Performatives are declarative sentences where their use by a speaker enables the speaker to perform an additional action. This paper argues that performativity requires knowledge. The speaker must know what they say to perform the additional action. The significance of this conclusion is then discussed.

The philosopher G.E. Moore first observed that making a statement and then denying that one knows or believes that statement is unacceptable. For example, It is raining, but I don't think that is defective. Across six experiments (n = 600), this study investigates the nature and extent of this unacceptability as a way to adjudicate between alternative theoretical explanations of this defectiveness. Results confirm that Moorean conjunctions are judged more acceptable than semantic contradictions (e.g., It is raining, but it isn't) but less so than felicitous conjunctions (e.g., It is raining, but it's okay), and this is so regardless of whether Moorean conjunctions are produced by a person or by an artificial agent such as ChatGPT. However, if the first conjunct is anchored on a perspective other than the speaker's, Moorean conjunctions increase in acceptability (e.g., The train arrives at noon, but I think it won't). Several features can drive this perspective-shift, yet the acceptability of Moorean conjunctions did not match that of felicitous sentences in our sample. Our findings support the view that the unacceptability is a byproduct of mindreading, a key part of the social cognition that is crucial to using and understanding language.

Across numerous languages, the attitude verb think is learned later than other attitude verbs like want. But why? This essays advances a new hypothesis: children initially treat think as a veridical yet non-factive verb akin to a class of verbs I call confirmatives. This hypothesis is argued to better explain existing data that troubles other hypotheses, and to find support from the ease with which children represent knowledge but not belief.

We argue that knowledge is not the norm of belief given that 'I believe' is used to hedge. We explore the consequences of this argument for the normative relationship between belief and assertion.

This essay offers an explanation of how assertions express that the speaker has a propositional attitude toward what's asserted. The explanation is that this feature of assertion is owed to a hearer's spontaneous mindreading. I call this the assertoric mindreading hypothesis . Once developed and defended, the hypothesis is used to investigate which attitude is expressed. Since the attitude expressed is the attitude tracked during mindreading, the attitude must have a certain profile. It is argued that only factive attitudes like knowledge have this profile. Non‐factive attitudes like belief or acceptance are ineligible.

A conviction had by many Christians over many centuries is that natural language is inadequate for describing God. This is the doctrine of divine ineffability. Apophaticism understands divine ineffability as it being justified or proper to negate statements that describe God. This paper develops and defends a version of apophaticism in which the negation involved is metalinguistic. The interest of this metalinguistic apophaticism is two-fold. First, it provides a philosophical model of historical apophaticisms that shows their rational coherence. Second, metalinguistic apophaticism enables a minimal understanding of ineffability that is independently plausible given its minor commitments.

Epistemic terms of various syntactic categories can uniformly be used to do the same thing—to hedge. This essay clarifies hedging as a phenomenon and explains how hedging happens by advancing the positional theory. The guiding idea is that, in uttering declaratives, speakers signal what their epistemic position is towards the content put into play by the declarative. The default signal is that the speaker knows. But when an epistemic term hedges, the term overrides the default. The non-default signal sent is that the speaker or someone else occupies the position indicated by the term. To make that idea precise, the positional theory treats hedging as a discourse function. Terms hedge because of how a declarative containing an epistemic term is situated within a discourse.

Evidentials indicate a source of evidence for a content, and sometimes do more. Depending on the language, they also express the speaker's belief in that content or its possibility. This paper is about how to explain the expression of belief. It argues that semantic explanations are better than illocutionary explanations in two ways. First, a general argument is provided that a semantic explanation is preferable. Second, a case study is given to the evidentials of Cuzco Quechua to argue that a semantic explanation is preferable to the illocutionary explanation that has been proposed in great detail by Faller (2002, 2012, 2014). The upshot is that illocutionary explanations of how belief is expressed are dispensable for at least some languages with grammaticalized evidentials.

Speakers offer testimony. They also hedge. This essay offers an account of how hedging makes a difference to testimony. Two components of testimony are considered: how testimony warrants a hearer's attitude, and how testimony changes a speaker's responsibilities. Starting with a norm-based approach to testimony where hearer's beliefs are prima facie warranted because of social norms and speakers acquire responsibility from these same norms, I argue that hedging alters both components simultaneously. It changes which attitudes a hearer is prima facie warranted in forming in response to testimony, and reduces how much responsibility a speaker undertakes in testifying. A consequence of this account is that speakers who hedge merely for strategic purposes deprive their hearers of warrant for stronger doxastic attitudes.

