Speech act theories of fiction propose that in writing a fictional work the author is performing a sui generis speech act dubbed fiction-making. Fiction-making is often characterized by reflexive intentions similar to Grice's take on assertions, modulo a substitution of belief for make-belief. Recently, it has been widely accepted that fictions are composed by a patchwork of at least two speech acts: besides acts of fiction-making, the author of a work of fiction performs regular acts of assertion. I will argue against patchwork approaches. First, I will argue that while it is plausible to accept the view that there are sincere assertions in fictional works, accepting insincere assertions in such environments clashes with widely accepted intuitions about fictionality. The lack of a secure access to the author's beliefs, along with the conclusion that there are no insincere assertions in fiction results in an inconsistent attribution of overt intentions to the author's utterances -- an important attribute to the recognition of a speech act. In place I will sketch an uniform speech act theory of fiction, where all utterances are taken to be acts of fiction-making.

In this talk, I will tackle two correlated problems brought up by the RRT framework – the Reflexive-Referential Theory – concerning fictional names. First, the problem of determining what semantic content is expressed by this alleged class of empty terms. Secondly, how the notion of semantic content proponed by the RRT explains their interpretation and the intuitions of truth-value prompted by utterances that contain them. I will defend three main claims: 1) that the classificatory concept of semantic content at the heart of John Perry’s version of the RRT in particular is advantageous to account for the type of referential failure we observe in fiction; 2) that, in the architecture of contents of the RRT, fictional names express incremented reflexive truth-conditions; and finally, 3) that, if we accept the RRT as a well-motivated semantic theory, incremented reflexive truth-conditions will be what explains the intuitions of truth-value elicited by the special kind of referential emptiness of fictional discourse.

In order to provide a new enactive-based approach to cognition, that deals with the categorical gap between lower-order and higher-order cognitive processes, Di Paolo, De Jaegher, and Cuffari (2018) recently proposed a rich and intricate theory of cognition that conceives bodies as linguistic. This theory aims to provide a framework for the understanding of bodies, social practices, and language in a way that the incompatibility between correction criteria and natural explanations will no longer exist. I call this theory ‘linguistic enactivism’. In this talk, I will present the main points of linguistic enactivism and question how the theory can influence new developments in research about language. For doing that, I’ll resort, first, to some reflection on what an understanding of language needs in order to provide a full account of embodied language, and second, to a few examples of contemporary empirical research in linguistics. The first step aims at highlighting important aspects to which we need to pay attention to when considering empirical research, and the second step aims at evaluating what is precisely embodied in embodied empirical research.

Douglas Walton (1992, 1996, 1999a, 2008) ha mostrado que muchas falacias son malas aplicaciones de estrategias argumentales que también admiten buenas aplicaciones. Entre estas estrategias se encuentra la apelación a la ignorancia. Este artículo tiene dos propósitos. En primer lugar, busca mostrar que los argumentos que Walton identifica como buenas apelaciones a la ignorancia sólo pueden considerarse apelaciones a la ignorancia si adoptamos una comprensión de esta categoría muy distinta a la tradicional, siendo además algunos de estos argumentos falaces. En segundo lugar, este artículo busca mostrar que hay determinados argumentos no considerados por Walton que podrían ser buenas apelaciones a la ignorancia, entendiendo esta categoría del modo tradicional. No obstante, la cuestión de su corrección enfrenta interrogantes que dejo abiertas.

Cepollaro, Cepollaro & Stojanovic, and Schlenker have defended presuppositional theories of slurs. According to these views, slurs encode the same truth conditional content as their neutral counterparts (e.g. ‘Kraut’/‘German’) but they trigger a presupposition that accounts for their power to derogate their targets. The squib presents a problem for these views related to the phenomenon of anti-presuppositions. It is argued that given a plausible understanding of anti-presuppositions, these theories incorrectly predict that (i) it is infelicitous to use the neutral counterpart in a context where the presupposition of the corresponding slur is satisfied and (ii) a felicitous use of the neutral counterpart anti-presupposes that the presupposition associated to the corresponding slur is not satisfied.

Polysemy is often said to be kryptonite for referentialist doctrines. When it comes to language, the complaint is that, given polysemy, word meanings cannot be specified in terms of real-world entities as referential semantics does. But the polysemy complaint might also be directed at thought. The idea is that, given polysemy, concepts cannot be Fodorian atoms, i.e., pairs of unstructured symbols and extralinguistic referents. In sum, polysemy invites all sorts of radical reactions to traditional referential, truth-conditional semantics. In this talk I will argue that such radical reactions to referentialism are unwarranted. First, I will argue that polysemy might not be as widespread as people believe, at least with respect to nouns. This makes the prospects for referential semantics look much less grim. Second, I will argue against the idea that words that really are polysemous must have a single, univocal meaning, from which polysemous senses are somehow derived. I argue that the same data might be explained simply in terms of storage and pragmatics. Third, I will argue that speakers often have vague mental states with respect to polysemous terms. That is, they frequently do not consciously resolve the polysemy of the words they deploy. This lightens the burden of pre-pragmatic disambiguation processes, and it might help explain the data from copredication as well. If I am right, genuine polysemy does complicate the picture, but this is no reason to abandon referentialism.

