Wattles offers a comprehensive survey of the history of the golden rule, "Do unto others as you want others to do unto you". He traces the rule's history in contexts as diverse as the writings of Confucius and the Greek philosophers, the Bible, modern theology and philosophy, and the American "self-help" context. He concludes by offering his own synthesis of these varied understandings.

In this paper, I take issue with an idea that has emerged from recent relativist proposals, and, in particular, from Lasersohn, according to which the correct semantics for taste predicates must use contents that are functions of a judge parameter rather than implicit arguments lexically associated with such predicates. I argue that the relativist account and the contextualist implicit argument-account are, from the viewpoint of semantics, not much more than notational variants of one another. In other words, given any sentence (...) containing a taste predicate, and given any assignment of values to the relevant parameters, the two accounts predict the same truth value and are, in that sense, equivalent. I also look at possible reasons for preferring one account over the other. The phenomenon of "faultless disagreement" is often believed to be one such reason. I argue, against Kölbel and Lasersohn, that disagreement is never faultless: either the two parties genuinely disagree, hence if the one is right then the other is wrong, or the two parties are both right, but their apparent disagreement boils down to a misunderstanding. What is more, even if there were faultless disagreement, I argue that relativism would fail to account for it. The upshot of my paper, then, is to show that there is not much disagreement between a contextualist account that models the judge parameter as an implicit argument to the taste predicate, and a relativist account that models it as a parameter of the circumstances of evaluation. The choice between the two accounts, at least when talking about taste, is thus, to a large extent, a matter of taste. (shrink)

In this paper, I take issue with the proposal put forward by Mark Richard in When Truth Gives Out (2008) concerning disputes over issues such as who is rich, what is cool, and other issues of similar ilk. Richard holds that the parties in the dispute can truly disagree on whether a given person is rich, but can be both right, if we assume that they have different standards of wealth. Disputes over what is cool are, according to Richard, trickier, (...) since they can give rise to cases of faultless disagreement in which the two parties disagree, and neither party is wrong, but neither party is right either! My fi rst goal in this paper will be to showthat the distinction between the two types of disagreement, as drawn by Richard, is not well motivated. I will also argue that if he were right about the stronger case (disagreement in which both parties are right), his own account would fail to capture it. He can capture either the idea that they truly disagree, or the idea that they are both right; but he cannot both have his cake and eat it, too.My second goal will be to bring to the foreground some constructive aspects of Richard’s proposal, and in particular the idea that such disagreements involve concepts whose application is not fully determined and whose usage is open to accommodation and negotiation (to use Lewis’s terms, as used by Richard). If we accept that on some occasions, whether a concept applies to a given instance or doesn’t is not yet settled, then arguably there are cases in which neither party is wrong—at least at the time of the dispute. I argue that their disagreement can be genuine only to the extent that it will eventually be settled whether the concept isto apply to a given instance or not, hence the way in which the concept gets shaped up and extended through its future uses makes it possible to determine, retrospectively, which of the two parties got it right. If this is correct, then the putative cases of faultless disagreement really turn upon the openness of the future: what makes them “faultless” is, simply, that there isn’t any matter of fact yet whether the one or the other party is right. (shrink)

The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the question of how they relate, on the one hand, to objective reality and, on the other, to subjective experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analytic philosophers for over a century, it is only relatively recently that more interdisciplinary and empirically-oriented approaches to such issues have begun to see light. The present chapter aims to make (...) a contribution of that kind. We will present the results of an empirical – specifically, corpus linguistic – study that offers evidence that moral predicates exhibit hallmarks of subjectivity at the linguistic level, but also, that they differ significantly from paradigmatically subjective predicates. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there are good motivations for a relativist account of the domain-sensitivity of quantifier phrases. I will frame the problem as a puzzle involving what looks like a logically valid inference, yet one whose premises are true while the conclusion is false. After discussing some existing accounts, literalist and contextualist, I will present and argue for an account that may be said to be relativist in the following sense: (i) a domain of quantification is required (...) for determining truth value, but is idle in determining semantic content, and (ii) the same sentence, as used on one and the same occasion, may receive different truth values relative to different domains. (shrink)

Aesthetic judgments are often expressed by means of predicates that, unlike ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’, are not primarily aesthetic, or even evaluative, such as ‘intense’ and ‘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.

