attitude she bears toward the thing. Another aim of the paper consists in proposing an alternative account of taste disagreements. It is close to taste expressivism when it comes to the explanation of disagreements in which speakers respond with ‘Nuh-uh’ to utterances of ‘This is tasty’, but departs from it in situations in which they respond with ‘That’s not true’. The account is developed within a contextualist framework according to which taste utterances express contextually enriched propositions that contain judges who evaluate things as tasty or not. (shrink)

It is usually claimed that taste utterances have judge-dependent semantic content. Jeremy Wyatt recently proposed a semantic theory that rejects this claim. According to him, the semantic content of taste sentences is judge-independent, but the content of our assertions made by uttering taste sentences is judge-dependent. He showed that this account explains faultless disagreements about tastes. My paper aims to raise some challenges to his proposal. First, a judge-independent taste proposition semantically expressed by a taste sentence seems unrelated to a (...) judge-dependent taste proposition asserted by the speaker. It means that the latter proposition is not systematically obtained from the former. Second, the theory assumes that there are judge-independent taste properties. The existence of such properties can be questioned because it is problematic to state instantiation conditions for them. The paper ends with a sketch of an alternative explanation; it shares Wyatt’s account of faultless disagreements but does not suffer from its drawbacks. (shrink)

The paper aims to weaken a widespread argument against indexical contextualism regarding matters of personal taste. According to indexical contextualism, an utterance of “T is tasty” (where T is an object of taste) expresses the proposition that T is tasty for J (where J is a judge). This argument suggests that indexical contextualism cannot do justice to our disagreement intuitions regarding typical disputes about personal taste because it has to treat conversations in which one speaker utters “T is tasty” and (...) another responds with “T is not tasty” (referred to as ‘judge-non-specific conversations’ in this paper) as being on a par with conversations in which one speaker utters “T is tasty to me” and another responds with “T is not tasty to me” (referred to as ‘judge-specific conversations’). The argument has it that judge-specific conversations, unlike judge-non-specific conversations, do not contain disagreement between speakers. To defend indexical contextualism, some philosophers have proposed accounts (here referred to as ‘dual-proposition theories’) according to which utterances of “T is tasty” are used to communicate both the above kinds of semantically expressed proposition and some other kinds of proposition (like superiority propositions or metalinguistic propositions) that could be used to explain disagreements about taste. The paper defends two claims: First, it is argued that judge-specific conversations, or at least some of them, do contain disagreement between speakers, contrary to what the anti-indexical-contextualist argument supposes. Second, it is argued that dual-proposition indexical-contextualist theories fail to explain judge-specific conversations that are intuitively interpreted as containing disagreement. (shrink)

Critical statements, if true, bear ontological commitments to fictional entities. A well-known version of fictionalism about fictional characters tries to eliminate these ontological commitments by proposing that we understand critical statements as prefixed by a special sentential operator, such as ‘according to a fictional realist theory’. The aim of the present paper is to show that fictionalism about fictional characters is underdeveloped as it stands because it can be shown to be systematically inadequate. Because the fictionalist’s paraphrases of critical statements (...) suggest that fictional realists affirm the propositions expressed by critical statements, the fictionalist mistakenly attributes to fictional realists an expertise in matters that pertain to literary criticism. Importantly, this problem of misattributed expertise paves the way to other issues that might be much more devastating to the fictionalist project. It can be shown that, because she wrongly attributes expertise to fictional realists, the fictionalist unintentionally portrays fictional realist theories in a way that renders them inconsistent and self-defeating. This undermines fictionalism about fictional characters because it leaves no workable fictional realist account in which to ground a fictionalist explanation. This is why the fictionalist about fictional characters should try to eliminate the problem of misattributed expertise and its related issues. At the end of the paper, I sketch some of the available options in this regard. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that intuitions are an indispensable part of the evidential support provided for, or against, philosophical theses concerning a wide rangeof topics. This view is ingeniously argued for by George Bealer. His approach is based on a close connection between the modal nature of philosophy and theindispensability of intuitions as sources of modally-oriented evidence. This paper is aimed at a critical assessment of this approach. It is claimed that philosophy,though being modal at bottom, need not rely on (...) (modal) intuitions as sources of evidence. In particular, it is shown (i) that at least some of Bealer’s crucial philosophical arguments do not rest on intuitions as evidence and (ii) that one may find modal philosophical claims of considerable importance that do not require modal intuitions for support. As a result, (modal) intuitions need not be considered indispensable for gaining philosophical knowledge, even when philosophy is understood along Bealer’s lines. (shrink)