Granularity in the Semantics of Comparison

This paper makes the novel observation that definite comparatives, such as the bigger circle, impose restrictions on the cardinality of the comparison class (CC) against which their truth conditions are evaluated. We show that the corpus frequency counts of definite comparatives sharply drop when the comparison class used for their interpretation is formed by more than two individuals. Two alternative theories of these distributional facts are considered and tested experimentally through an acceptability judgment task. According to the first theory, the 2-Individuals Theory, definite comparatives presuppose that the CC is of cardinality 2; under the second theory, the 2-Degrees Theory, the meaning of the comparative is evaluated against a granularity γ that maps the individuals in the CC to degrees in the relevant adjectival scale, and definite comparatives presuppose that the set of the degrees resulting from this mapping is of cardinality 2. Our experimental results show that definite comparative descriptions are most frequent and felicitous when evaluated against comparison classes with two individuals, but also that acceptability drops off with higher cardinalities in a gradient manner that is sensitive to granularity. Taken together, these findings argue against the 2-Individuals theory of definite comparatives and lend support to the 2-Degrees theory.

Difficulties in Establishing “Truth” Conditions in the Assessment of Addictive Smartphone Use in Young Adults

The smartphone revolution has placed powerful, multipurpose devices in the hands of youth across the globe, prompting worries about the potential negative consequences of these technologies on mental health. Many assessment tools have been created, seeking to classify individuals into problematic and non-problematic smartphone users. These are identified using a cutoff value: a threshold, within the scale range, at which higher scores are expected to be associated with negative outcomes. Lacking a clinical assessment of individuals, the establishment of this threshold is challenging. We illustrate this difficulty by calculating cutoff values for the Short Version of the Smartphone Addiction Scale (SAS-SV) in 13 Spanish-speaking samples in 11 countries, using common procedures (i.e., reliability, validity, ROC methodology). After showing that results can be very heterogeneous (i.e., they lead to diverse cutoff points and rates of addiction) depending on the decisions made by the researchers, we call for caution in the use of these classifications, particularly when researchers lack a clinical definition of true addiction—as is the case with most available scales in the field of behavioral addictions—which can cause an unnecessary public health alert.

Dynamic Probabilistic Entailment. Improving on Adams' Dynamic Entailment Relation

The inferences of contraposition (A ⇒ C ∴ ¬C ⇒ ¬A), the hypothetical syllogism (A ⇒ B, B ⇒ C ∴ A ⇒ C), and others are widely seen as unacceptable for counterfactual conditionals. Adams convincingly argued, however, that these inferences are unacceptable for indicative conditionals as well. He argued that an indicative conditional of form A ⇒ C has assertability conditions instead of truth conditions, and that their assertability ‘goes with’ the conditional probability p(C|A). To account for inferences, Adams developed the notion of probabilistic entailment as an extension of classical entailment. This combined approach (correctly) predicts that contraposition and the hypothetical syllogism are invalid inferences. Perhaps less well-known, however, is that the approach also predicts that the unconditional counterparts of these inferences, e.g., modus tollens (A ⇒ C, ¬C ∴ ¬A), and iterated modus ponens (A ⇒ B, B ⇒ C, A ∴ C) are predicted to be valid. We will argue both by example and by calling to the results from a behavioral experiment (N = 159) that these latter predictions are incorrect if the unconditional premises in these inferences are seen as new information. Then we will discuss Adams’ (1998) dynamic probabilistic entailment relation, and argue that it is problematic. Finally, it will be shown how his dynamic entailment relation can be improved such that the incongruence predicted by Adams’ original system concerning conditionals and their unconditional counterparts are overcome. Finally, it will be argued that the idea behind this new notion of entailment is of more general relevance.

ON MODELS FOR CROSS-WORLD PREDICATION

Я выдвигаю два методологических возражения против концепции кросс-мировой предикации, которую предлагает Е. Борисов: (1) Данный подход не учитывает того обстоятельства, что истинностный статус утверждений модального дискурса, как правило, интересует нас не в теоретико-модельном смысле, а в смысле истинности simpliciter. При этом данный подход не оставляет нам никакой возможности говорить о модальной эпистемологии и содержательном обосновании модальных утверждений. (2) Данный подход не учитывает роли воображения и ментального моделирования в том, что Е. Борисовым называется «интуитивным пониманием» рассматриваемых им утверждений. Учёт воображения и ментального моделирования, в свою очередь, переводит содержание подавляющего числа рассматриваемых Евгением примеров в разряд эпистемической модальности говорящего. При этом корректный переход от субъективной эпистемической модальности говорящего к любым типам объективных модальностей в рамках подхода Евгения попросту не может быть осуществлён, поскольку такой переход предполагает наличие внятной концепции модальной эпистемологии, чего Евгений нам не предлагает. Истинность любых рассматриваемых им примеров - это истинность на моделях говорящих, то есть на фреймах, в рамках которых говорящие полагают некоторые миры достижимыми из актуального. I raise two objections to E. Borisov’s methodology for building the theory of cross-world predication: (1) This approach does not take into account the fact that usually we are interested in truth values of modal claims not in the model-theoretical sense, but in the sense of truth simpliciter. However, this approach does not leave us any opportunity to talk about modal truths simpliciter, modal epistemology and substantive truth conditions for modal claims. (2) This approach does not take into account the role of imagination and mental modeling in what E. Borisov calls the ‘intuitive meaning’ of the analysed claims. However, taking into account imagination and mental modeling shows that the vast majority of the cases under consideration deal with epistemic and not alethic modality. In the absence of any modal epistemology we cannot simply postulate the validity of modal truths. Such postulation would be puzzling and unexplainable. And without such postulation of factuality, all the modalities we consider turn out epistemic.

