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)

In theoretical work about the language of personal taste, the canonical example is the simple predicate of personal taste, 'tasty'. We can also express the same positive gustatory evaluation with the complex expression, 'taste good'. But there is a challenge for an analysis of 'taste good': While it can be used equivalently with 'tasty', it need not be (for instance, imagine it used by someone who can identify good wines by taste but doesn't enjoy them). (...) This kind of two-faced behavior systematically arises with complex sensory-evaluative predicates, including those with other appearance verbs, such as 'look splendid' and 'sound nice'. I examine two strategies for capturing these different uses: one that posits an ambiguity in appearance verbs, and one that does not. The former is in line with an approach to 'look'-statements prominent in work in philosophy of perception, and I consider how the motivation given in that tradition carries over to the present context. I then show how the data used to support the verbal ambiguity approach can equally be captured on the second strategy, which appeals only to independently-motivated flexibility in adjective meaning. I close by discussing some considerations that are relevant for choosing between the two options. (shrink)

Two common strategies have dominated attempts to account for the nature of taste. On the one side, we have an affectivist understanding of taste where aesthetic attribution has to do with the expression of a subjective response. On the other side, we find a non-affectivist approach according to which to judge something aesthetically is to epistemically track its main aesthetic properties. Our main argument will show that neither emotion nor perception can explain the nature of aesthetic (...) class='Hi'>taste single-handedly. In this paper, our principal aim is to examine the relationship between perceptual discernment and emotional sensibility as we find it in the process of ascribing aesthetic qualities. Is it the nature of the specific aesthetic property in question which determines the way in which perception and emotion are balanced in aesthetic attribution, or is it, rather, something about how our sensory skills operate? One of the notions we would like to explore in greater detail in this context is the idea of attunement, or the way in which aesthetic agents can align themselves to the content of an artwork o in order to better grasp its content and significance. According to our proposed picture, the exercise of taste involves an adjustment of one’s emotional sensibility to the aesthetic character of o. From here, we will posit both emotional and perceptual training as part of an agent’s aesthetic education in her use of aesthetic terms. (shrink)

The present study used eye tracking methodology to examine rereading benefits for spatially transformed text. Eye movements were monitored while participants read the same target word twice, in two different low-constraint sentence frames. The congruency of perceptual processing was manipulated by either applying the same type of transformation to the word during the first and second presentations , or employing two different types of transformations across the two presentations of the word . Perceptual specificity effects were demonstrated such that (...) fixation times for the second presentation of the target word were shorter for the congruent condition compared to the incongruent condition. Moreover, we demonstrated an additional perceptually non-specific effect such that second reading fixation times were shorter for the incongruent condition relative to a baseline condition that employed a normal typography during the first presentation and a transformation during the second presentation. Both of these effects were similar in magnitude for high and low frequency words, and both effects persisted across a 1 week lag between the first and second readings. We discuss the present findings in the context of the distinction between conscious and unconscious memory, and the distinction between perceptually versus conceptually driven processing. (shrink)

This study investigates the performance of 21 monolingual and 56 bilingual children aged 5;6-9;0 on German-LITMUS-sentence-repetition (SRT; Hamann et al., 2013) and nonword-repetition-tasks (NWRT; Grimm et al., 2014), which were constructed according to the LITMUS-principles (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings; Armon-Lotem et al., 2015). Both tasks incorporate complex structures shown to be cross-linguistically challenging for children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and aim at minimizing bias against bilingual children while still being indicative of the presence of language (...) impairment across language combinations. Given the great variability in bilingual language exposure and the potential effect of language experience on language performance in bilingual children, we examined whether background variables related to bilingualism, particularly, the degree language dominance as measured by relative amount of use and exposure, could compromise the diagnostic accuracy of the German-LITMUS-SRT and NWRT. We further investigated whether a combination of the two tasks provides better diagnostic accurracy. To address this, we used an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, the Partitioning-Around-Medoids (PAM), for deriving a clinical category for the children as ±language-impaired based on performance scores on SRT and/or NWRT while withholding information about their clinical status based on standardized assessment in L1/L2. Subsequently, we calculated diagnostic accuracy and investigated which background variables (age of onset, length of exposure, degree of language-dominance, socio-economic-status, and risk factors for SLI) best explained clinical-group-membership yielded from the PAM-analysis based on NWRT and/or SRT scores. Results show that although language-dominance influences the performance of bilingual typically-developing children, especially in the SRT, the diagnostic accuracy of the tools is not compromised by language dominance: while risk factors for SLI were significant predictors for clinical group membership in all models, language dominance did not contribute at all to explaining clinical cluster membership as typically-developing or SLI based on any of the combinations of the SRT and NWRT variables. Additionally, results confirm that a combination of SRT scored by correct target structure and the structurally more complex language-dependent part of the NWRT yields better diagnostic accuracy than single measures and is only sensitive for risk factors for SLI and not to dominance levels or SES. (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)

Frege proposed that sentences like ‘The number of planets is eight’ be analysed as identity statements in which the number words refer to numbers. Recently, Friederike Moltmann argued that, pace Frege, such sentences be analysed as so-called specificational sentences in which the number words have the same non-referring semantic function as the number word ‘eight’ in ‘There are eight planets’. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, I argue that Moltmann fails to show that such sentences should be analysed (...) as specificational sentences. Second, I show that even if they are to be analysed in this way, Moltmann’s proposed specificational analysis is unsatisfactory. (shrink)

