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International audience; Judgments of taste are often assumed to be evaluative, in the sense of expressing either a positive or a negative assessment of the object under evaluation. However, the evaluative character of predicates of personal taste (PPTs) has received relatively little attention from a semantic point of view. Our aim is to fill out this lacuna. We show that PPTs do not divide neatly into positively and negatively valenced terms. Instead, we suggest that many PPTs, such as 'surprising' and 'intense', are neutral: they are underspecified for their valence and, depending on the context, can give rise to a positive, a negative, or an ambivalent evaluation. We investigate how such neutral PPTs differ from evaluative PPTs, and how they differ from certain other terms that are neither positive nor negative, such as 'average'. We use a two-pronged approach. First, we propose two novel linguistic tests that serve as diagnostics to distinguish the class of neutral PPTs from valenced PPTs, and we use corpus examples to corroborate the tests. Second, we use information from pre-existing psychological norms of valence to further explore the class of adjectives that we hypothesize are neutral.

The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the ques0on of how they relate, on the one hand, to objec0ve reality and, on the other, to subjec0ve experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analy0c philosophers for over a century, it is only rela0vely recently that more interdisciplinary and empirically-oriented approaches to such issues have begun to see light. The present chapter aims to make a contribu0on of that kind. We will present the results of an empirical-specifically, corpus linguis0c-study that offers evidence that moral predicates exhibit hallmarks of subjec0vity at the linguis0c level, but also, that they differ significantly from paradigma0cally subjec0ve predicates.

UIDB/00183/2020 UIDP/00183/2020 This publication is based upon work from COST Action CA-17132 European Network for Argumentation and Public Policy Analysis (http://publicpolicyargument.eu), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). The present chapter concerns arguments whose conclusions take the form of a prescription such as you ought to do such-and-such, which have driven much public discussion and policy since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to tackle a hitherto under-explored characteristic of many such normative arguments, namely, the relationship between evaluative and deontic propositions, depending on whether they occur as premises or conclusions in such arguments. In order to investigate how willing people are to argue from what is good to what one ought to do, and the other way round, we conducted an Inferential Judgment Experiment. Participants were presented with arguments involving deontic and evaluative propositions, and had to judge whether they could infer conclusion from premise. The stimuli that we used are tightly related to the argumentation surrounding the pandemic, regarding the measures of preventing the spread of COVID-19. The results of the study show that there is a robust inferential connection between evaluatives and deontics, but at the same time, a significant asymmetry as well. We explore several theoretical approaches to the relationship between the deontic and the evaluative realm, and test their predictions against the results of our study. publishersversion published

L'épistémologie sociale est une analyse de la dimension sociale de la connaissance. Son point de départ est le constat que bien des phénomènes ne nous sont connus que par l'intermédiaire des autres et donc que la connaissance a non seulement des sources directes, celles auxquelles le sujet a lui-même accès, mais aussi des sources indirectes reposant sur la confiance ou sur l'autorité accordée à autrui. Elle s'intéresse donc aux conditions de la transmission de l'information venant d'autrui, et aux relations de confiance et d'autorité épistémiques, notamment dans le domaine des sciences. Mais ses préoccupations sont plus larges et concernent tout ce qui a trait à la dimension sociale de la connaissance: la construction, au cours d'interactions, de justifications recevables ou acceptables; les modes ordinaires de pensée et de raisonnement; ou encore les relations de coopération et de collaboration dans une « communauté épistémique ». De plus elle reprend des questions qui étaient au cœur de la théorie durkeimienne de la connaissance, celle par exemple des croyances collectives, ou l'idée d'un sujet collectif du savoir. Par là elle se rapproche des social studies of science, tout en s'en distinguant par l'adoption d'un point de vue normatif et par le refus du relativisme. Ce volume présente un ensemble de recherches représentatives de ces différentes préoccupations. Elles ont en commun de reconnaître la spécificité de l'idée de normes de la connaissance, et, s'agissant de concevoir la dimension sociale de celle-ci, de se garder des formes radicales de holisme, pour lesquelles les groupes sociaux sont des entités sui generis.

International audience; We investigate various linguistic criteria that may be used in delineating the class of aesthetic adjectives. We also discuss the relationship between genuinely aesthetic adjectives (of which 'beautiful' and 'ugly' are paradigms) and other adjectives that may, but need not, be used in making an aesthetic judgment.

International audience; Aesthetic judgments are often expressed by means of predicates that, unlike 'beautiful' or 'ugly', are not primarily aesthetic, or even evaluative, such as 'intense' or 'harrowing'. This paper aims to explain how such adjectives can convey a value-judgment, and one, moreover, whose positive or negative valence depends on the context.

I investigate the relationship among the notions of meaning, content, and what is said. It is widely held that indexicals – words like 'this', 'I', or 'today' – contribute their reference, and nothing but their reference, to the semantic content, and thereby undermine any tentative identification of semantic content with lexical meaning. Against the mainstream view, I argue that semantic content is lexical meaning, for indexical and non-indexical expressions alike. In Chapter 1, I lay down this proposal in all due detail, explaining how to think of the semantic content of sentences containing indexicals, and articulating the relationship between content, truth, and reference. In Chapter 2, I present a number of problems for the existing accounts of what is said, and then show that if we think of semantic content along the lines of my proposal, we may account for the problematic cases while identifying the asserted content (or what is said) with semantic content. In Chapter 3, I show how my account extends, on the one hand, to definite descriptions and proper names, and, on the other, to epistemic modals and predicates of taste.