The received view about indexicals holds that they are directly referential expressions, and that the semantic contribution of an indexical consists of that thing or individual to which the indexical refers in the context of its utterance. The aim of this paper is to put forward a different picture. I argue that direct reference and indexicality are distinct and separate phenomena, even if they cooccur often. Still, it is the speaker who directly refers to the things that she is talking (...) about, and those things matter for the truth of her utterance. Indexicals, on the other hand, merely help the interpreter identify the speaker's intended reference. Typically, indexicals encode descriptive conditions that the context must meet to make the utterance true. For example, the demonstrative 'this' encodes the condition that the subject matter, ie that about which one is talking, should be salient and proximal to the speaker. The semantic contribution of an indexical, I suggest, consists precisely of such descriptive conditions. I will offer a formal account, dubbed contextual update semantics, and show how it captures the main conceptual motivation and how it handles embedded indexicals, which may seem problematic at a first glance. (shrink)

Our paper discusses Recanati’s application of the mental files apparatus to reports of beliefs and other attitudes. While mental files appear early on in Recanati’s work on belief-reports, his latest book introduces the concept of indexed files (a.k.a. vicarious files) and puts it to work to explain how we can report other people’s attitudes and to account for opacity phenomena. Our goal is twofold: we show that the approach in Recanati’s Mental Files (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) departs significantly from (...) his earlier proposals as well as from the very spirit of truth-conditional pragmatics; and we argue that the indexed files approach, qua an attempt to provide a semantics for belief-reports, is untenable. -/- . (shrink)

How shall we expand our appreciation of the beauties of nature? One set of resources for this project is the writings of John Muir (1838–1914). At the age of eleven, Muir came with family from Scotland to the United States, where, after working on family farms and taking a few science courses at the University of Wisconsin, he set forth on wide-ranging travels that led him to Yosemite in eastern California. My First Summer in the Sierra records his life-changing discovery. (...) He had long sought a soul-satisfying realization of divine beauty in nature, and his quest finally found fulfillment. Eventually, he was led into action to share and protect what had nourished him so deeply. He would crystallize his.. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

It has long been known (cf. Frege 1918, Castañeda 1968, Anscombe 1975 , Perry 1977, 1979, Lewis 1981) that de se attitudes, that is beliefs, desires, hopes etc. that one has about oneself as oneself,1 are interestingly different fromthe attitudes that one holds in a third-personal mode about some individual, who might or might not turn out to be them. Frege suggested that Dr. Lauben’s belief that he has been wounded is a belief that only Dr. Lauben himself can entertain. (...) Another person’s belief that Dr. Lauben has been wounded would be a different belief, one that would motivate action in a completely different way. This led Frege to the following puzzle.When Dr. Lauben says “I have been wounded”, he cannot be plausibly taken to express his own first-personal belief that he has been wounded, since nobody else can come to have that same belief. So what is, then, the content that he does express, in order to communicate to others that he has been wounded? Different solutions to the puzzle have been proposed, and my chapter may be seen as yet another attempt at addressing this question. I shall show that not only de se attitudes but also de se speech is interestingly different from third-personal attitudes/speech. (shrink)

Tekst analizira nacin na koji nastavnici i studenti u cetiri univerzitetska centara u Srbiji percipiraju problem efikasnosti studiranja u novom bolonjskom univerzitetskom okruzenju. Empirijska baza podataka na kojoj pociva prezentovana analiza sastoji se iz dve vrste podataka, kvantitativnim i kvalitativnim, koji su prikupljeni uz pomoc dve vrste metodoloskih instrumenata - anketnim upitnikom i produbljenim intervjuom, pri cemu je kvantitativni deo istrazivanja sproveden na sva cetiri univerziteta, a kvalitativni deo samo na Beogradskom univerzitetu. Dobijeni rezultati analize mapiraju kljucne faktore koji uticu (...) na efikasnost studiranja kao i neke od prvih strukturnih izmena u odnosima moci izmedju razlicitih socijalnih aktera koji interaguju unutar novo reformisanog univerzitetskog polja. (shrink)

Hegemonic gender role is specific configuration of different gender performances and practices that represents socially accepted answer on concrete circumstances within given society in particular historical moment. Analytical insight into their content and direction of change could provide us better understanding of other social structures and aspects of social life of society/ culture/sub cultural community/social group within which hegemonic gender role has been formulated and practicized. In that sense this research shell try to recognize them as a legitimate source of (...) data about societal process of structural transformation of Serbian society during the last two decades. (shrink)

