Conference Agenda

Holton (2017) argues from the observation that no natural language has a contrafactive to the claim that the object of knowledge is a fact. His argument relies on the idea that if the truth inference of 'know' arises because its declarative complement denotes a fact, then the falsity inference of contrafactives would be due to their declarative complements denoting contrafacts. But, Holton thinks, there are no contrafacts. Thus, given Holton's claim about knowledge, there are no contrafactives. In reply, Hyman (2017) and Roberts and Özyildiz (2023) insist there are contrafacts. My aim is to argue that their reply is ineffective. Even if there are contrafacts, they do not get you contrafactives. On Holton's picture, natural languages only get contrafactives if they let some of their declarative complements denote contrafacts. But, I argue, there are good reasons why natural languages do not do this. I show that if a natural language lets some of its declarative complements denote contrafacts, it invites a systematic and particularly problematic form of ambiguity in factive attitude ascriptions. For instance, a knowledge ascription 'S knows p' could now attribute either knowledge of p or knowledge of not-p, and in many contexts that ambiguity would be irresolvable.

In their seminal paper, Geis and Zwicky (1971) drew attention to "a tendency of the human mind ... to 'perfect conditionals to biconditionals'". They used the material conditional -> for their analysis and suggested the following principle: "A sentence of the form A -> C invites an inference of the form ~A -> ~C.'' It has been pointed out in the literature that there are several non-equivalent ways of understanding conditional perfection. In my talk I follow suit and examine four possible ways of implementing conditional perfection. Proceeding on the assumptions that (i) the perfecting of conditionals should be based on suppositional conditionals (of the kind studied in the tradition of Ramsey, Adams, Stalnaker and Lewis) rather than material conditionals, and that (ii) this perfecting occurs at the primary level of meaning, I will study the logics of these interpretations. The four logics turn out to be significantly different, but they are unified in invalidating the inference scheme of Weakening the Consequent.

According to the Logicality of Language hypothesis, the language system contains a logical device to exclude analytic constructions as ungrammatical. The hypothesis has been defended along two lines, namely as based on a natural logic built on logical skeletons (Gajewski 2002, 2009) or as based on standard logic and logical forms (Del Pinal 2019, 2021; Pistoia-Reda and Sauerland 2021). In an original contribution, Pistoia-Reda and San Mauro (2021) opposed the former line by showing that a propositional variant exists of the ungrammatical analytic construction “Some students but John smoke” which is: (i) based on standard logical forms; (ii) analytic, for the same logical principle; (iii) grammatical. I show that a similar variant exists for the ungrammatical analytic construction “There are any cookies left”, which has been used to illustrate how the behavior of “Any” is key to understanding the “spontaneous logicality of language” (Chierchia 2013). My analysis makes use of De Morgan’s laws and of a suitable correspondence between logical and set operators, which can well provide for further applications to other cases. I argue that accounting for such variants represents a requirement for any Logicality proposal, one that can be hardly satisfied by a natural logic of some kind.

Truth minimalism is the idea that truth doesn't play a substantial explanatory role and the concept of truth is exhausted by platitudes about it. Truth minimalism is taken to have the tendency to creep to other semantic and more generally representational notions, leading to the problem of creeping minimalism: realism/representationalism and expressivism about a discourse become indistinguishable. The creeping tendency for minimalism has been largely taken for granted in the literature. This talk challenges this assumption and argues that, while it is certainly possible for minimalism to creep, there is no pressure for an expressivist who embraces truth minimalism to go further and take up minimalism about other semantic and/or representational notions.

This talk focuses on two reasons for creeping minimalism that has been raised in the literature.

1) Expressivists are motivated to truth minimalism because it helps them accommodate ordinary uses of moral language, and this inevitably leads them to go minimalist about other notions like beliefs.

2) Notions like truth, proposition, belief and representation are taken to have constitutive connections to one another, so minimalism inevitably creeps along these links.

This talk resists creeping minimalism by offering arguments against these two reasons.