Indeterminacy as Indecision, Lecture III: Indeterminacy as Indecision

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (11) ◽  
pp. 643-667
Author(s):  
John MacFarlane ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Sorites Paradox ◽  
Direction Of Fit ◽  
Normative Language ◽  
Allan Gibbard ◽  
Vague Language

This lecture presents my own solution to the problem posed in Lecture I. Instead of a new theory of speech acts, it offers a new theory of the contents expressed by vague assertions, along the lines of the plan expressivism Allan Gibbard has advocated for normative language. On this view, the mental states we express in uttering vague sentences have a dual direction of fit: they jointly constrain the doxastic possibilities we recognize and our practical plans about how to draw boundaries. With this story in hand, I reconsider some of the traditional topics connected with vagueness: bivalence, the sorites paradox, higher-order vagueness, and the nature of vague thought. I conclude by arguing that the expressivist account can explain, as its rivals cannot, what makes vague language useful.

Vagueness and Legal Theory

Legal Theory ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy A. O. Endicott
Keyword(s):  
Legal Theory ◽  
Borderline Case ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Sorites Paradox ◽  
Ronald Dworkin ◽  
Good Account ◽  
Hans Kelsen ◽  
The Law ◽  
Vague Language ◽  
Vague Statement

The use of vague language in law has important implications for legal theory. Legal philosophers have occasionally grappled with those implications, but they have not come to grips with the characteristic phenomenon of vagueness: the sorites paradox. I discuss the paradox, and claim that it poses problems for some legal theorists (David Lyons, Hans Kelsen, and, especially, Ronald Dworkin). I propose that a good account of vagueness will have three consequences for legal theory: (i) Theories that deny that vagueness in formulations of the law leads to discretion in adjudication (including Dworkin's) cannot accommodate “higher-order” vagueness, (ii) A legal theory should accept that the law is partly indeterminate when it can be stated in vague language, (iii) However, the traditional formulation of the indeterminacy claim, that a vague statement is “neither true nor false” in a borderline case, is misconceived and should be abandoned.

Vagueness

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit Fine
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Mental States ◽  
General Idea ◽  
Sorites Paradox ◽  
Local Phenomenon ◽  
Intrinsic Feature

The book is about the problem of vagueness. It begins by discussing some of the existing views on vagueness and then explains why they have not been thought to be satisfactory. It then outlines a new account of vagueness, based on the general idea that vagueness is a global rather than a local phenomenon. In other words, the vagueness of an expression or object is not an intrinsic feature of the object or an expression but a matter of how it relates to other objects and expression. The development of this idea leads to a new semantics and logic for vagueness. The semantics and logic are then applied to a number of issues, including the sorites paradox, the transparency or luminosity of mental states, and personal identity. It is shown that the view allows one to hew to a much more intuitive position on these various issues.

Seeming to Seem

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Order Theory ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Intentional Stance ◽  
First Person ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Higher Order Theory ◽  
The Third Person

Dennett’s account of consciousness starts from third-person considerations. I argue this is wise, since beginning with first-person access precludes accommodating the third-person access we have to others’ mental states. But Dennett’s first-person operationalism, which seeks to save the first person in third-person, operationalist terms, denies the occurrence of folk-psychological states that one doesn’t believe oneself to be in, and so the occurrence of folk-psychological states that aren’t conscious. This conflicts with Dennett’s intentional-stance approach to the mental, on which we discern others’ mental states independently of those states’ being conscious. We can avoid this conflict with a higher-order theory of consciousness, which saves the spirit of Dennett’s approach, but enables us to distinguish conscious folk-psychological states from nonconscious ones. The intentional stance by itself can’t do this, since it can’t discern a higher-order awareness of a psychological state. But we can supplement the intentional stance with the higher-order theoretical apparatus.