The drama of Plato's brush with the kind of thinking formulated in the golden rule--"Do to others as you want others to do to you"--discloses (1) ambiguity in the rule, due to its association with the popular Greek practice of helping friends and harming enemies, and (2) an unnoticed philosophic and/or religious solution to a problem raised by this ambiguity. Revising Albrecht Dihle's influential analysis in "Die Goldene Regel" (1962), this article explores the philosophic implications of golden-rule thinking in three (...) of Plato's sources--Homer, Herodotus, and Isocrates--and in three texts from the dialogues: "Crito" 50a-54d, "Phaedo" 62b-c, and "Laws" 913a. (shrink)

The golden rule is most adequately conceived as a series of ascending principles about pleasure, sympathy, reason, brotherly or sisterly love, moral insight, and God-consciousness. The account draws primarily on Christian and Confucian traditions and on studies by contemporary philosophers. Questions are then discussed about the use of substantive moral assumptions and intuition in the rule, its supererogatory character, and the role of its spiritual level. The golden rule is proposed as a principle bearing valuable meanings from its diverse cultural (...) heritage. (shrink)

It has been long known (Perry in Philos Rev 86: 474–497, 1977 ; Noûs 13: 3–21, 1979 , Lewis in Philos Rev 88: 513–543 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 handling 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. (shrink)

Current teleology in Western biology, philosophy, and theology draws on resources from four main Western philosophers. (1) Plato’s ’Timaeus’, (2) Aristotle’s ’Physics’, (3) Kant’s ’Critique of Judgment’, (4) Hegel’s ’Philosophy of Nature’. Teleological themes persist, in different ways, in contemporary discussions; I consider two lines of criticism of traditional teleology -- by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould -- and one line that continues traditional teleology in an updated way -- by Holmes Rolston, III. (edited).

ABSTRACT: When we describe an event as sad or happy, we attribute to it a certainemotional value. Attributions of emotional value depend essentially on an agent ; and yet, people readily disagree over such values. My aim in this paper is to explain what happens in the case of “emotional disagreement”, and, more generally, to provide some insight into the semantics of value-attributions.

The aim of this paper is to argue against a growing tendency to assimilate moral disagreements to disagreements about matters of personal taste. The argumentative strategy adopted in the paper appeals to a battery of linguistic criteria that reveal interesting and important differences between predicates of personal taste and moral predicates. The paper further argues that these semantically tractable differences have an impact on the nature of the corresponding disagreements.

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 about people's assessments of truth value, but must be supplemented (if not replaced) by a different truth-predicate, obtained through certain "postsemantic" principles. Another 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, and that what context-sensitive expressions contribute to content are 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 debate between contextualism and relativism, as regards value-attributions. My second aim will be to show that both assumptions belong outside semantics, and are moreover questionable. (shrink)

