Volume 46 (2016): Issue 1 (September 2016)

All forms of nominal reference, whether quantificational, definite, rigid, deictic, or personal, require that the nominals in question appear in relevant grammatical configurations. Reference is in this sense a grammatical phenomenon. It is never determined lexically or a word-world relation in a purely semantic or causal sense. Here it is further argued that the principles of the grammar of object-reference naturally extend to cases where the reference of one nominal depends on that of another, i.e. the grammar of referential dependence, without any further special grammatical relations such as ‘binding’ required. This further includes a relation of (referential) identity.

The aim of this paper is to discuss theories that attempt to single out the class of intentional states by appealing to factors that are supposedly criterial for intentional sentences. The papers starts with distinguishing two issues that arise when one thinks about intentional expressions: the Taxonomy Problem and the Fundamental Demarcation Problem. The former concerns the relation between the classes of distinct intentional verbs and distinct intentional states. The latter concerns the question about how to distinguish intentional states and acts from the non-intentional ones. Next, the general desiderata for theories providing criteria for singling out the class of intentional sentences are introduced. Finally, distinct proposals for providing such criteria are analyzed. Author argues that neither is satisfactory.

This paper offers an analysis of indexical expressions and proper names as they are used in proverbs. Both indexicals and proper names contribute properties rather than objects to the propositions expressed when they are used in sentences interpreted as proverbs. According to the proposal, their contribution is accounted for by the mechanism of descriptive anaphora. Indexicals with rich linguistic meaning, such as ‘I’, ‘you’ or ‘today’, turn out to be cases of the attributive uses of indexicals, i.e. uses whose contribution relies on the linguistic meaning of the word. Third person pronouns, names of locations as well as surnames are analyzed as non-attributive descriptive uses.

In the debate between contextualism and relativism about predicates of taste, the challenge from disagreement (the objection that contextualism cannot account for disagreement in ordinary exchanges involving such predicates) has played a central role. This paper investigates one way of answering the challenge consisting on appeal to certain, less focused on, uses of predicates of taste. It argues that the said thread is unsatisfactory, in that it downplays certain exchanges that constitute the core disagreement data. Additionally, several arguments to the effect that the exchanges in question don’t amount to disagreement are considered and rejected.

In the present paper I present the metalinguistic solutions to the ‘lost disagreement’ problem proposed (independently) Sundell and Plunkett [2013] and Barker [2012]. I argue that metalinguistic negotiations about taste, even though successful in explaining the intuition of disagreement in a vast number of cases, are not an accurate solution to the disagreement problem in contextualism when it comes to the most paradigmatic case of “tasty”. I also argue against the account of faultless disagreement explained via vagueness of taste predicates [Barker, 2012]. I believe that the notion of faultlessness employed in the discussion of vagueness [Wright, 1994] is a different notion than the one employed in the discussion of taste discourse [Kölbel, 2003].

Does a high degree of confirmation make an inductive argument valid? I will argue that it depends on the kind of question to which the argument is meant to be providing an answer. We should distinguish inductive generalization from inductive extrapolation even in cases where they might appear to have the same answer, and also from confirmation of a hypothesis.

The double negation has always been considered by the logical systems from ancient times to the present. In fact, that is an issue that the current syntactic theories studying human reasoning, for example, the mental logic theory, address today. However, in this paper, I claim that, in the case of some languages such as Spanish, the double negation causes problems for the cognitive theories mainly based on formal schemata and supporting the idea of a universal syntax of thought in the human mind. Thus, I propose that, given those problems, semantic frameworks such as that of the mental models theory seem to be more appropriate for explaining the human inferential activity.

The paper traces how disappointment with the notion of linguistic meaning has led to a shift towards the new, technical term of “narrow content”. In the first part of the paper I analyze the ways “narrow content” is understood in the literature. I show two important distinctions which have to be applied to the term in order to avoid confusion – the difference between context and functional theories of narrow content, and the difference between mental and linguistic narrow content. I argue that the most controversial combination of both distinctions is the idea of functional linguistic narrow content. In the second part of the paper I show that, contrary to the initial impression, this controversial, cut back notion of narrow content sheds some much needed light on several key semantic phenomena which we might otherwise be unable to explain – and because of this can be seen as a rightful descendant of the notion of meaning.

The paper proposes a new semantics with dependent types for indefinites, encompassing both the data related to their exceptional scopal behavior and the data related to their anaphoric (dynamic) properties. The proposal builds on the formal system combining generalized quantifiers ([Mostowski 1957], [Lindström 1966]) with dependent types ([Martin-Löf 1972], [Makkai 1995]) in [Grudzińska & Zawadowski 2014] and [Grudzińska & Zawadowski 2016].

Classic understanding of logic as an instrument of cognition, which, in effect, pertain rather to human’s mind than to reality itself, gives rise to the fundamental mapping problem of reconciliation of this reality with any possible practices of its representations in thought. In other words, it is essentially not the same thing that can be thought and that can be. However, after unusual and highly abstract (essentially geometric) Grothendieck constructions gave rise to so called categorial analysis of logic, it became possible to show, that (up to categorial equivalence) Parmenides after all was right.

The article analyses the approach to the study of the sphere of language between theory of law and the philosophy of language. The aim of the paper is to study the range of applicability of philosophical and linguistic conceptions in theory of law. Law theory reflects certain movements and controversies that have been significant in linguistic sciences. The analyses, which, so far, have been conducted in theory of law, concentrated mainly on the use of the results of such achievements made by the representatives of the philosophy of language and linguistics as formal languages theories, transformational-generative theories, structuralism, formalism, pragmalinguistics. In this article, it is claimed that contemporary changes in the humanities justify the expansion of the range of jurisprudence integration to some other approaches, different from formalistic and pragmatic ones.

The paper presents H. L. A. Hart as a leading exponent of the analytic orientation in legal philosophy. Hart showed that the principles and methods of analytic philosophy yield fruitful implications to law, where they may foster fresh ideas and innovative solutions. The text emphasizes the linguistic aspect of Hart’s works; his achievements in legal theory are discussed in the context of the principles of ordinary language philosophy.