Manuel García-Carpintero

Disagreement About Taste: Commonality Presuppositions and Coordination

This paper confronts the disagreement argument for relativism about matters of taste, defending a specific form of contextualism. It is first considered whether the disagreement data might manifest an invariantist attitude that speakers have pre-reflectively. Semantic and ontological enlightenment should then make the impressions of disagreement vanish, or at least leave them as lingering ineffectual Müller-Lyer-like illusions; but it is granted to relativists that this does not fully happen. López de Sas appeal to presuppositions of commonality and Sundells appeal to metalinguistic disagreement are discussed, and it is argued that, although they help to clarify the issues, they do not fully explain why such impressions remain under enlightenment. To explain it, the paper develops a suggestion that other writers have made, that the lingering impression of disagreement is a consequence of a practical conflict, appealing to dispositions to practical coordination that come together with presuppositions of commonality in axiological matters.

Self-Conception: Sosa on De Se Thought

Castaneda, Perry, and Lewis argued in the 1960s and 1970s that thoughts about oneself “as oneself” – de se thoughts – require special treatment and advanced different accounts. In this chapter, I discuss Ernest Sosa’s approach to these matters. I first present his approach to singular or de re thought in general in the first section. In the second, I introduce the data that need to be explained, Perry’s and Lewis’s proposals and Sosa’s own account, in relation to Perry’s, Lewis’s, and his own views on de re thought. In the third section, I present the account I prefer – a “token-reflexive” version of Perry’s original account that Perry himself came to adopt in reaction to Stalnaker’s criticisms. In the final section, I take up Recanati’s recent arguments, from a viewpoint on de se thought very similar to Sosa’s, to the effect that such an account is in a good position to explain the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I argue there that that is not the case, and I conclude by suggesting that the token-reflexive account fits better both with the data and with Sosa’s Fregean take on de re thought in general.

A Non-Modal Conception of Secondary Properties

Abstract There seems to be a distinction between primary and secondary properties; some philosophers defend the view that properties like colours and values are secondary, while others criticize it. The distinction is usually introduced in terms of essence; roughly, secondary properties essentially involve mental states, while primary properties do not. In part because this does not seem very illuminating, philosophers have produced different reductive analyses in modal terms, metaphysic or epistemic. Here I will argue, firstly, that some well-known examples fail, and also that there are deep reasons why such approaches should do so. Secondly, I will argue that it is acceptable to remain satisfied with the non-reductive account in terms of essence. To that end, I will indicate how such an explication could be put to use to support the claim that properties like colours and values are secondary. In a series of recent writings, Kit Fine has argued that essence cannot be reductively analysed in modal terms. Fine offers some examples to motivate his claim. I suggest that the primary/secondary distinction constitutes a philosophically interesting illustration.

Contexts as Shared Commitments

Contemporary semantics assumes two influential notions of context: one coming from Kaplan (1989), on which contexts are sets of predetermined parameters, and another originating in Stalnaker (1978), on which contexts are sets of propositions that are “common ground.” The latter is deservedly more popular, given its flexibility in accounting for context-dependent aspects of language beyond manifest indexicals, such as epistemic modals, predicates of taste, and so on and so forth; in fact, properly dealing with demonstratives (perhaps ultimately all indexicals) requires that further flexibility. Even if we acknowledge Lewis (1980)s point that, in a sense, Kaplanian contexts already include common ground contexts, it is better to be clear and explicit about what contexts constitutively are. Now, Stalnaker (1978, 2002, 2014) defines context-as-common-ground as a set of propositions, but recent work shows that this is not an accurate conception. The paper explains why, and provides an alternative. The main reason is that several phenomena (presuppositional treatments of pejoratives and predicates of taste, forces other than assertion) require that the common ground includes non-doxastic attitudes such as appraisals, emotions, etc. Hence the common ground should not be taken to include merely contents (propositions), but those together with attitudes concerning them: shared commitments, as I will defend.

De se thoughts and immunity to error through misidentification

I discuss an aspect of the relation between accounts of de se thought and the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I will argue that a deflationary account of the latter—the Simple Account, due to Evans (The varieties of reference, 1982)—will not do; a more robust one based on an account of de se thoughts is required. I will then sketch such an alternative account, based on a more general view on singular thoughts, and show how it can deal with the problems I raise for the Simple Account.

