The aim of this article is to offer a solution to an exegetical puzzle which Weiner (2020) has recently put as follows: "Why does Frege analyze (some) imperfect parts of natural language?" According to what Weiner calls the "Standard Interpretation", Frege analysed logical imperfections because he "wanted to give a general account of the workings of language" (Dummett 1981). Weiner (2020), in contrast, claims that Frege was solely concerned with the fragment of natural language "in which we express apparently evaluable inferences". I argue that neither of these interpretations offers an accurate picture of the historical Frege. On my view, Frege is (primarily) interested in those linguistic phenomena that are (in some sense or other) relevant to his logical concerns, and I buttress this interpretation by a detailed analysis of Frege's views on existential import, existential presuppositions and colouring.

Frege's Begriffsschrift account of modality involves both a negative and a positive claim. The negative claim is that modal notions are logically insignificant; the positive claim is that modals convey a 'hint' (Wink) as to the speaker's grounds for judgement. This paper is about Frege's positive claim, which has not received much attention. I explain in detail the Fregean notion of hinting and how to distinguish hints from conceptual contents, and I argue that Frege's two-dimensional account of modal talk is supported by various observations. However, it also seems clear that Frege's account cannot be the whole story.

Quite a few scholars have argued that certain subsentential items contribute illocutionary contents. For instance, according to Camp (2013, 2018) using a slur amounts to performing two speech acts at once. Such claims raise the question of how to test for the illocutionariness of an item. I criticize a recent proposal and put forward a new one, which is based on Austin’s idea that illocutionary verbs can be identified by means of his “To say x was to do y” diagnostic. The test I propose can be successfully applied to Camp’s dual act analysis, but one may still wonder whether a speech act theoretic account is ultimately preferable to what Camp calls a “two-factor view”. I conclude by discussing whether the dual act view is indeed better poised to explain the highly variable projection behaviour of slurs.

This paper is a critique of what has become a widespread view of non-at-issue (NAI) contents. On this view, NAI contents are particularly well suited as instruments of manipulation since they are especially difficult to challenge and have a direct effect on the common ground. I argue by contrast, first, that challenging NAI contents is not significantly harder than challenging asserted contents. And second, I show that asserted and NAI contents have much the same effect on the common ground.

The starting point for this article is Holton's (2017) claim that there are no anti-factive attitude verbs (in Indo-European languages). In a first step, I argue that the German verb "w & auml;hnen" (as used by Frege and his contemporaries) is a counter-example. However, it seems as though anti-factives are rarer than factives, which raises the question of how to account for that observation. Since Holton's explanation, as well as a seemingly promising neo-Gricean explanation, turns out to be unsuccessful, I turn to the question of whether the rarity of anti-factives needs to be explained in the first place. I argue that, on closer inspection, anti-factives are not as special as they may appear, and I also argue that the comparative rarity of anti-factives can be explained via the principle of charity.

What, exactly, is the difference between words such as ‘dead’ and ‘deceased’? In this paper, I argue that such differences in register, or style, ought to be construed as genuine differences in non-truth-conditional meaning. I also show that register cannot plausibly accounted for in terms of either presupposition or conventional implicature. Register is, rather, an instance of what I call pure use-conditional meaning. In the case of register, a difference in meaning does not correspond to a difference in the contents speakers intend to convey.

I argue that "general pejoratives" such as "jerk" or "bastard" differ crucially from items such as "that damn N". While items such as the latter typically serve to give vent to one's attitudes, general pejoratives essentially involve judgments about a person's behaviour or character. This is particularly evident in cases where pejoratives occur not as epithets, but as predicate nominals. If we want to account for the overall contribution of words such as "jerk", there are three kinds of content that ought to be distinguished: truth-conditional contents, evaluative presuppositions, and expressive contents that are either at-issue (in the case of expressive predicates) or non-at-issue (in the case of epithets).

I argue that “general pejoratives” such as “jerk” or “bastard” differ crucially from items such as “that damn N”. While items such as the latter typically serve to give vent to one's attitudes, general pejoratives essentially involve judgments about a person's behaviour or character. This is particularly evident in cases where pejoratives occur not as epithets, but as predicate nominals. If we want to account for the overall contribution of words such as “jerk”, there are three kinds of content that ought to be distinguished: truth‐conditional contents, evaluative presuppositions, and expressive contents that are either at‐issue (in the case of expressive predicates) or non‐at‐issue (in the case of epithets).

