Jonas Åkerman

A plea for pragmatics

Let intentionalism be the view that what proposition is expressed in context by a sentence containing indexicals depends on the speaker’s intentions. It has recently been argued that intentionalism makes communicative success mysterious and that there are counterexamples to the intentionalist view in the form of cases of mismatch between the intended interpretation and the intuitively correct interpretation. In this paper, I argue that these objections can be met, once we acknowledge that we may distinguish what determines the correct interpretation from the evidence that is available to the audience, as well as from the standards by which we judge whether or not a given interpretation is reasonable. With these distinctions in place, we see that intentionalism does not render communicative success mysterious, and that cases of mismatch between the intended interpretation and the intuitively correct one can easily be accommodated. The distinction is also useful in treating the Humpty Dumpty problem for intentionalism, since it turns out that this can be treated as an extreme special case of mismatch.

Vagueness and Non-Indexical Contextualism

Contextualism concerning vagueness (hereafter ‘CV’) is a popular response to the puzzle of vagueness.1 The purpose of this chapter is to highlight some of the most basic components of CV, and to show that it is crucial to distinguish between two types of context-sensitivity in order to evaluate CV properly. In Section 2, we sketch a generic form of CV. In Section 3, we distinguish between Indexical and Non-indexical context-sensitivity and two corresponding versions of CV.2 In Section 4, we discuss the extent to which various forms of ‘blindness’ are problematic for these two versions of CV. Non-indexical CV is found to fare better than Indexical CV in this respect. In Section 5 we address a challenge posed by Keefe (2007) to the effect that CV entails that any speech report of what has been said by a particular vague utterance, where the context of utterance and the reporting context are relevantly different, will almost always be inaccurate. While this challenge is prima facie effective against Indexical CV it proves to be less effective against Non-Indexical CV.3

Infelicitous Cancellation: The Explicit Cancellability Test for Conversational Implicature Revisited

This paper questions the adequacy of the explicit cancellability test for conversational implicature as it is commonly understood. The standard way of understanding this test relies on two assumptions: first, that that one can test whether a certain content is (merely) conversationally implicated, by checking whether that content is cancellable, and second, that a cancellation is successful only if it results in a felicitous utterance. While I accept the first of these assumptions, I reject the second one. I argue that a cancellation can succeed even if it results in an infelicitous utterance, and that unless we take this possibility into account we run the risk of misdiagnosing philosophically significant cases.

Philosophy of language and mind

This special issue contains a number of papers selected on the basis of presentations of the first Philosophy of Language and Mind (PLM) conference, organized by the PLM network. The PLM network was established in 2010, with the purpose of furthering the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind in Europe. The original members were the Department of Philosophy at CEU, Budapest; Arche at the University of St Andrews; LOGOS at the University of Barcelona (mainly); CLLAM at the Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University; CSMN at the University of Oslo; Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris; ILLC at the University of Amsterdam; IP at University of London, and NIP at the University of Aberdeen. In 2011 PLM was joined by ILCLI at the University of the Basque Country, San Sebastian, and by the Institute of Philosophy II at the Ruhr University Bochum.

Forced-March Sorites Arguments and Linguistic Competence

Agent relativists about vagueness (henceforth ‘agent relativists’) hold that whether or not an object x falls in the extension of a vague predicate ‘P’ at a time t depends on the judgemental dispositions of a particular competent agent at t. My aim in this paper is to critically examine arguments that purport to support agent relativism by appealing to data from forced-march Sorites experiments. The most simple and direct versions of such forced-march Sorites argu- ments rest on the following (implicit) premise: If competent speakers’ judgements vary in a certain way, then the extensions of ‘P’ as used by these speakers must vary in the same way. This premise is in need of independent support, since otherwise opponents of agent relativism can simply reject it. In this paper, I focus on the idea that one cannot plausibly reject this premise, as that would commit one to implausible claims about linguistic competence. Against this, I argue that one can accommodate the data from forced-march Sorites experiments in a way that is compatible with a plausible picture of linguistic competence, without going agent relativist. Thus, there is reason to be sceptical of the idea that such data paired with considerations about linguistic competence can be invoked in order to lend any solid support to agent relativism. Forced-march Sorites arguments of this kind can, and should be, resisted.