The first part of the present paper has been published as an independent article, under the title "The Problem of De Se Assertion", Erkenntnis 76 (2012): 49-58.; It has been long known (Perry (1977, 1979), Lewis (1981)) that de se attitudes, such as beliefs and desires that one has about oneself, call for a special treatment in theories of attitudinal content. The aim of this paper is to raise similar concerns for theories of asserted content. The received view, inherited from Kaplan (1989), has it that if Alma says "I am hungry," the asserted content, or what is said, is the proposition that Alma is hungry (at a given time). I argue that the received view has difficulties handing de se assertion, i.e. contents that one expresses using the first person pronoun, to assert something about oneself. I start from the observation that when two speakers say "I am hungry," one may truly report them as having said the same thing. It has often been held that the possibility of such reports comes from the fact that the two speakers are, after all, uttering the same words, and are in this sense "saying the same thing". I argue that this approach fails, and that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to use the same words, or words endowed with the same meaning, in order to be truly reported as same-saying. I also argue that reports of same-saying in the case of de se assertion differ significantly from such reports in the case of two speakers merely implicating the same thing. Finally, I outline a new account of the content of assertion, similar to Lewis's account of de se attitudes. The proposal is, roughly, when Alma says "I am hungry", the asserted content just the property of being hungry, and it is a property that Alma asserts of herself. I then propose to generalize the account to the other cases in a way that departs from Lewis's account, and I close by showing how my proposal handles the cases discussed in the first part of the paper.

This paper is driven by the idea that the contextualism-relativism debate regarding the semantics of value-attributions turns upon certain extra-semantic assumptions that are unwarranted. One is the assumption that the many-place predicate of truth, deployed by compositional semantics, cannot be directly appealed to in theorizing/nabout people's assessments of truth value, but must be supplemented (if not replaced) by a different truth-predicate, obtained through certain "postsemantic" principles./nAnother is the assumption that semantics assigns to sentences not only truth values (as a function of various parameters, such as contexts, worlds and times), but also semantic contents/n, and that what context-sensitive expressions contribute to content/nare certain contextually determined elements. My first aim in this paper will be to show how the two assumptions have shaped two ways of understanding the debatebetween contextualism and relativism, as regards value-attributions. My second aim/nwill be to show that both assumptions belong outside semantics, and are moreover questionable. Partial funding from the following/nprojects: “Context, Content and Compositionality,” European Community’s Seventh Framework/nProgramme (FP7/2007–13), grant n° 229 441–CCC; “Perspectival Thoughts and Facts”/n(PETAF), EC-FP7/2007–13, grant n° 238 128; “Semantic Content and Context-Dependence,”/nMICINN, Spanish Government, grant n° CSD2009-0056.

chapter for the volume Introduction to the Philosophy of John Perry, ed. by Raphael van Riel and Albert Newen; International audience; This paper is an occasion to go back to Jon Barwise and John Perry's Situations and Attitudes (1983). The aim is to bring to the foreground the main tenets of situation semantics, and to give the reader with a fair sense of the theoretical motivations that were driving the framework, and that continue to be of major significance to Perry's larger philosophical enterprise. I start by rehearsing some of the central aspects of what can be described as the Fregean heritage, which is important in order to understand the context in which situation semantics saw light, and to appreciate the almost revolutionary nature of some of the ideas behind it. After having clarified the background, I turn to one of the main motivations behind situation semantics: the search for an account of meaning that relies upon an account of information, where the latter is crucially driven by the task of explaining how cognitive agents like us are led to act in ways they do, given how they are attuned to their environment.

These are the slides of the five lectures in the series "Topics in Philosophy of Language", offered as a course at the 23rd ESSLLI in Ljubljana, in August 2011.; The aim of these lectures is to provide a survey of some significant advances in philosophy of language, starting from the early days of Montague, Lewis or Kaplan, when philosophy of language and natural language semantics still formed a unified discipline, itself grounded in logic, to the present days. I focus on the topic of context-dependence, covering the standard accounts of indexicality (Kaplan and followers), and comparing them to some less standard accounts, such as two-dimensional update semantics (Stalnaker and followers) or situation semantics (Barwise & Perry and followers). I will also look at certains forms of context-dependence that do not seem to be reducible to indexicality, and examine to which extent they motivate a departure from traditional truth-conditional approaches (as has been defended, on different grounds, within contextualist as well as relativist approaches to semantics).

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 9th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, CONTEXT 2015, held in Larnaca, Cyprus, in November 2015. The 33 full papers and 13 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. The main theme of CONTEXT 2015 was "Back to the roots", focusing on the importance of interdisciplinary cooperations and studies of the phenomenon. Context, context modeling and context comprehension are central topics in linguistics, philosophy, sociology, artificial intelligence, computer science, art, law, organizational sciences, cognitive science, psychology, etc. and are also essential for the effectiveness of modern, complex and distributed software systems. CONTEXT 2015 embedded also a Doctoral Symposium, and three workshops; Smart University 3.0; CATI: Context Awareness and Tactile Design for Mobile Interaction; and SHAPES 3.0: The Shape of Things. .

Included in a special issue, edited by J. van Benthem and A. Gupta, on "Logic and Philosophy Today"; Formal semantics emerged at the interface of logic and philosophy of language in the early 1970's as a result of using tools provided by logic and model-theory to study natural language. We start by discussing the philosophical motivations, in particular compositionality and truth-conditionality, behind those early developments. We then turn to the question of how to reconcile the context-dependence of meaning in natural language with the conception of logical truth as 'truth in virtue of meaning'. We end with a discussion of some open issues related to the notion of validity in indexical intensional logics.