This paper is grounded on an exegetically creative reading of Kaplan's late approach to dthat-terms. I do have a few exegetic pretensions. In particular, I simply assume what I take to be the central tenets of Kaplan's theory of demonstratives between 1977 and 1989, and I develop them according to ideas suggested by certain passages in Afterthoughts. But my developments are also unashamedly creative. I recognize that I may overemphasize a few carefully chosen snippets and that, in doing so, I may end up ignoring other important junctures. But I happily trade textual faithfulness for theoretical insight: if on the right track, my results hopefully cast a new light not only on Kaplan's take on 'dthat' but also on the fundamental ideas in his philosophical and semantic framework.

This paper discusses the phenomenon of linguistic taboo.It contrasts that phenomenon with the truth-conditional and non-truthconditional dimensions of meaning, paying particular attention to slurs and coarseness.It then highlights the peculiarities of taboo and its meta-semantic repercussions: taboo is a meaning-related feature that is nevertheless directly associated with the tokening process.In the conclusion, it gestures to the role of taboo within a theory of linguistic action and the standard framework for conversational exchanges.On these results, I am going to end by looking at some of the harms that epistemic injustice inflicts upon its victims.

This essay proposes a dissolution of the so-called 'semantic problem of fictional names' by arguing that fictional names are only fictionally proper names.The ensuing idea that fictional texts do not encode propositional content is accompanied by an explanation of the contentful effects of fiction grounded on the idea of impartation.After some preliminaries about (referring and empty) genuine proper names, this essay explains how a fiction's content may be conveyed by virtue of the fictional impartations provided by a fictional teller.This idea is in turn developed with respect to homodiegetic narratives such as Doyle's Holmes stories and to heterodiegetic narratives such as Jane Austen's Emma.The last parts of the essay apply this apparatus to cases of so-called 'talk about fiction', as in our commentaries about those stories and that novel.

This essay proposes a dissolution of the so-called ‘semantic problem of fictional names’ by arguing that fictional names are only fictionally proper names. The ensuing idea that fictional texts do not encode propositional content is accompanied by an explanation of the contentful effects of fiction grounded on the idea of impartation. After some preliminaries about (referring and empty) genuine proper names, this essay explains how a fiction’s content may be conveyed by virtue of the fictional impartations provided by a fictional teller. This idea is in turn developed with respect to homodiegetic narratives such as Doyle’s Holmes stories and to heterodiegetic narratives such as Jane Austen’s Emma. The last parts of the essay apply this apparatus to cases of so-called ‘talk about fiction’, as in our commentaries about those stories and that novel.

This essay presents an analysis of the conversational role of disambiguation, with special attention to disambiguating parentheticals such as 'bats, the furry animals, are not easy to find'. The essay proposes an enriched representation of conversational states as pairs of an interpretation function and standard common belief, it represents disambiguations within the ensuing framework, and, on the basis of these conceptual tools, it proposes a systematic picture of the updates achieved by disambiguating parentheticas.

Abstract This book defends a Radical Fictionalist Semantics for fictional discourse. Focusing on proper names as prototypical devices of reference, it argues that fictional names are only fictionally proper names, and that, as a result, fictional sentences do not encode propositions. According to Radical Fictionalism, the contentful outcomes achieved by fiction are derived from the outcomes of so-called impartation, that is, from the effects achieved by the use of language. As a result, Radical Fictionalism pays special attention to fictional telling and to related themes in narrative fiction. In particular, the book proposes a Radical Fictionalist approach to the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic fiction, and to the divide between storyworlds and narrative peripheries. These ideas are then applied to the discussion of classic themes in the philosophy of fiction, including narrative time, literary translation, storyworld importation, fictional languages, inconsistent fictions, nested narratives, and narrative closure. Particular attention is also given to the commitments of Radical Fictionalism when it comes to discourse about fiction, as in prefixed sentences of the form ‘according to fiction F, … ’. In its final two chapters, the book extends Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse. In Chapter 7 it introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and in Chapter 8 it pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters.

The distinction between a merely ‘rigidifying’ dthat and a directly-referential take on dthat-terms is well known, and is explicitly highlighted by Kaplan in Afterthoughts, his 1989 commentary on Demonstratives. What is not equally widely recognized is that Afterthoughts also oscillates between three different directly referential proposals. This essay discusses the semantic and philosophical implications of these different directly-referential interpretations of ‘dthat’, paying particular attention to (a) the relationships between syntactic and propositional structure, (b) the structure and makeup of contexts in the semantics of indexical languages, (c) the significance of context shifting devices and of so-called operators on character, and (d) the aims and scope of propositional semantics.

This paper is officially devoted to the analysis of ‘Philadelphia is difficult to spell’. I challenge what I call the Mention Hypothesis, namely the notion that the expression ‘Philadelphia’ must be mentioned at a level suitable for the interpretation of that sentence. After the exploration of two use-based alternatives, I proceed to the defence of a Contextual Hypothesis. I conclude with a discussion of the consequences of the Contextual Hypothesis, its theoretical implementation, and its relationships with other semantics matters.