The experience of musical surprise is explained by psychologists in terms of the thwarting of prior musical expectations. The assumption that surprise is always caused by expectations is widespread not just in psychology at large, but also in philosophy. I argue here that this assumption is ill-founded. Many musical surprises, as well as many non-musical instances of perceptual surprise, can be explained by the falsification of assessments of the present, rendering the appeal to expectations unnecessary. I elaborate the positive view (...) before considering objections, and offering replies. (shrink)

Disagreements about matters of personal taste are a rather resilient kind of phenomenon that calls for an unorthodox solution. Hybrid taste-expressivism seems to provide such a solution because it explains taste disagreements in non-doxastic terms. According to it, utterances of taste sentences play a dual role—on the one hand, they are used to express propositions in which objects are ascribed taste properties and, on the other hand, they are used to manifest evaluations of the objects (...) contained in the propositions. The non-doxastic nature of taste disagreements is derived from the latter. My aim is to cast some doubt on the prospects of the hybrid taste-expressivist account. Although I admit that this explanation is on the right track in treating taste disagreements as non-doxastic, hybrid taste expressivism does not seem to be general enough. There are some instances of taste disagreement that are not amenable to this kind of explanation. I provide an alternative explanation that retains the non-doxastic nature of taste disagreements, but does not suffer from its limited explanatory power. (shrink)

At the intersection of religion and sexuality, this article explores how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people navigate dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within faith-based settings. Situated in a postcolonial setting, and with a specific focus on South Africa, the article delineates the oppressive dynamics at work at this intersection, along with how these are resisted through contemporary forms of activism. Grounded in a feminist analysis of relevant literature and of the field of activism in question, (...) and supplemented by interviews with key informants, the research offers a conceptual framework to advance transformative inclusion for LGBTIQ people within, and against, the dominant institutions, discourses and practices of faith.Contribution: This article contributes to the field of scholarship that concerns activism on sexual and gender rights in faith-based settings. It straddles theory and practice, offering an epistemological grounding for political action that advances the rights of LGBTIQ people. In bringing practitioner insights into academic discourse, the article adds to the burgeoning academic enquiry in this area, and offers a conceptual approach for supporting existing and new initiatives against marginalisation, exclusion and violence at the hands of faith. (shrink)

Moral non-cognitivists hope to explain the nature of moral agreement and disagreement as agreement and disagreement in non-cognitive attitudes. In doing so, they take on the task of identifying the relevant attitudes, distinguishing the non-cognitive attitudes corresponding to judgements of moral wrongness, for example, from attitudes involved in aesthetic disapproval or the sports fan’s disapproval of her team’s performance. We begin this paper by showing that there is a simple recipe for generating apparent counterexamples to any informative specification of the (...) moral attitudes. This may appear to be a lethal objection to non-cognitivism, but a similar recipe challenges attempts by non-cognitivism’s competitors to specify the conditions underwriting the contrast between genuine and merely apparent moral disagreement. Because of its generality, this specification problem requires a systematic response, which, we argue, is most easily available for the non-cognitivist. Building on premisses congenial to the non-cognitivist tradition, we make the following claims: (1) In paradigmatic cases, wrongness-judgements constitute a certain complex but functionally unified state, and paradigmatic wrongness-judgements form a functional kind, preserved by homeostatic mechanisms. (2) Because of the practical function of such judgements, we should expect judges’ intuitive understanding of agreement and disagreement to be accommodating, treating states departing from the paradigm in various ways as wrongness-judgements. (3) This explains the intuitive judgements required by the counterexample-generating recipe, and more generally why various kinds of amoralists are seen as making genuine wrongness-judgements. (shrink)

Recently adopted international texts have given a new focus on conflicts of interests and access to information resulting from biomedical research. They confirmed ethical review committees as a central point to guarantee individual rights and the effective application of ethical principles. Therefore specific attention should be paid in giving such committees all the facilities necessary to keep them independent and qualified.

Sentences such as 'Chocolate tastes good' have been widely discussed as sentences that give rise to faultless disagreement. As such, they actually belong to the more general class of impersonal perception reports, which include 'The violin sounds / looks strange' as well sentences that are about an agent-centered situation such as 'It feels / seems like it is going to rain'. I maintain the view that faultless disagreement is due to first person-based genericity, which, roughly, consists in attributing a property (...) to anyone the speaker (or described agent) identifies with (which generally requires a first-person experience) (Moltmann 2010). Unlike my previous analysis (and similar analyses), this paper no longer makes use of experiencers or judges as implicit arguments of taste predicates, but argues that impersonal perception verbs (taste, look, feel, seem), have a logophoric character. More precisely, such verbs describe perceptual occurrences whose experiencer is identical to the agent of the utterance situation, described attitudinal situation, or the situations a generic operator may range over. Perceptual occurrences are sharply distinguished ontologically from perceptual experiences as well as perceptual objects, entities we refer to as ‘the taste of chocolate’, ‘the sound of the violin’, ‘the look of the violin’. Sentences about perceptual objects ('the taste of chocolate is good', 'the sound of the violin is great', 'the look of the violin is beautiful') also give rise to faultless disagreement, but the source of that is a first-person-based attribution of an evaluative predicate to an (objective) perceptual object. (shrink)

