According to certain versions of predicativism, names denote metalinguistic predicates of a certain type, e.g. the name Perón as it occurs in the sentence Perón died in 1974 denotes a predicate more or less paraphrasable as “being called Perón” (Burge 1973, Matushansky 2008 and Fara 2011, among others). The metalinguistic theory of names is claimed to be superior in nontrivial ways to direct reference theories, according to which names contribute an individual without the mediation of descriptions (Kripke 1980). The alleged triumph of predicativism is that by assuming the “being called N” property as basic, both referential and non‐referential uses of proper names can be given a uniform semantic analysis. By contrast, the referentialist needs to resort to homonymy or semantic ambiguity. In addition, there are some systematic connections between referential and predicative uses of names that at first glance also seem to favor predicativism. The goal of this paper is to present an alternative syntax, semantics and pragmatics of proper names. We assume that grammatical categories and the associated meanings that they are supposed to encode are not grammatical primitives, but epiphenomena that result from the particular way in which syntax combines functional material and lexical Roots. Before syntax, lexical Roots have no detectable meanings. On this account, there are no names before syntax, as there are no nouns, verbs or adjectives. Names are thus seen as the result of a particular syntactic configuration whose semantic realization is that of contributing an individual. Metalinguistic uses of names, and other derived uses, are involved in a different syntactic scheme, one that makes a name Root a predicate of a certain type. Besides their different syntactic basis, we argue that metalinguistic inferences in both referential and predicative uses of names have a pragmatic source. According to the theory we propose, then, the so‐called Being Called Condition is neither a syntactic nor a semantic primitive. Under this conception of proper names the uniformity argument does not hold and the adduced linguistic evidence cannot lead to any (meta‐)semantic consideration.

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The article addresses the question of how should scientific peers revise their beliefs (if at all) upon recognized disagreement. After presenting the basics of peer disagreement in sections 1 and 2, we focus, in section 3, on a concrete case of scientific disagreement, to wit, the dispute over the evidential status of randomized control trials in medical practice. The examination of this case motivates the idea that some scientific disagreements permit a steadfast reaction. In section 4, we support this conclusion by providing a normative argument in the same direction; if we are correct, typical reasons for conciliation are absent in this kind of scientific disagreements.

In a recent work, Walter Carnielli and Abilio Rodrigues present an epistemically motivated interpretation of paraconsistent logic. In their view, when there is conflicting evidence with regard to a proposition A (i.e. when there is both evidence in favor of A and evidence in favor of ￢A) both A and ￢A should be accepted without thereby accepting any proposition B whatsoever. Hence, reasoning within their system intends to mirror, and thus, should be constrained by, the way in which we reason about evidence. In this article we will thoroughly discuss their position and suggest some ways in which this project can be further developed. The aim of the paper is twofold. On the one hand, we will present some philosophical critiques to the specific epistemic interpretation of paraconsistent logic proposed by Carnielli & Rodrigues. First, we will contend that Carnielli & Rodrigues’s interpretation implies a thesis about what evidence rationally justifies to accept or believe, called Extreme Permissivism, which is controversial among epistemologists. Second, we will argue that what agents should do, from an epistemic point of view, when faced with conflicting evidence, is to suspend judgment. On the other hand, despite these criticisms we do not believe that the epistemological motivation put forward by Carnielli & Rodrigues is entirely wrong. In the last section, we offer an alternative way in which one might account for the epistemic rationality of accepting contradictions and, thus, for an epistemic understanding of paraconsistency, which leads us to discuss the notion of diachronic epistemic rationality.

Neutral Counterpart Theories of slurs hold that the truth‐conditional contribution of a slur is the same as the truth‐conditional contribution of its neutral counterpart. In (2015), DiFranco argues that these theories, even if plausible for single‐word slurs like ‘kike’ and ‘nigger’, are not suitable for complex slurs such as ‘slanty‐eyed’ and ‘curry muncher’, figurative slurs like ‘Jewish American Princess’, or iconic slurring expressions like ‘ching chong’. In this paper, we argue that these expressions do not amount to genuine counterexamples to neutral counterpart theories of slurs. We provide a positive characterization of DiFranco's examples that doesn't deviate from the core of those theories.