The Riddle of Vagueness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crispin Wright
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Borderline Case ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Sorites Paradox ◽  
Systematic Research ◽  
Pure Mathematics ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Critical Overview ◽  
Original Treatment

This anthology includes fourteen of Crispin Wrights’s highly influential essays on the phenomenon of vagueness in natural language, collectively representing almost half a century of cutting-edge systematic research. Key issues addressed include whether or under what assumptions vague expressions’ apparent tolerance of marginal changes in things to which they apply indicates that they are governed by inconsistent semantic rules, the varieties of Sorites paradox and the roots of the plausibility of their respective major premises, what it is for something to be a borderline case of a vague expression, whether vagueness should be viewed as fundamentally a semantic or an epistemic phenomenon, whether there is ‘higher-order’ vagueness, and what should be the appropriate logic for vague statements. The essays reprinted here jointly document the development of a distinctively original treatment of the philosophy and logic of vagueness, broadly analogous to the intuitionistic philosophy and logic for pure mathematics. Richard Kimberly Heck contributes an extended introductory essay, providing both an insightful critical overview of the development of the distinctive elements of Wright’s thought about vagueness, and indeed an invaluable advanced introduction to the topic.

scholarly journals Incrementality and intention-recognition in utterance processing

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Gregoromichelaki ◽  
Ruth Kempson ◽  
Matthew Purver ◽  
Gregory J. Mills ◽  
Ronnie Cann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Predictive Model ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Intention Recognition ◽  
Dialogue Modelling ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Dynamic Syntax ◽  
Do So

Ever since dialogue modelling first developed relative to broadly Gricean assumptions about utter-ance interpretation (Clark, 1996), it has remained an open question whether the full complexity of higher-order intention computation is made use of in everyday conversation. In this paper we examine the phenomenon of split utterances, from the perspective of Dynamic Syntax, to further probe the necessity of full intention recognition/formation in communication: we do so by exploring the extent to which the interactive coordination of dialogue exchange can be seen as emergent from low-level mechanisms of language processing, without needing representation by interlocutors of each other’s mental states, or fully developed intentions as regards messages to be conveyed. We thus illustrate how many dialogue phenomena can be seen as direct consequences of the grammar architecture, as long as this is presented within an incremental, goal-directed/predictive model.

scholarly journals Talking About the Non-Literal: Internal States and Explanations in Child-Constructed Narratives

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edy Veneziano
Keyword(s):  
Old French ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Narrative Skills ◽  
Children's Narratives ◽  
Internal States ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Children's Attention ◽  
Evaluative Instrument ◽  
Children's Stories

Abstract Non-literal language most often permeates interesting and informative narratives. These are the non-perceptible, inferential aspects of a story, such as the explanation of events, the attribution of internal, particularly mental, states to the characters of the story, or the evaluation of events by the participants and/or the narrator. The main aim of this paper is to examine whether non-literal uses can be promoted in 7-year-old French-speaking children’s narratives through the use of a short conversational intervention (SCI) which focuses the children’s attention on the causes of events. The results show that, after the SCI, the expression of non-literal aspects, even higher-order ones, may make their appearance or significantly increase in children’s stories. The reasons for the effectiveness of the SCI in the promotion of non-literal uses of language and narrative skills in general, as well as the importance of using the SCI as an evaluative instrument, are discussed.

scholarly journals CLICKBAIT HEADLINES THROUGH THE PRISM OF SPEECH ACTS THEORY

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-36
Author(s):  
I.A. Bitner ◽  
◽  
A.V. Korshunova ◽  
B.O. Luzin ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Main Method ◽  
Direction Of Fit ◽  
Illocutionary Acts ◽  
Pragmatic Analysis ◽  
Point Condition ◽  
Specific Meaning ◽  
Communicative Success ◽  
Video Makers

Statement of the problem. The article discusses the peculiarities of YouTube video clickbait headlines. Some video makers are profit-conscious and deliberately headline their videos using eye-catching words that often have nothing to do with the real content in order to maximize the number of clicking the links. Such headlines aim at deceiving the recipients as for the content of the text or video, affecting their perception, attracting their attention and making them watch the video after all. Such headlines are known as clickbait, for they trap the reader or viewer with deliberately sensational or incomplete information. In this case promotional impact purposefully overrides the nominative function resulting in the peculiarity of the clickbait. The form of speech acts, including stylistic, lexical, syntactical, spelling and punctuation features, makes them stand out of other texts corpus. Particular attention is paid to discerning them as directive illocutionary acts and to proving that they meet all Searle’s requirements for such phenomena including illocutionary point, condition of sincerity, direction of fit. The purpose of the article is to analyze YouTube video clickbait headlines as directive illocutionary acts. Research methodology. The main method of research is qualitative content-analysis that involves revealing a specific meaning expressed with a clickbait headline as a significant element of a media text, as well as a communicative-pragmatic analysis aimed at identifying directive illocutionary force. Research results. Communicative success of clickbait headlines correlates with the “curiosity gap” manifesting itself in recipient’s information lacuna. The recipient should be able to bridge the former to avoid excessive cognitive attempts, clickbait headlines being a tool for that. Conclusions. Clickbait headlines analysis results in identifying them as directive illocutionary acts, for they foreground the perlocutionary function deliberately neglecting nominative one, thus manipulating an information recipient.

