Ambiguity and explanation

Shaheen, Jonathan L.

doi:10.1080/0020174x.2016.1175379

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 64 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Polysemy in explanatory talk can arise from other sources than have been considered here. 47 The class of uses of 'because' that I discuss at length in Shaheen (2017aShaheen ( , 2017b, represented here by (33), involves a non-causal, grounding-related meaning of 'because' that is distinct from the meaning of 'because' in any of the preceding examples.…”

Section: Other Sources Of Polysemymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, Shaheen (2017a) shows that metaphysical explanatory sentences like (33) use a different sense of 'because' than causal explanatory sentences, relying especially on conjunction reduction tests that cannot be applied in the cases of interest here. 50 I also set aside for another occasion discussion of examples like (34), which might properly…”

Section: Other Sources Of Polysemymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thanks are due to Emanuel Viebahn for discussion (although the reader is free to imagine that he might disagree with the preceding sentence). For discussion of these tests in connection with some of the putative ambiguities of 'because' mentioned in Section 5, see Shaheen (2017a) and Cox (2017, Chap. 3).…”

Section: Other Sources Of Polysemymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…8 With respect to lexical semantics, some authors use 'ambiguity' in a way that covers homonyms (like 'bank') but not polysemes (like 'healthy'). As in Shaheen (2017a), I use 'ambiguity' as an umbrella term for both homonymy and polysemy. 9 Schroeder (2008), which develops an elaborate expressivist semantics in pursuit of the idea that logical connectives require a univocal treatment, is a case-in-point here.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

How general can theories of ‘why’ and ‘because’ be?

Shaheen

2021

Inquiry

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper explores a taxonomy of uses of 'because' from the linguistics literature. It traces the apparent semantic differences between content, epistemic, and act 'because' to differences in attachment height. But it argues that the fact that these uses of 'because' never occur in the same environments is evidence of an underlying semantic unity. Arguments from such a distribution to underlying unity are familiar from phonology and morphology, and they are implicit in Quine's comments on ambiguity in Word and Object, but they have too rarely been deployed in semantics. Here, such an argument points the way towards an underexplored conception of polysemy, while also making progress on the rather more limited topic of the lexical semantics of 'because'.

show abstract

Section: Other Sources Of Polysemymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Other Sources Of Polysemymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Other Sources Of Polysemymentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

How general can theories of ‘why’ and ‘because’ be?

Shaheen

2021

Inquiry

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Examples of this abound in the philosophical literature (e.g. King (2002) on some propositional attitude verbs; Rumfitt (2003) on 'know how'; Serban (2017) on 'explain'; Shaheen (2017) on 'because'; Wallace (2021) on 'part'; Liu (2021Liu ( , 2023a on pain predicates such as 'ache ', 'sore' and 'hurt'). Relatedly, theorists have appealed to a lack of zeugmatic oddness to argue that a particular expression is not ambiguous (see Stanley and Williamson (2001) on 'know how'; Corkum (2022) on 'cause').…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to Think about Zeugmatic Oddness

Liu

2023

Rev.Phil.Psych.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Zeugmatic oddness is a linguistic intuition of oddness with respect to an instance of zeugma, i.e. a sentence containing an instance of a homonymous or polysemous word being used in different meanings or senses simultaneously. Zeugmatic oddness is important for philosophical debates as philosophers often use it to argue that a particular philosophically interesting expression is ambiguous and that the phenomenon referred to by the expression is disunified. This paper takes a closer look at zeugmatic oddness. Focusing on relevant psycholinguistic literature on homonymy and polysemy processing and representation, I argue that there are two different ways in which zeugmatic oddness can arise. Philosophical upshots concerning zeugmatic oddness are then drawn.

show abstract

Die Ontologie von Ursachen und Gründen: Rationalität und Kausalität des Seienden

Rizzo

Schnieder

2020

Handbuch Ontologie

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Ambiguity and explanation

Cited by 7 publications

References 64 publications

How general can theories of ‘why’ and ‘because’ be?

How general can theories of ‘why’ and ‘because’ be?

How to Think about Zeugmatic Oddness

Die Ontologie von Ursachen und Gründen: Rationalität und Kausalität des Seienden

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About