Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

What does it take for a necessity operator to capture an absolute as opposed to merely relative sense of necessity? Bob Hale (2013) delineates and formalizes three conceptions of absolute necessity, which he takes to be co-extensive, and to permit non-logical, absolutely necessary truths. We raise problems with Hale’s three conceptions of absolute necessity, both on their own terms and as regards the compatibility of all the features Hale wants them to possess. We show that Hale’s formulations are less informative than they may seem. They are all in important…

This article introduces Logicism about Necessity as a competitor to the currently popular Essentialism. The main point of contention between the two views concerns the ultimate source of metaphysical necessity. Essentialists take essences to ultimately ground metaphysical necessity, Logicists take logic to play that role. I provide some support for the claim that one of these two views is correct, and I use recent material from Fabrice Correia and Alex Skiles to develop a specific version of Logicism in some detail. The main ambition of the article is to present…

An increasingly popular view at the intersection of logic and metaphysics is that logical necessities have their source in the essences of logical entities: metaphysical necessity has its source in the essences or natures of things, and logical necessity is a restriction of metaphysical necessity. But logical and metaphysical necessity are, nevertheless, importantly distinct: there are metaphysical necessities that are not logical necessities. I raise a serious problem for this essentialist view. It seems as though they must misclassify some merely metaphysical necessities as logical necessities. I argue that the…

We give a short recap of how the notion of context has been developed in the philosophy of language since its introduction by Frege. We introduce various aspects of the concept of context: context of utterance, context at the semantics-pragmatics boundary, and social and cognitive context. We thereby offer to readers not accustomed to the distinctions used in the philosophy of language a framework to better understand the papers enclosed in this issue (and of which we provide summaries at the end of this introduction).

The paper aims to add contextual dependence to the new directival theory of meaning, a functional role semantics based on Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s directival theory of meaning. We show that the original formulation of the theory does not have a straight answer on how the meaning of indexicals and demonstratives is established. We illustrate it in the example of some problematic axiomatic and inferential directives containing indexicals. We show that the main reason why developing the new directival theory of meaning in this direction is difficult is that the theory focuses…

The paper considers the hypothesis that proper names are simple demonstratives. In the first part, I provide the general motivation for an indexical treatment of proper names as well as assess the strengths and weaknesses of existing indexical accounts. The second part is devoted to proposing a new account that treats proper names as simple demonstratives, where referents are determined by the speaker’s referential intention. In my proposal, I use the hybrid approach toward indexical expressions developed by Wolfgang Künne (1992) and Stefano Predelli (2006). I argue that this approach…

The border war between semantics and pragmatics has an early version in the dispute between Mates and Cavell. While Mates argues for a strict separation between semantic inferences and mere pragmatic regularities, Cavell argues for a “logic of ordinary language”, identifying the commitments following the act of saying something. This answer gives a clue to the contemporary debate between minimalists and contextualists: we may either think that pragmatic inferences are only effective after the proposition is grasped, or think that it is part of the determination of what is said.…

In this note, we discuss the analyticity puzzle affecting the logicality of language hypothesis. The analyticity puzzle is the fact that only some analyticities result in ungrammaticality, which seems to conflict with the idea that an inferential device plays a role in determining the set of the possible sentences of the language. The literature includes two solutions to account for this puzzling evidence. According to one of the solutions, the deductive system can access both ungrammatical and grammatical trivialities, though only the latter can be rescued, i.e. made informative, via…

Two strong contenders for scalar implicature (SI) computation are the pragmatic and the grammatical theories. While the former sustains that context plays a major role, the latter suggests context is required but is lexically and monotonically constrained (Chierchia 2012). In particular, this paper discusses a processing account for SIs that is dependent on the satisfaction of the Strawsonian presupposition of existence, necessary for the realization of the asymmetric entailment pattern among relevant alternatives. This observation complies with the principles of the grammatical view, for it predicts SIs in the presence…

In this paper, we propose an account of metaphor identification on the basis of contextual coherence. In doing so, we build on previous work by Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides that appeals to rhetorical relations in order to explain discourse structure and the constraints on the interpretation of metaphor that follow from it. Applying this general idea to our problem, we will show that rhetorical relations are sometimes insufficient and sometimes inadequate for deciding whether a given utterance is a case of metaphor. They are insufficient, since rhetorical relations fall…