There is a distinctive kind of command, namely commands to answer specific questions. An imperative sentence denoting such a command has an interrogative sentence corresponding to it-a sentence denoting the respective question. LetImp, Int, andQ be such an imperative sentence, the interrogative sentence corresponding to it, and the question denoted by the interrogative sentence, respectively. LetQ be an empirical question, i. e., and ((ητ)ω)-object. LetP be an ((ητ)ω)-construction constructingQ. Then the analysis ofImp has (...) the form (QL).LetQ be an analytical question, i. e., a molecular extensional η-construction. LetQ=C, whereC is a ℊ-object (over the extended base). Then the analysis ofImp has the form (QL′). The imperative sentences whose analyses have the form (QL) or (QL′) can be called ‘question-like imperative sentences’ or simply ‘QL-imperative sentences’. No imperative sentence whose analysis differs from (QL) and (QL\t') can be associated with a question. Therefore, no transformation of such an imperative sentence should result in a correct interrogative sentence. Fulfilling an order which is determined by a QL-imperative sentenceImp, one simultaneously gives the right answer to the questionQ (which is associated withImp). One who does not fulfil this order either wrongly answersQ or does not answerQ at all. (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)

This chapter contains sections titled: Taste and Discernment Delicacy of Taste and the Supertasters Practices and Comparisons Who Are the True Judges of Wine? Experts and Projects Experts and Evaluation Ideal and Izeal experts ‐ And You The Canon and Ideal Critics: The Special Relationship Levinson's Problems The Canon and Wine Wine Canons and Ideal Wine Critics Taste, the Competencies and Trust Iconic or Iconoclastic Critics Conclusion Notes.

In this paper, I take issue with an idea that has emerged from recent relativist proposals, and, in particular, from Lasersohn, according to which the correct semantics for taste predicates must use contents that are functions of a judge parameter rather than implicit arguments lexically associated with such predicates. I argue that the relativist account and the contextualist implicit argument-account are, from the viewpoint of semantics, not much more than notational variants of one another. In other words, given (...) any sentence containing a taste predicate, and given any assignment of values to the relevant parameters, the two accounts predict the same truth value and are, in that sense, equivalent. I also look at possible reasons for preferring one account over the other. The phenomenon of "faultless disagreement" is often believed to be one such reason. I argue, against Kölbel and Lasersohn, that disagreement is never faultless: either the two parties genuinely disagree, hence if the one is right then the other is wrong, or the two parties are both right, but their apparent disagreement boils down to a misunderstanding. What is more, even if there were faultless disagreement, I argue that relativism would fail to account for it. The upshot of my paper, then, is to show that there is not much disagreement between a contextualist account that models the judge parameter as an implicit argument to the taste predicate, and a relativist account that models it as a parameter of the circumstances of evaluation. The choice between the two accounts, at least when talking about taste, is thus, to a large extent, a matter of taste. (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)

The objective of this study is twofold: to examine the patterns that govern social reporting with reference to an Islamic framework and to identify the moral legitimacy factors that influence them. We select 146 publicly listed Sharia‐compliant companies and classify the disclosures in their annual reports according to an Islamic framework that categorises items as either Required, Expected or Desired to indicate the degree of importance each item carries from an Islamic perspective. Based on this framework, we then analyse moral (...) legitimacy factors, specifically the type of Sharia screening body and the proportion of Muslims in the population, that may influence the prioritisation of the different categories of social reporting. We find that disclosures that fall into the Required category of our framework—especially those that relate to companies’ involvement in “haram” activities (activities not permissible in Islam)—are still few among the companies studied. Our research also reveals that both moral legitimacy factors under investigation influence the three categories of social reporting, although in different ways. This research contributes to the existing literature by empirically examining how organisations prioritise their disclosure of virtues and the moral legitimacy factors that influence that prioritisation. (shrink)

The chapter considers two semantic issues concerning will-sentences: Stalnaker’s Asymmetry and modal subordination in Karttunen-type discourses. The former points to a distinction between will and modal verbs, seeming to show that will does not license non-specific indefinites. The latter, conversely, suggests that will-sentences involve some kind of modality. To account for the data, the chapter proposes that will is semantically a tense, hence it doesn’t contribute a quantifier over modal alternatives; a modal feature, however, is introduced in the interpretation (...) of a will-sentence through a supervaluational strategy universally quantifying over possible futures. That this is not part of will’s lexical semantics is shown to have consequences that ultimately contribute to explain Stalnaker’s Asymmetry. Furthermore, that a modal quantification is present in the interpretation of a will-sentence is shown to imply the availability of modal subordination in Karttunen-type discourses. (shrink)

I point out some unclarities in Allison's interpretation of Kant's aesthetic theory, specifically in his account of the free play of the faculties. I argue that there is a tension between Allison's commitment to the intentionality of the pleasure involved in a judgment of beauty, and his view that the pleasure is distinct from the judgment, and I claim that the tension should be resolved by rejecting the latter view. I conclude by addressing Allison's objection that my own view fails (...) to accommodate judgments of non-beauty or ugliness. (shrink)

There are many analogies between medical and judicial practice. This article explores one such analogy, between “medicalization” and “criminalization.” Specifically, drawing on an analogy between a judge’s speech act of delivering a verdict and a physician’s speech act of giving a diagnosis, it suggests a novel account of the phenomenon of “overdiagnosis.” Using this approach, we can make some headway in understanding debates over the early detection of cancer. The final section outlines the relationship between this approach and familiar (...) debates in philosophy of medicine on the nature of disease and in philosophy of science on the “value-free ideal.”. (shrink)