Propositions are traditionally regarded as performing vital roles in theories of natural language, logic, and cognition.This chapter o ers an opinionated survey of recent literature to assess whether they are still needed to perform three linguistic roles: be the meaning of a declarative sentence in a context, be what is designated by certain linguistic expressions, and be the content of illocutionary acts.After considering many of the relevant theoretical choice-points, I suggest that there remains a linguistic basis for propositions, but not for some of the traditional reasons.

A speaker's use of a sentence does more than contribute content to a conversation. It also expresses the speaker's attitude. This essay is about which attitude or attitudes are expressed by using an interrogative sentence to ask a question. With reference to eight lines of data about how questions are circulated in conversation, it is argued that a desire to know the question's answer(s) is expressed.

Assertion is widely regarded as an act associated with an epistemic position. To assert is to represent oneself as occupying this position and/or to be required to occupy this position. Within this approach, the most common view is that assertion is strong: the associated position is knowledge or certainty. But recent challenges to this common view present new data that are argued to be better explained by assertion being weak. Old data widely taken to support assertion being strong has also been challenged. This paper examines such challenges and finds them wanting. Far from diminishing the case for strong assertion, carefully considering new and old data reveals that assertion is as strong as ever.

What sort of epistemic positions are compatible with inquiries driven by interrogative attitudes like wonder and puzzlement? The ignorance norm provides a partial answer: interrogative attitudes directed at a particular question are never compatible with knowledge of the question's answer. But some are tempted to think that interrogative attitudes are incompatible with weaker positions like belief as well. This paper defends that the ignorance norm is exhaustive. All epistemic positions weaker than knowledge directed at the answer to a question are compatible with having an interrogative attitude towards that question. We offer two arguments for this conclusion. The first is based on considerations about the role of hedging in inquiry. The second is conditional on considerations related to the aim of inquiry as a goal-directed activity.

Here is a question as intriguing as it is brief: what are we ? The animalist’s answer is equal in brevity: we are animals . This stark formulation of the animalist slogan distances it from nearby claims—that we are essentially animals, for example, or that we have purely biological criteria of identity over time. Is the animalist slogan—unburdened by modal or criterial commitments—still interesting , though? Or has it lost its bite? In this article we address such questions by presenting a positive case for the importance of animalism and applying that case to recent critiques.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsWeaver, Bryan R., and Scharp, Kevin. Semantics for Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 176. $55.00 (cloth).Daniel Fogal and Peter van ElswykDaniel FogalNew York University Search for more articles by this author and Peter van ElswykUniversity of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 131, Number 2January 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711224 Views: 73Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

A traditional problem with the performative hypothesis is that it cannot assign proper truth-conditions to a declarative sentence. This paper shows that the problem is solved by adopting a multidimensional semantics on which sentences have more than just truth-conditions. This is good news for those who want to at least partially revive the hypothesis. The solution also brings into focus a lesson about what issues to consider when drawing the semantics/pragmatics boundary.

The animalist says we are animals. This thesis is commonly understood as the universal generalization that all human persons are human animals. This article proposes an alternative: the thesis is a generic that admits of exceptions. We defend the resulting view, which we call ‘generic animalism’, and show its aptitude for diagnosing the limits of eight case-based objections to animalism.

A speaker's use of a declarative sentence in a context has two effects: it expresses a proposition and represents the speaker as knowing that proposition. This article is about how to explain the second effect. The standard explanation is act-based. A speaker is represented as knowing because their use of a declarative in a context tokens the act-type of assertion and assertions represent knowledge in what's asserted. In this article, a semantic explanation is proposed according to which declaratives covertly host a know-parenthetical. A speaker is thereby represented as knowing the proposition expressed because that is the semantic contribution of the parenthetical. This view is called PARENTHETICALISM. The article contends that parentheticalism better explains knowledge representation than alternatives. As a consequence of outperforming assertoric explanations, parentheticalism opens the door to altogether eliminating the act-type of assertion from linguistic theorizing.

Epistemic contextualism in the style of Lewis (in Aust J Philos 74:549–567, 1996) maintains that ascriptions of knowledge to a subject vary in truth with the alternatives that can be eliminated by the subject’s evidence in a context. Schaffer (in Philos Stud 119:73–103, 2004, in Oxford Stud Epistemol 1:235–271, 2005, in Philos Phenomenol Res 75:383–403, 2007, in Philos Issues 18(1):1–19, 2008, in: Schaffer, Loewer (eds) A companion to David Lewis, pp 473–490. Wiley, Hoboken, 2015), Schaffer and Knobe (in Noûs 46:675–708, 2012), and Schaffer and Szabó (in Philos Stud 168(2):491–543, 2014) hold that the question under discussion or qud always determines these alternatives in a context. This paper shows that the qud does not perform such a role for know and uses this result to draw a few lessons about the metasemantics of context-sensitivity.