We highlight various non-standard mechanisms of communication to both motivate our response to what is known as the 'answering machine paradoxes' and to shed light on recent variants of these cases. We claim that the most intuitive solution to these paradoxes requires one to distinguish between the agent (of a context), the tokening of a sentence and the agent's chosen mechanism of communicating this tokening.Keywords Answering machine paradox Á Indexicals Á Context of utterance Á Kaplan Á Predelli Á Pure and impure indexicals Steven Hawking is having a bad day. He has just lost another nurse; the fourth this month. The problem is that the voice synthesizer he uses to communicate has been malfunctioning, 'saying' things that Hawking has not instructed it to say. The first three times it was inconvenient and embarrassing when he 'said' ''I hate you!'' to his worthy nurses, but what he 'said' to this latest nurse was liable to land him with a harassment suit. ''The machine is putting words in my mouth,'' he tells the engineer. ''I am not saying these things!'' Intuitively, Hawking is not saying anything; and the machine (having no communicative intentions) is not saying anything. In fact, nothing is said; no proposition is expressed. We use this case and cases like it to both motivate our response to what is known as the 'answering machine paradoxes' and to shed light on recent variants of these cases. We claim that the most intuitive solution to these paradoxes requires one to distinguish between the agent (of a context), the tokening of a sentence and the agent's chosen mechanism of communicating this tokening.

In Facing the Future, Belnap et al. reject bivalence and propose double time reference semantics to give a pragmatic response to the following assertion problem: how can we make sense of assertions about future events made at a time when the outcomes of those events are not yet determined? John MacFarlane employs the same semantics, now bolstered with a relative-truth predicate, to accommodate the following apparently conflicting intuitions regarding the truth-value of an uttered future contingent: at the moment of utterance, if asked to evaluate the truth-value of the asserted future contingent one has the intuition that the assertion is neither true nor false, yet later, at the moment of the predicted event, one has the intuition that the assertion was, already, either true or false. Both MacFarlane and Belnap assume that assertions of future contingents have complete propositional content -the traditional propositional contents that, according to him 'are the contents of assertions and beliefs'. This assumption is challenged.

In this paper, I argue that we need a more robust account of our ability and willingness to trust social robots. I motivate my argument by demonstrating that existing accounts of trust and of trusting social robots are inadequate. I identify that it is the feature of a façade or deception inherent in our engagement with social robots that both facilitates, and is in danger of undermining, trust. Finally, I utilise the fictional dualism model of social robots to clarify that trust in social robots, unlike trust in humans, must rely on an independent judgement of product reliability.

In this paper I propose a Fictional Dualism model of social robots. The model helps us to understand the human emotional reaction to social robots and also acts as a guide for us in determining the significance of that emotional reaction, enabling us to better define the moral and legislative rights of social robots within our society. I propose a distinctive position that allows us to accept that robots are tools, that our emotional reaction to them can be important to their usefulness, and that this emotional reaction is not a direct indicator that robots deserve either moral consideration or rights. The positive framework of Fictional Dualism provides us with an understanding of what social robots are and with a plausible basis for our relationships with them as we bring them further into society.