Previous work has shown that children with dyslexia are impaired in speech recognition in adverse listening conditions. Our study further examined how semantic context and fundamental frequency contours contribute to word recognition against interfering speech in dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. Thirty-two children with dyslexia and 35 chronological-age-matched control children were tested on the recognition of words in normal sentences versus wordlist sentences with natural versus flat F0 contours against single-talker interference. The dyslexic children had overall poorer recognition performance than non-dyslexic (...) children. Furthermore, semantic context differentially modulated the effect of F0 contours on the recognition performances of the two groups. Specifically, compared with flat F0 contours, natural F0 contours increased the recognition accuracy of dyslexic children less than non-dyslexic children in the wordlist condition. By contrast, natural F0 contours increased the recognition accuracy of both groups to a similar extent in the sentence condition. These results indicate that access to semantic context improves the effect of natural F0 contours on word recognition in adverse listening conditions by dyslexic children who are more impaired in the use of natural F0 contours during isolated and unrelated word recognition. Our findings have practical implications for communication with dyslexic children when listening conditions are unfavorable. (shrink)

A number of authors have objected to the application of non-classical logic to problems in philosophy on the basis that these non-classical logics are usually characterised by a classical metatheory. In many cases the problem amounts to more than just a discrepancy; the very phenomena responsible for non-classicality occur in the field of semantics as much as they do elsewhere. The phenomena of higher order vagueness and the revenge liar are just two such examples. The aim of this paper is (...) to show that a large class of non-classical logics are strong enough to formulate their own model theory in a corresponding non-classical set theory. Specifically I show that adequate definitions of validity can be given for the propositional calculus in such a way that the metatheory proves, in the specified logic, that every theorem of the propositional fragment of that logic is validated. It is shown that in some cases it may fail to be a classical matter whether a given sentence is valid or not. One surprising conclusion for non-classical accounts of vagueness is drawn: there can be no axiomatic, and therefore precise, system which is determinately sound and complete. (shrink)

In this paper I argue on two fronts. First, I press for the view that judging is a type of mental action, as opposed to those who think that judging is involuntary and hence not an action. Second, I argue that judging is specifically a type of non-voluntary mental action. My account of the non-voluntary nature of the mental act of judging differs, however, from standard non-voluntarist views, according to which ‘non-voluntary’ just means regulated by epistemic reasons. In addition, judging (...) is non-voluntary, I contend, because it is partially constituted by the exercise of a non-reason-governed skill. This skill, which I call ‘critical pop-out’, consists of an unreflective, often unconscious, ability to detect the kind of situations in which the reflective abilities that also partially constitute our acts of judging should be deployed. We are responsible for our judgments, I conclude, because in identifying such reflection-inviting situations, we reveal the kind of epistemic agents we are. (shrink)

The article examines the place of graphic design in modern post-industrial society, extending beyond purely applied art and aspiring to play the role of an expert in the interiors of human existence, determining the social and cultural status of an individual. It is argued that graphic design, organically integrating into contexts and actively responding to the challenges of such a social-decorative phenomenon as fashion, plays a significant role in shaping taste culture. This attests to the multiplicity of ambivalent cultural (...) manifestations of graphic design. Special attention is given to identifying the functional potential of graphic design in creating cross-cutting trends that, through non-verbal means of communication, can form and maintain social and cultural unity. In connection with this, an analysis of graphic design is carried out through the prism of philosophical communication, allowing the identification of graphic design as the most effective practice of nonverbal communication and information visualization in post-industrial society. It is determined that graphic design is capable not only of generating new meanings but also of creating communicative gaps. Given this specificity, the article particularly focuses on identifying the educational and upbringing potential of graphic design. It is demonstrated that the process of creating visual images and their subsequent interpretation by consumers of graphic information depends not only on the aesthetic taste, ethical beliefs, and humanistic orientation of the designer (visualizer) but also on their educational and upbringing potential. The necessity of strengthening humanistic orientations in modern Ukrainian design and art education is emphasized. (shrink)

Generics are sentences such as Birds fly, which express generalizations. They are prevalent in speech, and as far as is known, no human language lacks generics. Yet, it is very far from clear what they mean. After all, not all birds fly—penguins don’t! -/- There are two general views about the meaning of generics in the literature, and each view encompasses many specific theories. According to the inductivist view, a generic states that a sufficient number of individuals satisfy a (...) certain property—in the example above, it says that sufficiently many birds fly. This view faces the complicated problem of spelling out exactly how many is “sufficiently many” in a way that correctly captures the intuitive truth conditions of generics. -/- An alternative, the rules and regulations view, despairs from this project and proposes instead that generics directly express rules in the world. Rules are taken to be abstract objects, which are not related to the properties of specific individuals. This view faces the difficult problem of explaining how people come to know of such rules when judging the truth of falsity of generics, and accounting for the strong intuition that a sentence such as Birds fly talks about birds, not abstract objects. -/- What seems to be beyond dispute is that generics, even if they do not express rules, are lawlike: they state non-accidental generalizations. Many scholars have taken this fact to indicate that generics are parametric on possible worlds: they refer to worlds other than the actual world. This, again, raises the problem of how people come to know about what happens in these other worlds. However, a rigorous application of standard tests for intensionality shows that generics are not, in fact, parametric on possible worlds, but only on time. This unusual property may explain much of the mystery surrounding generics. -/- Another mysterious property of generics is that although there is no language without them, there is no linguistic construction that is devoted to the expression of genericity. Rather, generics can be expressed in a variety of ways, each of which can also express nongenerics. Yet, each manifestation of generics differs subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) in its meaning from the others. -/- Even when these and other puzzles of genericity are solved, one mystery would remain: Why are generics, which are so easy to produce and understand in conversation, so difficult to analyze? (shrink)