This paper is partly exegetical, partly systematic. I argue that Frege's account of what he called "colouring" contains some important insights on how communication is related to mental states such as mental images or emotions. I also show that the Fregean perspective is supported by current research in psycholinguistics and that a full understanding of some linguistic phenomena that scholars have accounted for in terms of either semantics or pragmatics need involve psycholinguistic elements.

The author argues that there is no such thing as a unique and general taxonomy of non-at-issue contents. Accordingly, we ought to shun large categories such as “conventional implicature” (Grice), “F-implicature” (Horn), “ CI ” (Potts), “Class B” (Tonhauser, Beaver, Roberts & Simons) or the like. As an alternative, we may, first, describe the “semantic profile” of linguistic devices as accurately as possible. Second, we may explicitly tailor our categories to particular theoretical purposes.

Quite a few scholars claim that many implicata are propositions about the speaker’s epistemic or doxastic states. I argue, on the contrary, that implicata are generally non-epistemic. Some alleged cases of epistemic implicature are not implicatures in the first place because they do not meet Grice’s non-triviality requirement, and epistemic implicata in general would infringe on the maxim of quantity. Epistemic implicatures ought to be construed as members of a larger family of implicature-like phenomena.

Why did Frege offer only proper names as examples of presupposition triggers? Some scholars claim that Frege simply did not care about the full range of presuppositional phenomena. This paper argues, in contrast, that he had good reasons for employing an extremely narrow notion of ‘Voraussetzung’. On Frege’s view, many devices that are now construed as presupposition triggers either express several thoughts at once or merely ‘illuminate’ a thought in a particular way. Fregean presuppositions, in contrast, are essentially tied to names.

This paper offers a detailed reconstruction of Frege's theory of side-thoughts (Nebengedanken) and its relation to other parts of his pragmatics, most notably to the notion of colouring (Farbung), to the notion of presupposition (Voraussetzung), and to his implicit notion of multi-propositionality. I also highlight some important differences between the subsemantic categories employed by Frege and those used in contemporary pragmatics.

Many scholars claim that Frege's theory of colouring (Farbung) is committed to a radical form of subjectivism or emotivism. Some other scholars claim that Frege's concept of colouring is a precursor to Grice's notion of conventional implicature. I argue that both of these claims are mistaken. Finally, I propose a taxonomy of Fregean colourings: for Frege, there are (1) purely aesthetic colourings, (2) communicative colourings or hints, (3) non-communicative colourings.

Expressive-Assertivism, a metaethical theory championed by Daniel Boisvert, is sometimes considered to be a particularly promising form of hybrid expressivism. One of the main virtues of Expressive-Assertivism is that it seems to offer a simple solution to the Frege-Geach problem. I argue, in contrast, that Expressive-Assertivism faces much the same challenges as pure expressivism.

Abstract: Frege’s mature writings apparently contain two different criteria of sense identity. While in „Über Sinn und Bedeutung“ (1892) and in „Kurze Übersicht meiner logischen Lehren“ (1906?) Frege seems to advocate a psychological criterion, his letter to Husserl of December 12, 1906 offers a thoroughly logical criterion of sense identity. It is argued that the latter proposal is not a „momentary aberration“, but rather Frege’s official criterion; his psychological criteria only serve as a way of illustrating questions of sense identity by appealing to the thoughts of ideal thinkers.

According to (cognitivist) judgment internalism, there is a conceptual connection between moral judgment and motivation. This paper offers an argument against that kind of internalism that does not involve counterexamples of the amoralist sort. Instead, it is argued that these forms of judgment internalism fall prey to a Frege-Geach type argument.

No AccessErkenntnis/ErkenntnistheorienThorsten SanderThorsten Sanderhttps://doi.org/10.7767/boehlau.9783205790099.137SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous chapter Next chapter FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book cover ISBN: 978-3-205-78540-8 eISBN: 978-3-205-79009-9HistoryPublished online:July 2018 PDF download