We criticize attempts to define hope in terms of other psychological states and argue that hope is a primitive mental state whose nature can be illuminated by specifying key aspects of its functional profile.1

Brentano’s theory of inner consciousness has recently had a surprising comeback. However, it is still an open question how it is best understood. It is widely held that according to Brentano a mental act is conscious iff it is self‐presenting. In contrast, I will argue that Brentano holds that a mental act x is conscious iff it is unified with an immediately evident cognition (‘Erkenntnis’) of x. If one understands Brentano’s theory in this way, it promises to shed light on standard problems for theories of inner consciousness.

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The questions in the domain of relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatics that strike me as most interesting and most in need of some long hard thought concern the nature of ad hoc concepts. (Carston, 2010: 248-249) AbstractAccording to truth-conditional pragmatics, a word may contribute an ad hoc concept to the proposition expressed, that is, something that differs from the concept the word encodes (the lexicalized concept). In relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatics, ad hoc concepts are treated like a species of concepts proper. Concepts as well as ad hoc concepts are taken to be atomic. Lexical pragmatic adjustment is conceived as the formation of an ad hoc concept that is narrower or broader in extension (or both) than the lexicalized concept involved. We argue that difference in extension should not be taken as the crucial feature of lexical pragmatics, since ad hoc concepts can have the same extension as the lexicalized concept. In contrast, we propose a positive view of ad hoc concepts as clusters of information poised to be used in inference. (Surprisingly, ad hoc concepts turn out not to be concepts at all.) The cluster account drops the assumption that ad hoc concepts are atomic and can therefore provide a satisfactory explanation of lexical pragmatic adjustment.2 Keywords ad hoc concept, concept, lexical pragmatic adjustment, truth-conditional pragmatics, relevance theory, proposition expressed Truth-Conditional Pragmatics and Ad hoc ConceptsGrice proposed that the pragmatic implicatures of an utterance are inferred from the proposition it literally expresses by drawing on pragmatic maxims. For him, the proposition expressed ("what is said", in Grice's terminology) by an utterance is determined by the linguistic meaning of the words uttered, the assignment of referents to context-dependent expressions such as pronouns and the resolution of ambiguities. (See Grice, 1975: 44). More recently several authors have argued that pragmatics does not only start when the proposition expressed is determined. Some aspects of the proposition expressed seem to be inferred on the basis of pragmatic principles.1 A criterion that has been important in the debate is the effect of embedding under logical operations such as negation. (See Carston, 2002: 193). Consider an example given by Carston (2002: 193):(1) A: Have you showered? B:No, I haven't. I showered yesterday and one should not shower too often.The negation in B's reply operates on the proposition that the speaker has showered on the day of utterance. Otherwise we could not see how B's reason (in his second sentence) bears on the truth of his utterance of "No, I haven't." Now it is has been controversial whether pragmatics enters 1 Wilson and Sperber, 1981, provides one of the earliest versions of this view. For overviews see Carston, 2002: 19-32; Recanati, 2004: 25f. 3 the picture in such cases through deriving the value of a hidden variable that is linguistically provided, or by "free" (i.e. purely pragmatic) enrichment. But it is accepted by both sides that th...