ABSTRACT Recently, the hypothesis that purely evaluative disputes are metalinguistic negotiations has gained traction. I resist a strong version of that hypothesis, and argue that some of those disputes are not metalinguistic negotiations. To defend that claim, I argue that metalinguistic negotiations have three linguistic properties that some purely evaluative disputes lack. First, in a metalinguistic negotiation it is felicitous to embed the dispute-initial statement under the subjective attitude verb consider; second, a speaker can reply to that initial statement by (...) using a metalinguistic comparative; and, third, such negotiations address metalinguistic questions under discussion. Some purely evaluative disputes lack these properties, which suggests that they are not metalinguistic negotiations. (shrink)

I defend a metalinguistic account of Mates's puzzle: sentences where synonymous expressions cannot be substituted salva veritate. If Andrea thinks that attorneys are different from lawyers, and she thinks that Fiona is the former but not the latter, we may hesitate to substitute ‘lawyer’ for ‘attorney’ in ‘Andrea believes that Fiona is an attorney’, even though ‘lawyer’ and ‘attorney’ are synonymous. I argue that these sentences report de re beliefs about linguistic expressions, thereby blocking such substitutions, and I offer a (...) compositional derivation of their meaning. (shrink)

I argue against the view that metalinguistic usage is a form of conversational implicature. That view, suggested by Thomasson (Anal Philos 57(4):1-28, 2016) and Belleri (Philos Stud 174(9):2211–2226, 2017), has been most recently fleshed out by Mankowitz (Synthese 199:5603–5622, 2021). I provide two types of criticism to the implicature view. From an empirical point of view, metalinguistic usage differs in key respects from standard cases of conversational implicature. From a conceptual standpoint, I argue that the calculation algorithm provided by the (...) implicature view makes undesirable predictions. Although my main objective is negative, I end the paper by sketching an alternative neo-Stalnakerian view of metalinguistic usage, that can be gathered from work by Barker (Linguist Philos 25(1):1–36, 2002; Inquiry 56(2–3):240–257, 2013) and others. (shrink)

It has been argued that moral assertions involve the possession, on the part of the speaker, of appropriate non-cognitive attitudes. Thus, uttering ‘murder is wrong’ invites an inference that the speaker disapproves of murder. In this paper, we present the result of 4 empirical studies concerning this phenomenon. We assess the acceptability of constructions in which that inference is explicitly canceled, such as ‘murder is wrong but I don’t disapprove of it’; and we compare them to similar constructions involving ‘think’ (...) instead of ‘disapprove’—that is, Moore paradoxes (‘murder is wrong but I don’t think that it is wrong’). Our results indicate that the former type of constructions are largely infelicitous, although not as infelicitous as their Moorean counterparts. (shrink)

We explore a particular type of propagandistic message, which we call “provocative insinuation”. For example: ‘Iraqi refugee is convicted in Germany of raping and murdering teenage girl’. Although this sentence seems to merely report a fact, it also conveys a potentially hateful message about Iraqi refugees. We look at the argumentative roles that these utterances play in public discourse. Specifically, we argue that they implicitly address the question of the integration of refugees and migrants, and in fact aim to tilt (...) the audience against these groups by strongly inviting hearers to make generalisations based on “striking” properties. We examine different strategies to counteract the conveyed hateful message. (shrink)