It is not unfrequently claimed that aesthetic discourse (discourse concerning what is beautiful and ugly, but also about what is sombre, garish or unbalanced) may be apt for a truth-relativist semantic approach (as developed, e.g. by MacFarlane (2014) for other expressions). Extant proposals, however, have been cursorily advanced under the unexamined assumption that it is possible straightforwardly to extend the assessment-sensitive semantic account of predicates of personal taste (PPTs) like ‘tasty' or ‘fun’, to aesthetic predicates in general (cf. Egan (2010)). The aim of this paper is to provide an aesthetically informed assessment-sensitive semantic account of thick aesthetic predicates (TAPs) such as ‘balanced’, ‘sombre’, ‘shocking’, ‘unified’, ‘integrated’, ‘lifeless’, ‘serene’, ‘harmonious’, ‘dynamic’, ‘powerful’, ‘vivid’, ‘delicate’, ‘touching’, ‘trite', ‘sentimental’, ‘tragic’, etc. These predicates have been traditionally supposed to be thick, which means they encompass both a descriptive and an evaluative component. Hence, we'll be putting forward a dual relativist account of TAPs according to which TAPs have a dual or bidimensional semantics in the sense of Kaplan (1999), with assessment sensitivity being a distinctive feature of both the truth-conditional and the expressive or non-truth-conditional content of TAPs.

La verdad del discurso ficcional ha sido debatida en filosofía analítica desde los tiempos de Frege, así como lo ha sido la semántica relacionada con los términos ficcionales. Dicha discusión se ha centrado, mayormente, en el análisis de nombres propios ficcionales, como Sherlock Holmes. En esta presentación, nos enfocaremos en contextos no ficcionales. Intentaremos mostrar que la idea propuesta por Vendler de que es posible utilizar "verbos preservadores de la realidad" (como golpear, empujar, comer) para diferenciar términos ficcionales de términos no ficcionales. Mostraremos, a partir de la presentación de un experimento, que en dichos contextos presentan distintas interpretaciones. En la posición de argumento interno de verbos preservadores de la realidad, los términos ficcionales son interpretados como no animados, mientras que los términos no ficcionales son interpretados como animados. Intentaremos defender, a partir de esto, que la semántica de los términos ficcionales no se agota en el discurso ficcional.

The purpose of this talk is to discuss and evaluate the main arguments developed in Kripke’s unpublished lectures “Rigid Designation and the Contingent A Priori: The Meter Stick Revisited” delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 1986. In these lectures Kripke considers the objections raised by two of his main critics against his classical examples of contingent a priori truths: the objections raised by Donnellan (1979) against the Neptune example, and the objections raised by Salmon (1986) and Plantinga (1975) against the standard meter case. Kripke introduces some slight changes in his initial position that are, according to him, enough to deal with the objections. I shall discuss how far he succeeds in this.

“I fell ​in love”, “He got ​out of depression”, “She is in despair” - for Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), these sentences are instantiations of the same underlying conceptual metaphor: emotions are bounded states in which we can be in or out. One of the central insights which result from studying metaphors as a cognitive phenomenon is that metaphors are a frequent and unconscious part of our ordinary thought and expression (instead of a rare poetic or rhetorical instrument), as the expressions at the beginning of this text exemplify. Synthesizing the theoretical and empirical landscape of metaphor studies is a difficult endeavor because metaphors are controversial (Gibbs, 2017), the empirical evidence for different theories is somewhat contradictory (Holyoak & Stamenkovic, 2018), the phenomenon is multifaceted (i.e., it involves multiple features and processes), and, as with everything in science: there is more to be learned about it. Our objective is to present (i) a brief overview of the main theories about metaphor; (ii) some of the most relevant empirical findings and controversies; and (iii) a tentative synthesis and way forward. Specifically, we address the issue of semantic representation of metaphor, the (systematic) relationships among metaphors, and the processing of different types of metaphors.

In this paper, I explore an asymmetry in predicate doubling constructions in Spanish: namely, while it is possible to double a verb appearing in a complement clause embedded under a cognitive factive predicate, it is unacceptable with clauses selected by emotive factives. I provide a semantic-pragmatic analysis for this pattern: I claim that predicate doubling with clauses embedded under emotive factives is banned because it leads to an impossible presupposition, i.e., a presupposition that cannot be satisfied in any possible context. I show that this proposal can also straightforwardly account for the ban of verum focus constructions in clauses selected by emotive factives and the impossibility of emotive factives to embed polar questions. Finally, I argue that a syntactic approach of predicate doubling in terms of movement (Vicente 2009, 2007) cannot account for this asymmetry.