Among semanticists and philosophers of language, there has been a recent outburst of interest in predicates such as delicious, called predicates of personal taste (PPTs, e.g. Lasersohn 2005). Somewhat surprisingly, the question of whether or how we can distinguish aesthetic predicates from PPTs has hardly been addressed at all in this recent work. It is precisely this question that we address. We investigate linguistic criteria that we argue can be used to delineate the class of specifically aesthetic adjectives. We show (...) that there are, in fact, good motivations for keeping PPTs and aesthetic predicates apart: the semantic structure of the former, but not the latter, entails an experiencer. There are many adjectives whose semantic structure arguably also entails an experiencer, yet which are readily used in expressing aesthetic judgments. Adjectives such as provocative or moving are a case in point, since as adjectives they arguably maintain the experiencer argument from the verb they are derived from. Nevertheless, when we describe, say, a sculpture as provocative, or a theater performance as moving, we clearly make aesthetic judgments. The difficult question, then, is to articulate the relationship between an aesthetic predicate (of which beautiful and ugly are paradigms) and other predicates that just happen to be used in making an aesthetic judgment. Tightly related to this point is the more general question of the relationship between an evaluative predicate and a predicate that occurs in an evaluative judgment. One of our aims is to make some progress in addressing these questions. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against the view there are contingent a priori truths, and against the related view that there are contingent logical truths. I will suggest that in general, predicates ›a priori‹ and ›contingent‹ are implicitly relativized to circumstances, and argue that apriority entails necessity, whenever the two are relativized to the same circumstance. I will then criticize the idea, inspired by David Kaplan's framework, of contingent contents "knowable under a priori characters." I will also argue, against Kaplan, (...) that sentences of the form »The actual F is F« do not deserve the status of logical truths, since what they express is neither necessary nor a priori. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of new trends have seen light at the intersection of semantics and philosophy of language. They are meant to address puzzles raised by the context-sensitivity of a variety of natural language constructions, such as knowledge ascriptions, belief reports, epistemic modals, indicative conditionals, quantifier phrases, gradable adjectives, temporal constructions, vague predicates, moral predicates, predicates of personal taste. A diversity of labels have consequently emerged, such as 'contextualism', 'indexicalism', 'invariantism', 'literalism', 'minimalism', and 'relativism', variously qualified. The goal (...) of this essay is to pinpoint the issues that lie at the heart of the recent debates, clarify what is at stake, and provide a snapshot of the current theoretical landscape. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to propose an account of the notion of semantic content. I will try to show that my account has some advantages over the existing accounts, and that, at the same time, it captures the most valuable insights behind both parties involved in the contextualism-minimalism debate. The proposed account of semantic content differs from the more traditional ones in that it puts more burden on the parameters of the point of evaluation, leaving very little in (...) the content itself. In particular, even in the case of indexical and demonstrative pronouns, the semantic content is, I suggest, stable across contexts, and does not include the reference of the pronoun. In a nutshell, the semantic content associated with (an utterance of) a sentence that contains one or more pronouns is a function that asks not only for a world and a time of evaluation, but also one or more individuals, before it can return a truth value. (shrink)

Tekst analizira nacin na koji nastavno osoblje na Beogradskom univerzitetu percipira bolonjski proces, nacelno i unutar lokalnog srpskog socijalnog i univerzitetskog konteksta; razlicite upravne instance unutar univerzitetskog obrazovnog sistema, mesto nastavnika unutar obrisa novog visokoskolskog obrazovnog sistema u procesu bolonjske transformacije. Empirijsku osnovu predstavlja istrazivanje o uslovima rada nastavnog osoblja koje je Centar za obrazovne politike iz Beograda izveo na pet fakulteta Beogradskog univerziteta tokom 2008 godine.

Osnovna intencija istrazivanja je da retrospektivno sagleda promene u konstruktu pozeljnog modela zenskih rodnih uloga u periodu 'razvijenog samoupravnog socijalizma' (1970-tih), periodu strukturne krize socijalizma (1980-tih) i postsocijalistickom periodu srpskog/jugoslovenskog drustva, onako kako je on konstruisan u zenskom casopisu 'Bazar'. Kroz osnovne postavke teorijskog okvira istrazivanja pokusacemo da koncipiramo i priblizimo se pretpostavljenom novom komunikacionom modelu koji ce biti u stanju da u istrazivanje inkorporira sve promene nastale u samom procesu komunikacije izmedju emitera i recipijenta i time doprinesemo boljem razumevanju (...) sadrzaja poruke. (shrink)

One of the most important and, at the same time, most controversial issues in metasemantics is the question of what semantics is, and what distinguishes semantic elements (features, properties, phenomena, mechanisms, processes, or whatever) from the rest. The issue is tightly linked with the debate over the semantics-pragmatics distinction, which has been vibrant for a decade or two, but seems to be reaching an impasse. I suggest that this impasse may be due to the failure to recognize a distinct realm (...) that should not be subsumed either under semantics or pragmatics, but may be labeled "prepragmatics". My ultimate goal is to put forward and defend a novel picture of our language architecture, according to which: semantic content is strictly poorer than the lexically encoded content (and therefore does not involve any contextually determined material - not even the reference of demonstratives); pragmatic mechanisms require being able to reason about one's beliefs and intentions and do not affect truth-conditions or truth-value; and, finally, there is a distinct prepragmatic level, which takes into account various kinds of contextual information and makes it possible to evaluate a sentence (as used on a particular occasion) for a truth value. I shall take as a case study, one of the "stumbling stones" in the semantics-pragmatics literature: the case of demonstrative reference. The upshot will be to show that if there is indeed room for a family of linguistic phenomena that are neither semantic nor yet fully pragmatic, the resolution of demonstrative reference is a candidate par excellence to belong there. (shrink)