scholarly journals Cotard syndrome, self-awareness, and I-concepts

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (I) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Rocco Joseph Gennaro
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Conscious State ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Internal Organs ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Previous Discussion ◽  
Delusional Belief ◽  
Conscious Mental State

Various psychopathologies of self-awareness, such as somatoparaphrenia and thought insertion in schizophrenia, might seem to threaten the viability of the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness since it requires a HOT about one’s own mental state to accompany every conscious state. The HOT theory of consciousness says that what makes a mental state a conscious mental state is that there is a HOT to the effect that “I am in mental state M.” I have argued in previous work that a HOT theorist can adequately respond to this concern with respect to somatoparaphrenia and thought insertion. There is also Cotard syndrome which is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which people hold the delusional belief that they are dead, do not exist, or have lost their blood or internal organs. In this paper, I argue that HOT theory has nothing to fear from it either and can consistently account for what happens in such unusual cases. I analyze Cotard syndrome in light of my previous discussion of somatoparaphrenia and thought insertion, and argue that HOT theory can provide a somewhat analogous account without the worry of inconsistency. It is crucial to recognize that there are multiple “self-concepts” and levels of HOTs which can help to provide a more nuanced explanation. With regard to the connection between consciousness and self-consciousness, it is proposed that Cotard patients are indeed capable of having some “I-thoughts” about their bodies and mental states.

Self-Representationalist Theories of Consciousness

2020 ◽  
pp. 457-481
Author(s):  
Tom McClelland
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Lower Order ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Conscious State ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Order Component ◽  
Intimate Contact ◽  
In Virtue Of

Self-Representationalists hold that conscious mental states are conscious in virtue of suitably representing themselves, and that awareness of a mental state is achieved by representing oneself as being in that state. Where Higher-Order Representationalists claim that awareness of a mental state is conferred by a distinct mental state that represents it, Self-Representationalists instead argue that conscious mental states represent themselves. This chapter explores why Self-Representationalists make this move away from Higher-Order Representationalists and describes the internal divisions among Self-Representationalist theories. These divisions concern: whether conscious states have distinguishable components corresponding to their lower-order and higher-order content; whether the higher-order component of a conscious state (if such there is) is itself represented by that state. The challenges faced by Self-Representationalist include: the threat of collapsing into a Higher-Order Representationalist theory; the worry that the proposed self-representing states resist naturalization; and the danger of failing to accommodate the intimate contact we have with our own conscious states.

scholarly journals Higher–Order Thought and the Problem of Shifting Subjectivity

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madhu Mangal Chaturvedi ◽  
A. V. Ravishankar Sarma Ravishankar Sarma
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Lower Order ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Subjective Character ◽  
Target State ◽  
Conscious Mental State

In this paper, we argue that the two versions of the higher–order thought theory of consciousness, viz. Rosenthal’s extrinsic higher–order thought and Gennaro’s intrinsic higher–order thought, fail to explain the subjective character of a conscious mental state. Both these theories face what we call the problem of shifting subjectivity. Since these theories explain the consciousness of mental states in terms of a representational relation between two unconscious mental states with the help of a two–tiered representational structure divided into a higher–order thought and a lower–order mental state (which is the target of the higher–order thought), they fail to explain the subjective character of conscious mental states, which is intrinsic to them. In their account, the subjective character intrinsic to conscious mental states seems to shift from the target state to the higher–order mental state, which is separate from the target state. The objection is strong against Rosenthal’s extrinsic higher–order thought theory, which clearly makes a distinction between a world–directed mental state and the higher–order thought representing it. However, although Gennaro’s intrinsic higher–order thought theory is an attempt to preserve the intuition that consciousness is intrinsic to conscious mental states, it faces the problem of shifting subjectivity in the case of introspective consciousness.

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