We can communicate linguistic information by asserting sentences that are not explicitly about linguistic matters. Stalnaker offers a pragmatic account of this phenomenon. It is not clear that such an account is correct. In this article I offer an alternative account that does not rely on pragmatic mechanisms and which captures many of the insights in Stalnaker's theory of linguistic communication. The view is inspired by Barker's semantics of vague adjectives.
In this paper I present and evaluate Leibniz's two main arguments against the existence of atoms. In this context atoms are extended particles that are absolutely hard, homogeneous, indivisible, and indestructible by natural means. As we shall see, Leibniz's arguments are flawed in a very instructive way. The first argument is in tension with the claim that God created the best possible world. The second argument overgeneralizes in an undesirable way. However, as I shall discuss in the last section of the paper, even if the arguments are somehow defective, at least the first one contributes valuable insights to contemporary metaphysics.
It is notoriously difficult to model the range of application of vague predicates relative to a suitable sorites series. In this paper I offer some critical remarks against an interesting view that has received little attention in the literature. According to it, the sharp cut-offs we find in our semantic models are just artifacts of the theory, and, as such, they are harmless. At the end I discuss a contextualist view that, at a cost, may be able to get around the problems related to sharp cut-offs incurred in by other theories of vagueness.
Algunas aseveraciones que no son acerca del significado de las palabras usadas pueden transmitir información acerca de ese significado. En (Mena, 2022) ofrecí una teoría para explicar este fenómeno de manera puramente semántica. Lo novedoso de la teoría consiste en incluir las interpretaciones del lenguaje en las circunstancias de evaluación: los parámetros respecto a los cuales evaluamos los contenidos de las expresiones ling¨üísticas. En este ensayo argumento que las aseveraciones de oraciones que contienen indéxicos pueden transmitir información acerca del contexto de uso, aunque esas oraciones no sean acerca de contextos. Dado esto, ofrezco una extensión de mi teoría de los efectos metalingüísticos para modelar a los indéxicos de manera similar. También discuto las muchas maneras en que la teoría aquí presentada se distingue de otras semánticas bidimensionales.
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