work in progress
by Isidora Stojanovic
I am currently working on several papers, some of which exist as complete drafts, some of which build on previous work, and some of which are yet to come.
Emotional Disagreement
This work builds on my previous work on predicates of personal taste, as well as on my work on semantic content. It investigates the issue of how we express emotional values, and how we disagree over them. Download the latest draft here.
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Summary: The aim of this paper is to provide some insight into the semantics of expressions of emotional value (such as 'it is sad that'). Such expressions bear striking similarities to predicates of personal taste (such as 'delicious'); in particular, they also generate the so-called cases of faultless disagreement. In line with previous work, I will argue that genuine disagreement is never faultless. What happens is, rather, is that at a first glance, we get both the intuition that there is disagreement and the intuition that each of the disagreeing parties is right, but further scrutiny makes one intuition prevail over the other, on a case to case basis. This, I argue, can be explained by assuming that the lexical meaning of expressions of emotion underspecifies the truth-conditional content of judgments involving such expressions (i.e. the conditions on what the world must be like for the judgment to come out true). After developing and discussing this "underspecification hypothesis" in some detail, I will address the problem of residual disagreement, by which I mean the fact that even once the parties make it clear what is the intended interpretation of a judgment containing a predicate of emotion (or a taste predicate, more generally), it remains unclear on which grounds they could possibly resolve their disagreement. I will suggest that, in such a case, underspecification is even more extreme, in that the concepts themselves over which the disagreement bears are open-ended: whether the concept applies to a given instance or not is not yet settled by the previous uses of the concept. In this respect, residual disagreement can be viewed, or so I argue, as a kind of practical disagreement, where what is at issue is how to best shape concepts that are still under construction. |
Talking about the Future: Unsettled Truth and Assertion
Email me if you'd like a draft.
Summary: Philosophers have been long concerned with the issue of whether the notions of truth and falsity can apply to future contingents, i.e. statements expressing future events that are not yet determined yet and thus need not happen. While there are several semantic frameworks that (arguably) provide a satisfactory account of truth conditions of future tensed sentences, not much has been done when it comes to providing assertability conditions for such statements. The issue, in other words, is under which conditions one may justifiably assert that a certain event will happen, if our universe is indeterministic and its current state leaves it open whether the event at stake will indeed happen. I will try to fill in this lacuna, by proposing an amendment to two existing frameworks (Belnap's and MacFarlane's) that accounts better for the way that people talk about the future.
Semantics, Metasemantics and Postsemantics
No draft available yet. I discussed some related issues in my talk "Postsemantics: what it is and why it matters" in the Mental Phenomena Workshop in Dubrovnik (Sept 2011).
Summary: It has been suggested by a number of authors that the issue of how certain expressions get to be assigned their semantic value is an issue that does not, itself, pertain to semantics, but rather, to 'metasemantics'. Other authors have suggested that the issue of how to determine the values of the parameters at which a sentence is evaluated for its truth value is, again, an issue that does not pertain to semantics, but rather, to 'postsemantics'. Yet others have argued that both sorts of issue pertain to pragmatics. Our first aim in this paper is to clarify what metasemantics and postsemantics are, and how they relate to semantics, on the one hand, and pragmatics, on the other. Our second aim will be to look at three specific areas, much discussed in the semantics-pragmatics literature: the resolution of demonstrative pronouns (ie the question of why a given utterance of 'this' student is taken to refer to one student rather than another); quantifier domain restriction (ie the question of which class of individuals is relevant to interpreting a given utterance of eg 'most students'); and comparison class dependence (ie the question of what degree of tallness must an object have for a given utterance of eg 'tall' to truthfully apply to that object). The discussion of the mechanisms deployed in the three sets of cases will help us further clarify the notions of metasemantics and postsemantics. We will then argue that one of the reasons why the debate on the semantics/ pragmatics distinction appears to have reached an impasse may be precisely the failure to recognize the distinctly metasemantic or postsemantic nature of certain features of the interpretation and use of a large class of expressions, including demonstratives, quantifiers and gradable adjectives.