Philosophers of language distinguish among the lexical or linguistic meaning of the sentence uttered, what is said by an utterance of the sentence, and speaker's meaning, or what is conveyed by the speaker to her audience. In most views, what is said is the semantic or truth-conditional content of the utterance, and is irreducible either to the linguistic meaning or to the speaker's meaning. I will show that those views account badly for people's intuitions on what is said. I will (...) also argue that no distinguished level of what is said is required, and that the notion of linguistic meaning is the best placed to play the role of what is said. This relies on two points. First, our intuitions on what is said cannot be detached from the ways in which we talk about what is said, and from the semantics of speech reports and indirect discourse in general. Second, besides what is said, there is an equally important notion of what what-is-said is said about, or that about which the speaker is talking. These are, then, the three main ingredients needed for the theory of what is said: linguistic meaning, what is talked about, and a semantic account of reported speech. (shrink)

Philosophers used to model belief as a relation between agents and propositions, which bear truth values depending on, and only on, the way the world is, until John Perry and David Lewis came up with cases of essentially indexical belief; that is, belief whose expression involves some indexical word, whose reference varies with the context. I shall argue that the problem of the essential indexical at best shows that belief should be tied somehow to what is subsequently acted upon, and (...) must make room for other relations than those properly predicated. But it does not show that belief cannot be modeled as a binary relation between an agent and some suitable object, nor that this object cannot be a proposition. (shrink)

Slightly modified version, as it appeared in Striegnitz, K. et al. Special Issue: The Language Sections of the ESSLLI-01 Student Session, Human Language Technology Theses. 2002.

The paper discusses the position of young people in Serbia today, as can be inferred from the evidence collected in the study "Politics and everyday life - three years later". Starting from the typology she developed in her 2002 analysis of young people?s interviews, the author traces the changes that have intervened over the past three years in the attitudes of these same respondents concerning politics, personal engagement, views of the future and of their own selves. The fact that the (...) expectations, awakened by the events of 5 October 2000, have been betrayed, has brought strong disappointment, and it is the context in which young people in Serbia once again are losing faith that they will ever find their place in their own society. Against the background of a basic tension in relation to politics - between excessive interest and disgust - there basic strategies of young people in 2005 are formed. "Withdrawal", as the most common strategy, indicates a return of the young to their narrow personal, private, imaginary world, after a short exit into reality and active participation in creating the conditions of their own social existence. The increasingly frequent strategy of "aggression and imposition of one?s own worldview" points to the rising radicalization of the young generation. Finally, it is only the "planning strategy", espoused by just a handful of respondents, that retains traces of faith in future improvement of social conditions. Tekst razmatra poziciju mlade generacije u Srbiji danas, onako kako se ona moze iscitati iz empirijskog materijala prikupljenog studijom "Politika i svakodnevni zivot - tri godine posle". Oslanjajuci se na tipologiju koju je izgradila prilikom analize intervjua s mladim ljudima pre tri godine, autorka prati promene u stavovima prema politici, sopstvenom angazmanu, pogledu u buducnost i dozivljaju samih sebe do kojih je kod istih ispitanika doslo tokom protekle tri godine. Razocaranje zbog izneverenih ocekivanja, probudjenih dogadjajima od 5. oktobra 2000, stvara kontekst u kojem mlade ljude u Srbiji ponovo napusta vera da ce pronaci za sebe mesto u vlastitom drustvu. Na pozadini osnovne napetosti u odnosenju prema politici - izmedju preterane zainteresovanosti i gadjenja - formiraju se tri dominantne strategije mladih 2005. Najzastupljenija "strategija povlacenja" iskazuje povratak mladih u uski licni, privatni, imaginarni svet, posle kratkog izleta u realnost i aktivno sudelovanje u oblikovanju uslova sopstvenog drustvenog zivota. Strategija "napada i nametanja svog pogleda na svet", koja je u porastu, ukazuje na radikalizaciju mlade generacije. Konacno, "strategija planiranja", koju zastupa mali broj ispitanika, jedina zadrzava tragove vere u poboljsanje stanja u drustvu. (shrink)

One of the most interesting and fruitful applications of logics, classical or other, has been in supplying formal frameworks for the semantics of natural language. In this paper, I discuss the following puzzle: there seem to be arguments that are logically valid - more precisely, that are instances of the rule of universal instantiation, and yet, the utterance of the premise is intuitively true while the conclusion is false. I will discuss two strategies, developed in response to different sorts of (...) problems, that seem immediately applicable to this puzzle. While the so-called contextualist strategy blocks the puzzle at the level of syntax, the index-shifting strategy actually embraces the apparently paradoxical claim that there are logically valid arguments with premises whose utterances are true and a conclusion whose utterance is false, but insists that different points of evaluation come into play in determining the truth values of the utterances involved in the alleged counter-instances to rules of logic. (shrink)

Included in a special issue, edited by J. van Benthem and A. Gupta, on "Logic and Philosophy Today".