This paper motivates and describes a non-alethic approach to faultless disagreement involving predicates of personal taste. In section 1 I describe problems faced by Sundell's indexicalist approach, and MacFarlane's relativist approach. In section 2 I develop an alternative, non-alethic, approach. The non-alethic approach is broadly expressivist in that it endorses both the negative semantic thesis that simple sentences containing PPTs do not semantically encode complete propositions and the positive pragmatic thesis that such sentences are used to express evaluative mental (...) states. Finally, in section 3 I explain how the non-alethic approach explains faultless disagreement. (shrink)

The main aim of the thesis is to give a semantic account of implicit content – the kind of content that plays a crucial role in implicit communication. Implicit communication is a species of communication in which a speaker communicates certain contents that go over and above the contents retrievable from the linguistic meaning of the words used. The focus of the thesis is a certain kind of implicit communication involving locations (when sentences such as “It is raining” are used (...) to communicate that it is raining at a certain location) and judges (when sentences such as “Avocado is tasty” are used to communicate that avocado is tasty for a certain person, called “the judge”). The way the topic of implicit content is approached is via the notion, widespread in contemporary philosophy of language, of “unarticulated constituents”. The thesis contains an investigation of this notion, with the specific aim of disentangling the many senses it has been used and of providing a general definition of the notion. A direct product of this investigation is a partitioning of the logical space; three positions are then selected, which correspond to the main contenders in the current debate involving unarticulated constituents: truth-conditional semantics, truth-conditional pragmatics and relativism. The biggest part of the thesis is dedicated to investigating certain arguments that have surfaced in the debate between these positions, with the ultimate goal of proposing a relativist account of implicit content. The particular version of relativism offered consists in the combination of the claim that locations and judges are part of the circumstances of evaluation, rather than the content of utterances, with “the variadic functions approach” to certain natural language expressions. Also, several arguments against a truth-conditional semantic approach to predicates of personal taste are provided. (shrink)

The Aceh Jinayat Qanun, which is often considered violating Human Rights, has become the choice of the non-Muslim minorities as their rational choice. This study aims to analyze non-Muslims’ choice of The Aceh Jinayat Qanun implemented by the Sharia Court in Aceh and its underlying motives. This study relies on field research involving observations, in-depth interviews with Sharia Court judges, Head of the Islamic Sharia Service, Acehnese clerical figures, and Non-Muslims involved in criminal cases handled by the Sharia Courts. This (...) study also analyzes Sharia Court decisions on criminal cases involving non-Muslims and various related documents issued by the Sharia Courts, police, and prosecutors. The study was undertaken between July 2017 and March 2020. The study shows that the Acehnese non-Muslims do not select The Aceh Jinayat Qanun because of its religious values but based on practicality, efficiency, and socio-cultural consideration. The Sharia-based sentences, which have often been conceived as inhuman and violate fundamental human rights, are chosen and become the rational choice for non-Muslims in solving their legal issues. This paper concludes that the implementation of the Sharia on non-Muslim has not always been negative. This paper demonstrates non-Muslims’ interest to choose Sharia-based criminal justice or The Aceh Jinayat Qanun over the Criminal Code. This can be seen as their rational choice over a more efficient, low-cost, effective, and fast legal process offered by The Aceh Jinayat Qanun sentencing system. (shrink)

Blind tasting — tasting without knowing the wine’s producer, origin, or other details obtainable from the wine’s label— has become something of a fetish in the wine world. We are told, repeatedly and insistently, that blind tasting is the best, most neutral, least biased, and most honest evaluative procedure, and one that should be employed to the exclusion of non-blind/sighted tasting (which, in turn, is typically disparaged as confused, biased, or dishonest). Professional evaluators (e.g., the tasting panel of the Wine (...) Spectator, the Grand Jury Europ´een, virtually every judging panel in competitive wine events) routinely advertise that they use blind tasting exclusively. Wine books and tasting manuals at all levels consistently emphasize the importance of blind tasting. Thus, Michael Broadbent, perhaps the most prolific author of tasting notes in history, writes that “It is my firm opinion . . . that to assess the qualities of a wine by tasting it completely blind, without any hint of what it might be, is the most useful and salutary discipline that any self-respecting taster can be given” (quoted in ? , 156). Or, again, Ronald Jackson, in his industry-standard textbook on wine tasting, asserts categorically that “Tastings should always be conducted blind, usually with only the names of the wine noted in advance” ( ? , 334). (shrink)