Taking inspiration from Searle's The Logic of Fictional Discourse', this essay presents an argument against different versions of the so-called speech act theory of fiction'. In particular, it argues that a Uniformity Argument may be constructed, which is additional to the Determination Argument commonly attributed to Searle, and which does not rely on his presumably controversial Determination Principle. This Uniformity Argument is equally powerful against the Dedicated Speech Act' theories that Searle originally targeted, and the more recent, Grice-inspired versions of speech-act approaches to fictional discourse.

This essay studies the semantic properties of what I call Russell-names. Russell-names bear intimate semantic relations with descriptive conditions, in consonance with the main tenets of descriptivism. Yet, they are endowed with the semantic properties attributed to ordinary proper names by Millianism: they are rigid and non-indexical devices of direct reference. This is not an essay in natural language semantics, and remains deliberately neutral with respect to the question whether any among the expressions we ordinarily classify as proper names behave as Russell-names. Its aim is rather that of casting a new light on the traditional debate about descriptivism on the one hand, and, on the other, what is commonly understood as a radically anti-descriptivist approach. From the viewpoint of descriptivism, the conceivability of Russell-names provides welcome relief from the pressure exerted by considerations at odds with a flaccid and/or indexical treatment of proper names. Conversely, from a Millian standpoint, the conceivability of Russell-names indicates that the Millian stance, far from providing a meagre picture of names as 'mere tags', is at least in principle consistent with the recognition of their semantic bonds with richer descriptive material. The Appendix provides a formal treatment of Russell-names within a model theoretic semantics for indexical intensional languages, developed within an original 'double-context' framework.

This essay is devoted to an analysis of the semantic significance of a fashionable view of proper names, the Predicate Theory of names (PT), typically developed in the direction of the Metalinguistic Theory of names (MT). According to MT, ‘syntactic evidence supports the conclusion that a name such as ‘Kennedy’ is analyzable in terms of the predicate (general term) ‘individual named ‘Kennedy’’. This analysis is in turn alleged to support a descriptivist treatment of proper names in designative position, presumably in contrast with theories of names as ‘directly referring rigid designators’. The main aim of this essay is that of questioning the significance of PT and MT as theories of designation: even granting for the argument’s sake that names are analyzable as (metalinguistic) predicates, their designative occurrences may be interpreted in consonance with the dictates of Direct Reference—indeed, in consonance with the radically anti-descriptivist version of Direct Reference I call Millianism.

Journal Article Kaplan’s three monsters Get access Stefano Predelli Stefano Predelli University of Nottingham Nottingham, NG7 2RD Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Analysis, Volume 74, Issue 3, July 2014, Pages 389–393, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anu059 Published: 27 June 2014

This essay argues that relativist semantics provide fruitful frameworks for the study of the relationships between meaning and truth-conditions, and consequently for the analysis of the logical properties of expressions. After a discussion of the role of intensionality and indexicality within classic double-indexed semantics, I explain that the non-relativistic identification of the parameters needed for the definition of truth and for the interpretation of indexicals is grounded on considerations that are irrelevant for the assessment of the relationships between meaning and truth.

This essay proposes a novel semantic account of demonstratives, aimed at clarifying the sense in which demonstratives are semantically dependent on demonstrations. Its first two sections summarize the main views currently on the market. Section 3 argues that they are all vitiated by the same shortcomings, and yield incorrect results of 'truth in virtue of character' and entailment. Section 4 proposes a different account of the relationships between demonstratives and demonstrations, grounded on the idea of truth-conditionally irrelevant aspects of the meaning of certain expressions. The resulting view of demonstratives is consonant with the so-called 'bare boned' account of their truth-conditional role, but is also in the position to recognize that the dependence of a demonstrative on a demonstration is, in some sense of the term, meaning-governed. The final section of this essay discusses the distinction between 'vacuous' and 'incomplete' uses of demonstratives, and cases involving multiple occurrences of these expressions.

This essay argues that cases of apparently sub-sentential speech, such as Charles’ utterance of ‘a world famous topologist’ in the presence of a suitably salient woman, are unproblematic from the viewpoint of the Traditional View of meaning and truth-conditions. My argument is grounded on the distinction between different senses of ‘truth-conditions’ in double-index semantics, and on an understanding of semantic inputs as constraints on logical forms. Given these conceptual resources, I argue that an utterly traditional understanding of the relationships between meaning and truth yields the intuitively desired results.

The main aim of this essay is that of defending springboard for denial of what Richard a certain analysis of sentences that play a central Wollheim called the physical object hypothe role in our discourse about music, such as sis: works of music are not physical objects or events, at least in sense that they are not (1) Aida ends pianissimo sort of things that bear straightforward, direct, causal interactions with denizens of physical or world. . ... , , This conclusion and related hypothesis that (2) Pierrot Lunaire begins on A natural.1 • ■ ■ • . v ' musical works are in some sense abstract entities