Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 5, Page 1322-1341, October 2021.

A predicate of personal taste occurring in a sentence in which the perspectival information is not linguistically articulated by an experiencer phrase may have two different readings. In case the speaker of a bare sentence formed with a predicate of personal taste uses the subjective predicate encoding perspectival information in one way and the hearer interprets it in another way, the agents’ acts are not coordinated. In this paper I offer an answer to the question of how a hearer can (...) strategically interact with a speaker on the intended perspectival information so that both agents can optimally solve their coordination problem. In this sense, I offer a game-theoretical account of the strategic communication with expressions referring to agents’ perspectives, communication which involves the interaction between a speaker who intends to convey some perspectival information and who chooses to utter a bare sentence formed with a predicate of personal taste, instead of a sentence in which the perspectival information is linguistically articulated by an experiencer phrase, and a hearer who has to choose between interpreting the uttered sentence in conformity with the speaker’s autocentric use of the predicate of personal taste or in conformity with the speaker’s exocentric use. (shrink)

This book offers the first sustained investigation of the phenomenon of retraction - the “taking back” of the conventional or deontic effects of a previous speech act - bringing together issues and solutions from the semantics of perspectival expressions and from the framework of Speech Act theory. It addresses questions that have been at the center of lively debates in philosophy of language and linguistics, but also draws out some of the ramifications these questions have for certain debates in the (...) logic of discourse, philosophy of mind or experimental philosophy. Many times, what we say on a certain occasion proves to be wrong. When we realize this, we sometimes react by retracting what was previously said – formally or informally, explicitly or not. The essays in this volume tackle issues such as what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for successfully performing a retraction, whether there is a solid empirical basis for retraction, whether the phenomenon can be used in favor or against certain semantics views, whether there is a type of retraction that is merely verbal, or what are the ethical implications of retraction. The volume brings together and puts in dialogue renowned researchers on these topics, serving both as a fixture for specialists and as an introduction into the topic of retraction. (shrink)