Speakers often judge the sentence “Lois Lane believes that Superman flies” to be true and the sentence “Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent flies” to be false. If Millianism is true, however, these sentences express the very same proposition and must therefore have same truth value. “Pragmatic” Millians like Salmon and Soames have tried to explain speakers’ “anti-substitution intuitions” by claiming that the two sentences are routinely used to pragmatically convey different propositions which do have different truth (...) values. “Non-Pragmatic” Millians like Braun, on the other hand, have argued that the Millian should not appeal to pragmatics and opt instead for a purely psychological explanation. I will present two objections against Non-Pragmatic Millianism. The first one is that the view cannot account for the intuitions of speakers who accept the identity sentence “Superman is Clark Kent”: applying a psychological account in this case, I will argue, would yield wrong predictions about speakers who resist substitution with simple sentences. I will then consider a possible response from the non-pragmatic Millian and show that the response would in fact require an appeal to pragmatics. My conclusion will be that Braun’s psychological explanation of anti-substitution intuitions is untenable, and that the Millian is therefore forced to adopt a pragmatic account. My second objection is that Non-Pragmatic Millianism cannot account for the role that certain commonsense intentional generalizations play in the explanation of behavior. I will consider a reply offered by Braun and argue that it still leaves out a large class of important generalizations. My conclusion will be that Braun’s non-pragmatic strategy fails, and that the Millian will again be forced to adopt a pragmatic account of intentional generalizations if he wants to respond to the objection. In light of my two objections, my general conclusion will be that non-pragmatic versions of Millianism should be rejected. This has an important consequence: if Millianism is true, then some pragmatic Millian account must be correct. It follows that, if standard objections against pragmatic accounts succeed, then Millianism must be rejected altogether. (shrink)

A speaker often decides whether or not to saysomething based on his assessment of the impact itwould have on his hearer's beliefs. If he thinks itwould bring them more in line with the truth, he saysit; otherwise he does not. In this paper, I developa model of these judgments, focusing specifically onthose of vague sentences. Under the simplifyingassumption that an utterance only conveys a speaker'sapplicability judgments, I present a Bayesian model ofan utterance's impact on a hearer's beliefs. Fromthis model I (...) derive a model of a speaker's judgment ofwhether or not an utterance would be informative. Iillustrate it with several examples of judgments ofvague and non-vague sentences. For instance, I showthat it models the common judgment that assertingeither ``George is tall'' or ``George is not tall'' wouldbe misleading if George were borderline tall, butasserting ``George is tall and he isn't tall'' would notbe. (shrink)

Presentists deny that past or future things exist. Some presentists also deny that there are any underlying truths about the past or future. While this seems to conflict with our everyday tensed discourse, presentists might avoid conflict by adopting a theory of hermeneutic fictionalism about the non-present. Under such a theory, everyday utterances of non-present-tensed sentences are taken to engage with a fiction, rather than expressing truths about the past or future. In this paper I defend a specific version (...) of this view: meta-fictionalism about the non-present. Under this view there is a socially-understood non-present fiction, a 'story of history', derived from apparent records existing in the present. Meta-fictionalists take our everyday tensed discourse to involve assertions about the content of that fiction. I argue that this view is plausible, and that it fares better than pretence fictionalism, a competing view that has already seen discussion in the literature. (shrink)

Traxler, Pickering, and Clifton found that ambiguous sentences are read faster than their unambiguous counterparts. This so-called ambiguity advantage has presented a major challenge to classical theories of human sentence comprehension because its most prominent explanation, in the form of the unrestricted race model, assumes that parsing is non-deterministic. Recently, Swets, Desmet, Clifton, and Ferreira have challenged the URM. They argue that readers strategically underspecify the representation of ambiguous sentences to save time, unless disambiguation is required by task demands. (...) When disambiguation is required, however, readers assign sentences full structure—and Swets et al. provide experimental evidence to this end. On the basis of their findings, they argue against the URM and in favor of a model of task-dependent sentence comprehension. We show through simulations that the Swets et al. data do not constitute evidence for task-dependent parsing because they can be explained by the URM. However, we provide decisive evidence from a German self-paced reading study consistent with Swets et al.'s general claim about task-dependent parsing. Specifically, we show that under certain conditions, ambiguous sentences can be read more slowly than their unambiguous counterparts, suggesting that the parser may create several parses, when required. Finally, we present the first quantitative model of task-driven disambiguation that subsumes the URM, and we show that it can explain both Swets et al.'s results and our findings. (shrink)

In this article, I seek to answer the following cluster of questions: What would a characteristically African, and specifically relational, conception of a criminal trial’s final end look like? What would the Afro-relational approach prescribe for sentencing? Would its implications for this matter forcefully rival the kinds of penalties that judges in South Africa and similar jurisdictions typically mete out? After pointing out how the southern African ethic of ubuntu is well understood as a relational ethic, I draw out of (...) it a certain conception of reconciliation that I advance as a strong candidate for being the proper final end of a criminal trial. I argue that, far from requiring forgiveness, seeking reconciliation can provide strong reason to punish offenders. Specifically, a reconciliatory sentence is one that roughly has offenders reform their characters and compensate their victims in ways the offenders find burdensome, thereby disavowing the crime and tending to foster cooperation and mutual aid. I argue that this novel account of punishment is a prima facie attractive alternative to more familiar retributive and deterrence rationales, and that it entails that widespread practices such as imprisonment and mandatory minimum sentences are unjust. (shrink)

Few problems are as challenging to Levinas's ethics as the tension or even chiasm that opens between the ethics in relation to the face and the claims of the third. This paper offers a reading of the role of the judge in court as the model for understanding the relation of these two aspects of justice. I make reference to an essay by the legal theorist Robert Cover that explored the violence of the courtroom. He shows how society contains (...) appropriate violence by framing the institutions of the court. Levinas then appears in his repeated citation of a Talmudic text about the judge _not_ facing the defendant in a court. Through a careful reading of the Talmudic text and the Biblical texts upon which it draws, we can see Levinas sorting out the different kinds of responsibility to which the judge responds. The paper ends with a brief reflection on how engaging with the specificity of a text offers new methodological resources for philosophical reflection. (shrink)