Beyond verification: Flesh witnessing and the significance of embodiment in conflict news

Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism, we argue that it has missed out on the ethico-political function of UGC as testimonials of lives-at-risk. If we wish to recognize and act on UGC as techno-social practices of witnessing human pain and death, we propose, then we need to push further the conceptual and analytical boundaries of the field. In this paper, we do this by introducing a view of UGC as flesh witnessing, that is as embodied and mobile testimonies of vulnerable others that, enabled by smartphones, enter global news environments as appeals to attention and action. Drawing on examples from the Syrian conflict, we provide an analysis of the narrative strategies through which flesh witnessing acquires truth-telling authority and we reflect on what is gained and lost in the process. western story-telling, we conclude, strategically co-opts the affective dimension of flesh witnessing – its focus on child innocence, heroic martyrdom or the data aesthetics of destruction – and selectively minimizes its urgency by downplaying or effacing the bodies of non-western witnesses. This preoccupation with verification should not be subject to geopolitical formulations and needs to be combined with an explicit acknowledgement of the embodied voices of conflict as testimonies of the flesh whose often mortal vulnerability is, in fact, the very condition of possibility upon which western broadcasting rests.

Object-based unawareness: Axioms

This paper provides foundations for a model of unawareness, called object-based unawareness (OBU) structures, that can be used to distinguish between what an agent is unaware of and what she simply does not know. At an informal level, this distinction plays a key role in a number of papers such as Tirole (2009) and Chung & Fortnow (2016). In this paper, we give the model-theoretic description of OBU structures by showing how they assign truth conditions to every sentence of the formal language used. We then prove a model-theoretic sound and completeness theorem, which characterizes OBU structures in terms of a system of axioms. We then verify that agents in OBU structures do not violate any of the introspection axioms that are generally considered to be necessary conditions for a plausible notion of unawareness. Applications are provided in our companion paper.

An alternatives account of 'most’ and 'more than half’

While 'most' and 'more than half' are generally assumed to be truth-conditionally equivalent, the former is usually interpreted as conveying greater proportions than the latter. Previous work has attempted to explain this difference in terms of pragmatic strengthening or variation in meanings. In this paper, we propose a novel explanation that keeps the truth-conditions equivalence. We argue that the difference in typical sets between the two expressions emerges as a result of two previously independently motivated mechanisms. First, the two expressions have different sets of pragmatic alternatives. Second, listeners tend to minimize the expected distance between their representation of the world and the speaker's observation. We support this explanation with a computational model of usage in the Rational Speech Act framework. Moreover, we report the results of a quantifier production experiment. We find that the difference in typical proportions associated with the two expressions can be explained by our account.

Presentación del número monográfico sobre Expressing Hatred: The Political Dimension of Expressives

Desde hace unos años, se ha producido dentro de la filosofía analítica un movimiento de acercamiento a las prácticas reales y de huida de las idealizaciones no justificadas que pretende poner las herramientas conceptuales desarrolladas durante el último siglo al servicio de la justicia social. En el ámbito de la filosofía del lenguaje, este giro ha pasado por el análisis de expresiones del lenguaje natural que, por no encajar de forma completamente satisfactoria con la concepción del significado como condiciones de verdad, han recibido tradicionalmente poca atención. Sin embargo, estas expresiones juegan un papel fundamental en la comunicación con impacto político. Hablamos de los expresivos, esto es, expresiones que se utilizan para comunicar una cierta actitud. El propósito de este número especial de Daimon es ofrecer una panorámica de algunos debates que se están desarrollando en la actualidad en relación con la dimensión política de los expresivos, pero también de discusiones cercanas que en ocasiones se solapan con esta, tanto en filosofía del lenguaje como en ramas de la filosofía afines. For some years now, there has been a movement within analytic philosophy to get closer to real practices and to flee from unwarranted idealizations in order to put the conceptual tools developed over the last century at the service of social justice. In the field of philosophy of language, this turn has involved the analysis of natural language expressions that, not fitting in a completely satisfactory way with the conception of meaning as truth conditions, have traditionally received little attention. However, these expressions play a fundamental role in communication with political impact. We are talking about expressives, that is, expressions that are used to communicate a certain attitude. The purpose of this special issue of Daimon is to offer an overview of some of the debates that are currently taking place in relation to the political dimension of expressives, but also of related discussions that sometimes overlap with it, both in philosophy of language and in related branches of philosophy.

Jeremy is a... Expressive-relativism and expressives in predicative positions

Expressives are words that convey speakers’ attitudes towards a particular object or situation. Consider two examples: Attributive: That f**khead Jeremy forgot the turkey. Predicative: Jeremy is a f**khead. In both examples the word f**khead communicates some expressive content - the negative attitude of the speaker. However, only in Predicative does it appear to contribute to the truth-conditional content. The task is to explain the semantics of the word f**khead when it seemingly behaves wildly differently in different syntactic positions. In this paper I consider several good candidates for dealing with f**khead occurring in Predicative position: Expressivist and Descriptive approaches that treat f**khead in Predicative as purely descriptive; and Expressive-Contextualism that treats Predicative as communicating to both expressive and descriptive dimensions. I show that none of the options fully capture the meaning of f**khead. Treating Predicative as purely descriptive leaves out the highly important expressive element, whilst Contextualist semantics does not seem as a suitable descriptive theory for expressives. I finally present a novel hybrid account that combines Expressivist semantics with Relativism. I call this view Expressive-Relativism. I show that by adopting Expressive-Relativism we can not only explain the relationship of f**khead in Attributive and Predicative, but also give a suitable descriptive theory that captures the truth-conditions of Predicative.