Research

My doctoral dissertation focused on examining the significance of speakers' intentions in metasemantics. Specifically, I challenged the idea of their semantic relevance. Additionally, I formulated a novel non-intentionalist metasemantics for demonstrative expressions, which enebles their reference to change as discourse evolves. Alongside my co-author, Tadeusz Ciecierski, we also proposed a new metasemantics for the word 'I'. On our view, the uses of this expression refer to whoever is "responsible" for the satisfaction of the felicity conditions of the speech act a given use is a part of.

Current Work in Progress:

Currently, I am working on papers on (1) assertoric content, (2) semantic redundancy of speaker's referential intentions, (3) the lying-misleading distinction, and (4) the paradox of voting. I am also thinking a lot about how to conceptualize beliefs.

Ad 1) In this paper I put forward a novel theory of assertoric content according to which it can potentially be constituted not only by the standing content of the utterance but also by its explicature or implicature, or by the content the speaker intends to express but doesn't (e.g. in certain cases of obvious malapropisms). I unscramble this somewhat messy picture of the phenomenon by explaining how it derives from familiar modes of interpretation used also in the legal sphere. A draft of the paper is available here.

Ad 2) There are two versions of the view according to which speaker's intentions are relevant for the fixing of the reference of uses of demonstratives. On the first, their reference is simply a function of the context of use, similarly to how theorists typically construe supposedly "automatic" indexicals like "I" or "today". The only difference is that the semantically relevant feature of the context in the case of demonstratives is supposed to be the speaker's intention, rather than their identity or the day of the utterance. The second, pragmatic, version of the intentionalist view posits that demonstratives do not refer at all, that it is only the speakers that do. One of the main reasons for the supporters of pragmatic intentionalism to distance themselves from the semantic version of the view is that given that interpreting the communicative intentions of the speakers is already a requirement posed by rational communication, it would be redundant for the semantics of any expression to instruct them to do the same. In the paper, I argue that this redundancy argument, even though plausible, cannot be correct in its current general form. I also propose a way of qualifying it in a way allowing to retain its thrust against semantic intentionalism. An early draft of the paper is available here.


Published Articles

Book Reviews