Few problems are as challenging to Levinas's ethics as the tension or even chiasm that opens between the ethics in relation to the face and the claims of the third. This paper offers a reading of the role of the judge in court as the model for understanding the relation of these two aspects of justice. I make reference to an essay by the legal theorist Robert Cover that explored the violence of the courtroom. He shows how society contains (...) appropriate violence by framing the institutions of the court. Levinas then appears in his repeated citation of a Talmudic text about the judge not facing the defendant in a court. Through a careful reading of the Talmudic text and the Biblical texts upon which it draws, we can see Levinas sorting out the different kinds of responsibility to which the judge responds. The paper ends with a brief reflection on how engaging with the specificity of a text offers new methodological resources for philosophical reflection. (shrink)

Cappelen and Hawthorne’s Relativism and Monadic Truth (2009) offers an extended defense of a thesis they call simplicity, which, in brief, holds that propositions are true or false simpliciter. Propositions are cast in their traditional roles as the contents of assertions, and as the semantic values of declarative sentences in contexts. Simplicity stands in sharp contrast to forms of relativism including, for instance, a form that hold that our claims are true or false only relative to a judge. This (...) applies especially to claims of taste, which come out true or false only relative to the judge who finds things tasty (e.g. Glanzberg 2007, Lasersohn 2005). But simplicity also rejects the more widespread temporalist view that propositions are true or false only relative to a time, and it rejects the even more widely held view that propositions are true or false only relative to a world. One reason that has been advanced for temporalism, e.g. by Kaplan (1989), is that our languages seem to contain non-trivial temporal operators. Hence, the argument goes, the semantic values of sentences need to be temporally neutral, i.e. vary for truth or falsehood with time. The same goes for possible worlds and modal operators. Hence, Kaplan and many others think of the semantic values of sentences as sets of world-time pairs. It has been tempting to apply this sort of argument much more widely, to see the semantic values of sentences as varying not just with world and time, but perhaps with location and other parameters as well. Kaplan.. (shrink)

Kant holds that when we judge a thing beautiful, we do so from no other basis than our pleasure in the contemplation of the object, while at the same time, we presume to judge with validity for everyone. To explain how this is possible is the task of what he calls the critique of taste. I distinguish among three kinds of explanation that Kant offers. One is a theoretical account of the mental state from which judgments of (...) taste supposedly arise--what Kant describes as a harmonious free play of the cognitive faculties. Another kind of explanation, made on the basis of the first, is an attempted "deduction" or proof of our right to make judgments of taste. I argue that Kant's theory of harmonious free play has little in the way of either content or plausibility, rendering his attempt to derive the universal validity of judgments of taste from it otiose. The main interest of his critical effort, I find, lies in the descriptive and analytical part of his account of judgments of taste, specifically in his attempt to comprehend both their subjective character and their claim to universal validity. The first of these he understands as consisting in the judgment's being based in feeling; the universality-claim he understands as a normative requirement. I argue that no interpretation can be faithful to these basic tenets of Kant's analysis without also accepting his curious conclusion that the act of judging in some sense "precedes" the very feeling of pleasure on which it is said to be based. I attempt to make sense of this conclusion in terms of the peculiar kind of consciousness of pleasure involved in such a judgment. (shrink)

Block’s, 5–43 1981) anti-behaviourist attack of the Turing Test not only illustrates that the test is a non-sufficient criterion for attributing thought; I suggest that it also exemplifies the limiting case of the more general concern that a machine which has access to enormous amounts of data can pass the Turing Test by simple symbol-manipulation techniques. If the answers to a human interrogator are entailed by the machines’ data, the Turing Test offers no clear criterion to distinguish between a thinking (...) machine and a machine that merely manipulates representations of words and sentences as it is found in contemporary Natural Language Processing models. This paper argues that properties about vagueness are accessible to any human-like thinker but do not normally display themselves in ordinary language use. Therefore, a machine that merely performs simple symbol manipulation from large amounts of previously acquired data – where this body of data does not contain facts about vagueness – will not be able to report on these properties. Conversely, a machine that has the capacity to think would be able to report on these properties. I argue that we can exploit this fact to establish a sufficient criterion of thought. The criterion is a specification of some of the questions that, as I explain, should be asked by the interrogator in a Turing Test situation. (shrink)

Non-existence provides big problems for ontology and modest for logic. Logical problems of non-existence consist in licensing inferences in which sentences with empty terms are involved. The standard predicate logic solves this question by presupposing that every individual constant has an object to which it refers. This means that empty domains are excluded from semantics for the first-order logic. However, there is a temptation to consider logic without existential presuppositions.The ontological problem of non-existence leads to the question of the meaning (...) of 'nothing'. We encounter "various conceptions of nothing" in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to our times. However, nothing (or nothingness) is always a negation of being. Since we have distributive and collective (mereological) concepts of being, we also should distinguish nothing in the distributive and mereological meaning. This difference is important because only the former leads to the paradox of nothing of all nothings, analogical to the paradox of all sets. A closer analysis of the nothing in the distributive sense shows that any meaningful talk about non-existence requires a relativisation to a fixed domain of discourse. This seems; to entail that the empty set is the formal model of nothing what means that the concept of absolute nothing in the distributive sense is simply inconsistent. To some extent, being and nothing are mutually dual. This motivates that the concept of nothing is governed by so-called dual logic connected with processes of rejection. More specifically, statements on "nothing" are not asserted but rejected. (shrink)

