No abstract

This paper is concerned with the conditions under which a person can be said to have told someone or predicted (the answer to a question like) who sang. It is standardly claimed that while (i) the true answer must be completely specified, it is not necessary that (ii) it be specified as being the complete answer. Here the non-factive verbs tell and predict are said to differ from the factive verb know, which typically does impose the strong exhaustivity requirement in (ii). We argue for an intermediate reading of tell and predict that requires more than (i) but less than (ii). To account for this reading we claim that the exhaustivity requirement (ii) imposed by know is due to an operator than can apply non-locally. Applying the operator above a non-factive verb derives the intermediate reading, whereas doing so is vacuous in the case of factives. Thus, we derive the intermediate reading, and differences in the exhaustivity requirements imposed by factives and non-factives, without lexical stipulation.

After presenting a simple expressivist account of reports of probabilistic judgements, I explore a classic problem for it, namely the Frege‐Geach problem. I argue that it is a problem not just for expressivism but for any reasonable account of ascriptions of graded judgements. I suggest that the problem can be resolved by appropriately modelling imprecise credences.

We discuss the challenge to truth-conditional semantics presented by apparent shifts in extension of predicates such as 'red'. We propose an explicit indexical semantics for 'red' and argue that our account is preferable to the alternatives on conceptual and empirical grounds.Truth-conditional semantics is the project of determining a way of assigning truthconditions to sentences based on A) the extension of their constituents and B) their syntactic mode of composition. Truth-conditional semantics is the major research project of linguistic semantics and the project and its prospects are a central concern in contemporary philosophy of language. 1 Some linguists and philosophers argue that the fact that the extension of certain predicates appears to change dramatically across different contexts indicates that there is a fundamental problem with truth-conditional semantics. 2 We will state one version of this problem and outline an approach to it. We hope to advance the discussion of the issue by A) giving the explicit semantic theory and B) discussing some empirical considerations that motivate our approach (or at least fail to disconfirm it!).Two vignettes 3 can illustrate the phenomenon of predicates appearing to have context-dependent extensions: The GreengrocerThe greengrocer stocks two types of watermelons. Both types are green on the outside, one has red flesh and the other has yellow flesh. A customer asks for a red watermelon. The greengrocer points to one and says, 'How about this one? It's red'.We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments on previous drafts. We would also like to acknowledge audiences at the CSMN/Arché Adjectives Workshop and the UCL Pragmatics Reading Group for their useful questions and comments.