Situation Semantics
Written for the volume Introduction to John Perry's Philosophy, ed. by Raphael van Riel and Albert Newen. Email me if you'd like a draft.
Summary: This paper is an occasion to go back to Jon Barwise and John Perry's Situations and Attitudes (1983). The aim is to bring to the foreground the main tenets of situation semantics, and to give the reader with a fair sense of the theoretical motivations that were driving the framework, and that continue to be of major significance to Perry's larger philosophical enterprise. I start by rehearsing some of the central aspects of what can be described as the Fregean heritage, which is important in order to understand the context in which situation semantics saw light, and to appreciate the almost revolutionary nature of some of the ideas behind it. After having clarified the background, I turn to one of the main motivations behind situation semantics: the search for an account of meaning that relies upon an account of information, where the latter is crucially driven by the task of explaining how cognitive agents like us are led to act in ways they do, given how they are attuned to their environment.
Indexicals, Logical Constants and Semantic Invariance
No draft available yet. This work is connected with my previous work on meaning, context and logical truth.
Summary: From a true utterance of "This flower is red", one can infer that there is a red flower; from a true utterance of "I am tired", one can infer that someone who is speaking is tired; "It is now raining here" can be inferred from "It is raining"; and so on. But what is the status of such inferences? In line with the influential work by David Kaplan (1977, 1989), it has been held that these are logical inferences. At the same time, also following Kaplan, it is held that the semantic value of indexicals ('this', 'I', 'here', 'now') is determined by the context and is thus interpretation-dependent. My first aim in this talk will be to point out and discuss the tension between taking indexicals to be part of our logical vocabulary (as needed if one wishes to treat the above inferences as logical) while holding that their semantic value is unstable and context-dependent; I will also discuss the more general idea of semantic invariance as a criterion for logical constants, and the connection between truth "in virtue of meaning" and logical truth. Secondly, I will suggest that there are independent reasons for not taking indexicals to contribute their reference to semantic content, which suggests in turn that they are, after all, semantic invariants. But this still leaves it an open question what the status of the above inferences is. I will argue against the idea that 'I am here now' is a truth of logic (as Kaplan held), and even more controversially, I will argue that the infrence from ɸ to 'Now ɸ' or to 'Actually ɸ' is not (or need not be) a matter of logic. It still remains that there is something special to such inferences, to the extent that they are borne by the properties of language and its use, rather than by factual properties of the things they describe. In the last part of the talk, I will develop and discuss the idea of pragmatically warranted inferences and truth, and their relationship to truth in virtue of meaning and to logic.
Lexical Meaning and Logical Inference
This is a much more ambitious project, to which I hope to be able to devote myself in the following two or three years.
Summary: The project aims at systematically examining the relationship between three debates in three different disciplines: the problem of logical constants in philosophy of logic, the debate on the functional vs. lexical distinction in linguistics, and the debate on the semantics vs. pragmatics distinction in philosophy of language. Our hypothesis is that these seldom-connected debates actually address the same set of underlying issues. In particular, we will argue that to give an account of semantic content, and to provide a principled answer to the question of where to draw the line between semantics and pragmatics, is correlated, on the one hand, with identifying criteria that distinguish the logically valid inferences from other inference patterns, and, on the other, with an account of the lexical and functional properties of the expressions of a given language. We will further examine whether the distinction between logical vs. non-logical expressions maps onto the distinction between functional vs. lexical (or 'substantive') categories. If our hypotheses are correct, then not only will the language of logic and natural language turn out to be intimately connected, but we will also gain new insight into the distinction between function words and content words. While our main goal is to address conceptual issues, we will flesh out and test our hypotheses through three case studies, involving respectively indexical pronouns, prepositions, and degree modifiers. The latter two will allow us to enrich our dominantly theoretical approach with standard methods from corpus linguistics, as well as statistical methods, such as distribution modelling.