Although relativism may be said to be one of the oldest doctrines in philosophy, dating back to the teachings of Protagoras in the 5th century B.C., when it comes to contemporary philosophy, there is no consensus on what makes a view qualify as "relativist". The problem is particularly accute in metaethics, since most of the views that up to a decade ago were described as “relativist” would be more accurately described as "contextualist" or even “expressivist” in light of the distinctions (...) currenty drawn in philosophy of language and semantics. In this chapter, we distinguish two construals of relativism, developed in sections 2 and 3 respectively: the “metaphysical” construal, based on the idea that there is no single, absolute, universal morality, and the “semantic” construal, based on the idea that the truth value of moral claims is relative to a set of moral standards, or moral practices, or some other suitable parameter. Section 1 introduces the core relativist ideas in an informal way, and warns against possible misinterpretations. (shrink)

Since Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, the view that there are contingent apriori truths has been surprisingly widespread. In this paper, I argue against that view. My first point is that in general, occurrences of predicates “a priori” and “contingent” are implicitly relativized to some circumstance, involving an agent, a time, a location. My second point is that apriority and necessity coineide when relativized to the same circumstance. That is to say, what is known apriori (by an agent in a (...) circumstance) cannot fail to be the case (in the same circumstance), hence it is necessary. (shrink)

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.

One of the most promising aspects of Perry 's Reflexive-Referential Theory is its capacity to generate a variety of contents that may be associated with a single utterance, contents that may be used for various explanatory purposes. My concern in this paper is that, as it stands, RRT generates too many contents. The problem is not just that most of those contents will be explanatorily idle, but rather, that nothing in the actual RRT explains why those contents cannot play the (...) roles that their minimally different “neighbors” can play. In Section 1, I discuss two kinds of example that motivate RRT and its multiplicity of contents; the first comes close enough to some of Perry's own examples, but the second is original, and may be therefore viewed as an application of RRT to a problem that has not been discussed by Perry himself. In Section 2, I will show how these examples give rise, in turn, to problems of overgeneration. In other words, just as RRT is able to derive contents that may be used to account for the cases that need explanation, it ought to be able to derive analogous contents that, in turn, give counterintuitive, if not outright wrong predictions. In Section 3, I will tentatively outline a line of response that Perry could take. The overall direction of the paper is thus optimistic, since the problems raised may be viewed as pointing to ways of improving RRT, rather than undermining it. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors present a presuppositional account for a class of evaluative terms that encode both a descriptive and an evaluative component: slurs and thick terms. The authors discuss several issues related to the hybrid nature of these terms, such as their projective behavior, the ways in which one may reject their evaluative content, and the ways in which evaluative content is entailed or implicated (as the case may be) by the use of such terms.

The present study is couched within Rachman's three-pathway theory of fear acquisition. Besides the direct contact with the objects of fear, this model also includes two indirect pathways to fear acquisition: negative information transmission and modeling. The study aims to explore the contribution of these three factors to the level of children's fear of COVID-19. The sample consisted of 376 children, aged 7–19, and one of their parents. The survey was conducted online during the COVID-19 national state of emergency in (...) the Republic of Serbia. The children assessed their fear of COVID-19, general fearfulness, negative information transmission, and modeling by their parents, as well as the level of exposure to negative information outside their home. The parents assessed their own fear of COVID-19 and trait anxiety. Parents' anxiety, children's age, and children's general fearfulness were used as covariates. The results of our path analysis provide support for Rachman's notion of indirect pathways. The more the parents were afraid of COVID-19, the more they expressed this, which in turn led to an increase in the children's fear of COVID-19. Furthermore, children's exposure to negative information related to COVID-19, provided by their teachers and peers or stemming from the media, directly contributed to the level of children's fear. The results of the study emphasize the importance of caregivers' behavior during global health crises and provide some clues as to what caregivers may do to protect their children's mental health in such circumstances. (shrink)