Non-existence provides big problems for ontology and modest for logic. Logical problems of non-existence consist in licensing inferences in which sentences with empty terms are involved. The standard predicate logic solves this question by presupposing that every individual constant has an object to which it refers. This means that empty domains are excluded from semantics for the first-order logic. However, there is a temptation to consider logic without existential presuppositions.The ontological problem of non-existence leads to the question of the meaning (...) of 'nothing'. We encounter "various conceptions of nothing" in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to our times. However, nothing (or nothingness) is always a negation of being. Since we have distributive and collective (mereological) concepts of being, we also should distinguish nothing in the distributive and mereological meaning. This difference is important because only the former leads to the paradox of nothing of all nothings, analogical to the paradox of all sets. A closer analysis of the nothing in the distributive sense shows that any meaningful talk about non-existence requires a relativisation to a fixed domain of discourse. This seems; to entail that the empty set is the formal model of nothing what means that the concept of absolute nothing in the distributive sense is simply inconsistent. To some extent, being and nothing are mutually dual. This motivates that the concept of nothing is governed by so-called dual logic connected with processes of rejection. More specifically, statements on "nothing" are not asserted but rejected. (shrink)

One of the distinctive features of Hume's presentation of disinterested aesthetic pleasure in the Treatise is its basis in sympathy as the communication of sentiment between a spectator and specifically an owner of a beautiful object. By tracking the recurring example of the beautiful house, which properly provides pleasure only to the owner who dwells in it, I reconsider the operation of sympathy in relation to property. My central argument is that sympathy underwrites the disinterested sociality of judgments of (...) class='Hi'>taste for Hume not by enabling the spectator to feel a pleasure that corresponds to the owner's pleasure in beauty but rather by rendering this pleasure as a sentiment that does not originally belong to anyone and does not exist prior to its sympathetic communication. (shrink)

Recent scholarship emphasizes the scaffolding role of language for cognition. Language, it is claimed, is a cognition-enhancing niche (Clark, 2006), a programming tool for cognition (Lupyan and Bergen, 2016), even a neuroenhancement (Dove, 2019), and augments cognitive functions such as memory, categorization, cognitive control as well as meta-cognitive abilities (‘thinking about thinking’). Yet the notion that language enhances or augments cognition does not fit in with embodied approaches to language processing, or so we will argue. Accounts aiming to explain how (...) language enhances various cognitive functions often employ a notion of abstract representation. Yet embodied approaches to language processing have it that language processing crucially, according to some accounts even exclusively, involves embodied, modality-specific, i.e. non-abstract representations. In coming to understand a particular phrase or sentence, a prior experience has to be simulated or reenacted. The representation thus activated is embodied (modality-specific) as sensorimotor regions of the brain are thereby recruited. In the paper, we will first discuss the notion of representation, clarify what it takes for a representation to be embodied or abstract respectively, and distinguish between conceptual and (other) linguistic representations. We will then put forward a characterization of cognitive control and examine its representational infrastructure. The remainder of the paper will be devoted to arguing that language augments cognitive control. To that end, we will draw on two lines of research, which investigate how language augments cognitive control: i. research on the availability of linguistic labels, and ii. research on the active usage of a linguistic code, specifically in inner speech. Eventually, we will argue that the cognition-enhancing capacity of language can be explained once we assume that it provides us with a. abstract, non-embodied representations, and with b. abstract, sparse linguistic representations that may serve as easy-to-manipulate placeholders for fully embodied or otherwise more detailed representations. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to analyze the social circulation of discourses on non-hegemonic cultural practices, in particular, on what is called “trash TV”, and how they are connected to struggles over cultural and social hierarchies. To do so, it takes a specific event as starting point: the injunction that the CNMC filed against Mediaset to adjust the contents of Sálvame Diario to the requirements of what is known as the “child protection time slot”. This paper uses (...) constructionist framing to analyze how this event was discussed by different social actors. Our analysis shows that while the CNMC and the press painted the conflict as a legal issue, Sálvame and social media users focused their discussion on the social acceptability of celebrity gossip media and their viewers. (shrink)

This paper aims to delineate the class of aesthetic judgments linguistically. The main idea is that aesthetic judgments can be specified by a certain set of assertibility conditions, i.e., by norms that govern appropriate speech-acts. This idea is spelled out in detail and defended against various objections. The suggestion leads to an interesting account of aesthetic judgments that is theoretically fruitful: It provides the basis for a non-circular and satisfying characterization of the whole domain of aesthetic research and it marks (...) an important linguistic difference between aesthetic judgments and judgments of personal taste. (shrink)

Some earlier remarks Michael Dummett made on Gödel’s theorem have recently inspired attempts to formulate an alternative to the standard demonstration of the truth of the Gödel sentence. The idea underlying the non-standard approach is to treat the Gödel sentence as an ordinary arithmetical one. But the Gödel sentence is of a very specific nature. Consequently, the non-standard arguments are conceptually mistaken. In this paper, both the faulty arguments themselves and the general reasons underlying their failure (...) are analysed. The analysis reveals the true nature of the epistemological relation between the Gödel sentence and its numerical instances. (shrink)

‘AI & Law’ research has been around since the 1970s, even though with shifting emphasis. This is an overview of the contributions of digital technologies, both artificial intelligence and non-AI smart tools, to both the legal professions and the police. For example, we briefly consider text mining and case-automated summarization, tools supporting argumentation, tools concerning sentencing based on the technique of case-based reasoning, the role of abductive reasoning, research into applying AI to legal evidence, tools for fighting crime and tools (...) for identification. (shrink)