Reference and Reference-Fixing in Pure Quotation

Cory Washington has identified three questions that a theory of pure quotation should address, and on the basis of which such theories could be classified: (i) what part of a quotation has a referring role, (ii) what the reference of that referring part is, and (iii) how that reference is fixed. This paper compares the answers given by the demonstrative, Davidsonian account that I have previously advocated with those provided by what I regard as the most interesting alternative to have emerged in recent years: the “disquotational” Tarski-inspired account advocated by Gomez-Torrente and others. This paper develops three points. First, the Demonstrative Theory, together with plausible independent principles, does entail that, in default contexts, the (“semantic”) referent of a quotation is the linguistic type of the token quoted. The theory explains in this way why instances of Gomez-Torrente’s “Interiority Principle” are by default true, even if not “as a matter of meaning alone”. Second, the theory provides the same account for reference-determination in non-default cases, in which “semantic” referents differ from linguistic types. Unlike Gomez-Torrente’s principle, the theory does without a specific general naming convention to account for the determination of the semantic referents of quotations. Finally, the issues dividing the Demonstrative and Disquotational theories are not verbal, but substantive, and in principle amenable to empirical resolution.

Relativism, the Open Future, and Propositional Truth

In his paper “Future Contingents and Relative Truth,” John MacFarlane argues for truth relativism on the basis of the possibility of the open future. He defends the relativization of a truth predicate of linguistic items: utterances of sentences produced in concrete contexts. In more recent work, however, he contends that this was wrong, because when propositions are taken as truth bearers, the truth absolutists he was objecting to have an escape, and offers a new argument for relativism based on the semantics of “actually.” Here, I will critically examine these points. In the first place, I will suggest that the new argument concerning “actually” is not convincing. More importantly, I argue that truth absolutists should not accept MacFarlane’s “gift,” that is, his proposal for them to resist his previous arguments once they take truth to be a predicate of propositions: if there was a good argument in “Future Contingents and Relative Truth” for truth relativism taking truth as a property of linguistic items, there is still one when taking it as a property of propositions; these issues do not depend on the nature of truth bearers. I conclude by outlining what I take to be the best line for truth absolutists to take regarding the open future.

Fictional Entities, Theoretical Models and Figurative Truth

In setting up his influential “constructive empiricist” project, Bas van Fraassen (1980, 12) characterizes realism about scientific theories by the following three claims: (i) Scientific theories should be interpreted “at face value”. If the theory includes the sentence “there are quarks”, it should be understood as making the same kind of claim we make when we say “there are cans of beer in the refrigerator”: there is no reinterpretation. (ii) Scientific theories purport to be true (iii). We may in principle have good reasons for believing that a scientific theory is true.

The Explanatory Value of Truth Theories Embodying the Semantic Conception

The purpose of this paper is, firstly, to propose a reply to a popular argument against disquotational theories of truth; and, secondarily, to contribute in so doing to clarifying the nature of such theories, in a specific way of interpreting them. There are different, even contraposed ways of interpreting disquotationalism (see O’Leary-Hawthorne and Oppy, 1997, for an examination of different dimensions along which a truth-theory can be deflationary); as a paradigm of the sort of disquotational theories I will be considering, I have in mind (what I take to be) Tarski’s semantic conception, as presented (with a carefully developed example of what a disquotational theory would look like) in his classic 1936 paper. The semantic conception takes as truth-bearers linguistic items (sentences, or uttered instances thereof) which are already interpreted. Far from aiming to explicate what it is for truth-bearers to have meaning, or propositional content (a proper part of the meaning of truth-bearers), this variety of disquotationalism takes for granted that their having the propositional content they possess is to be explicated (if illuminatingly explicated at all) without resort to an independently analyzed truth-concept. (Interesting Tarskian accounts are necessarily given for ‘formalized’ languages. However, they are ‘formalized’ only in the sense that the truth-definitions are given for languages whose logical syntax has been made theoretically perspicuous; not in the sense that they are uninterpreted formal languages, so that the truth-definition is at the same time a stipulation of the language’s semantics.) The fundamental idea which informs the semantic conception (the one which makes it a disquotational theory) is that, for any potential candidate truth-bearer already endowed with meaning, the condition ultimately asserted to obtain when truth is predicated of it is just that asserted in asserting that candidate truth-bearer. Hence, there is a sort of redundancy in truth-predications; although, strictly speaking, the semantic conception does not take truth to be redundant, in that it takes the main function of the truth-predicate to lie in allowing for the expression of general claims in which its use is not redundant.

Pejoratives, Contexts and Presuppositions

Kaplan started a fruitful debate on the meaning of pejoratives. He suggests that a dimension of expressive meaning is required, separated from the straightforward “at issue” content. To account for this, writers have elaborated on this suggestion, by arguing that the separated expressive meaning of pejoratives and slurs is instead either a conventional or conversational implicatures, or a presupposition. I myself prefer a presuppositional account; however, in order to deflate a very serious objection that has been raised against accounts of that kind, it is on the one hand essential that we take what is presupposed to be genuinely expressive, and, related, it is also essential that we adopt a more complex view than the one usually assumed on the nature of the context relative to which speech acts make their contributions.