“…(Competing explanations of the painted leaves scenario can be found in Hansen 2011, Kennedy and McNally 2010, Predelli 2005, Rothschild and Segal 2009, Sainsbury 2001and Szabó 2000. However, attention has recently turned to examining the methods by which the intuitions are elicited by context shifting experiments in the first place.…”
In this paper we refine the design of context shifting experiments, which play a central role in contextualist debates, and we subject a large number of scenarios involving different types of expressions of interest to contextualists, including 'know' and color adjectives like 'green', to experimental investigation. Our experiment (i) reveals an effect of changing contexts on the evaluation of uses of the sentences that we examine, thereby overturning the absence of results reported in previous experimental studies (so-called null results), (ii) uncovers evidence for a 'truth bias' in favor of positive over negative sentences, and (iii) reveals previously unnoticed distinctions between the strength of the contextual effects displayed by scenarios involving knowledge ascriptions and for scenarios concerning color and other miscellaneous scenarios.Word count: 15,202
“…(Competing explanations of the painted leaves scenario can be found in Hansen 2011, Kennedy and McNally 2010, Predelli 2005, Rothschild and Segal 2009, Sainsbury 2001and Szabó 2000. However, attention has recently turned to examining the methods by which the intuitions are elicited by context shifting experiments in the first place.…”
In this paper we refine the design of context shifting experiments, which play a central role in contextualist debates, and we subject a large number of scenarios involving different types of expressions of interest to contextualists, including 'know' and color adjectives like 'green', to experimental investigation. Our experiment (i) reveals an effect of changing contexts on the evaluation of uses of the sentences that we examine, thereby overturning the absence of results reported in previous experimental studies (so-called null results), (ii) uncovers evidence for a 'truth bias' in favor of positive over negative sentences, and (iii) reveals previously unnoticed distinctions between the strength of the contextual effects displayed by scenarios involving knowledge ascriptions and for scenarios concerning color and other miscellaneous scenarios.Word count: 15,202
“…There are two observations about natural language that are taken to be evidence for compositionality: productivity and systematicity. Productivity is the principle that speakers are able to understand and produce a potentially unlimited number of (often novel) expressions, described here by Zoltán Szabó (): Since competent speakers can understand a complex expression e they never encountered before, it must be that they (perhaps tacitly) know something on the basis of which they can figure out, without any additional information, what e means. If this is so, something they already know must determine what e means.…”
Linguistic theories of lexical semantics support a Neoclassical Theory of concepts, where entities like CAUSE, STATE, and MANNER serve as necessary conditions for the possession of individual event concepts. Not all concepts have a neoclassical structure, and whether or not words participate in regular linguistic patterns such as verbal alternations will be proposed as a probe for identifying whether their corresponding concepts do indeed have such structure. I show how the Neoclassical Theory supplements existing theories of concepts and supports a version of analyticity and conceptual analysis.After engaging in debate for a sufficient amount of time, one realizes that arguments can only proceed when participants share the relevant concepts. Establishing shared concepts is so important to philosophy that during the 20th century many philosophers explicitly stated that the entire aim of the field was to analyze and clarify concepts, helping to facilitate some debates and put an end to others. This article will argue that linguistic theories of lexical semantics have interesting and important consequences for the study of concepts. The first section sets out the phenomena a theory of concepts is supposed to explain, and the second provides a survey of some current theories and the challenges they face. Section 3 presents an overview of decompositional approaches to lexical semantics, and Section 4 shows how these approaches support a Neoclassical Theory of concepts that helps explain the phenomena at issue. Finally, Sections 5 and 6 develop a kind of conceptual analysis from this theory and show how it can be applied to philosophical problems.
“…Another approach Crary focuses on that might be invoked to accommodate changes in intuitive truth value introduces the idea of parameters that receive different values depending on changes in the context of utterance. Zoltán Gendler Szabó has proposed such an account, arguing that there is a hidden ‘part’ variable at the level of logical form in color adjectives (Szabó , ).…”
Section: Open‐ended Variation In Truth Conditionsmentioning
Alice Crary has recently developed a radical reading of J. L. Austin's philosophy of language. The central contention of Crary's reading is that Austin gives convincing reasons to reject the idea that sentences have context-invariant literal meaning. While I am in sympathy with Crary about the continuing importance of Austin's work, and I think Crary's reading is deep and interesting, I do not think literal sentence meaning is one of Austin's targets, and the arguments that Crary attributes to Austin or finds Austinian in spirit do not provide convincing reasons to reject literal sentence meaning. In this paper, I challenge Crary's reading of Austin and defend the idea of literal sentence meaning.
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