Variadic function and pragmatics-rich representations of belief reports

Our paper discusses Recanati's application of the mental files apparatus to reports of beliefs and other attitudes. While mental files appear in Recanati's work on belief-reports early on (e.g. Recanati 1993), Recanati's latest book introduces the concept of indexed files (a.k.a. vicarious files) and puts it to work to explain how we can report other people's attitudes and to account for opacity phenomena. Our goal is twofold: we shall show that the approach in Recanati 2012 departs significantly from his earlier proposals (1993, 2000) as well as from the very spirit of truth-conditional pragmatics (2010), and we shall argue that the indexed files approach, qua an attempt to provide a semantics for beliefreports, is untenable. Sect. 1: Introduction: from Modes of Presentation to Mental Files Recanati has dealt with belief-reports and, more generally, attitude ascriptions in a number of places over the past 20 years. Some of this work shows important similarities with the framework presented in 2012, but there are significant divergences as well. We shall review the ideas already present in Recanati's earlier work (1993, 2000), introduce his new approach, and then point out certain features of the latter that make it difficult to draw a homogeneous picture of Recanati's views about metarepresentation; that is, about the capacity of thinking about attitudes-be they other people's or our own-and of reporting them.

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Relativism and Bound Predicates of Personal Taste: An Answer to Schaffer's Argument from Binding

Zeman

2015

Dialectica

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In this paper I put forward and substantiate a possible defensive move on behalf of the relativist about predicates of personal taste that can be used to block a recent contextualist argument raised against the view: the 'argument from binding' proposed in Schaffer (2011). The move consists in adopting Recanati's (2002;2004) "variadic functions" apparatus and applying it to predicates of personal taste like 'tasty' and experiencer phrases like 'for John'. I substantiate the account in a basic relativistic framework and reply to several objections to the variadic-functions approach in general and to its application to the expressions at hand.The aim of this paper is to put forward and substantiate a possible defensive move on behalf of the relativist about predicates of personal taste that could be used to block a recent contextualist argument raised against the view -the 'argument from binding' proposed in Jonathan Schaffer's article 'Perspective in Taste Predicates and Epistemic Modals'. This argument has the same form as that used by defenders of truth-conditional semantics against truth-conditional pragmatics about, for example, locations. The argument proceeds as follows: we start from examples of complex sentences that have bound readings, and, by appeal to certain syntactic and semantic assumptions we are drawn to conclude that simple sentences containing the target expressions have a corresponding variable in their logical form 1 that is responsible for the bound reading. The answer I will propose in this paper has the peculiarity that it grants all the syntactic and semantic assumptions the proponent of the argument resorts to, while still offering an escape route for the relativist by employing a certain view about the expressions involved in the argument.I will proceed as follows. In section 1 I will give a brief characterization of predicates of personal taste and then present the data Schaffer relies on, together with various instances of the argument from binding -including the one I claim is implicit in Schaffer's paper. In section 2 I will sketch the solution to Schaffer's . 1 'Logical form' will be understood in this paper as referring to the level of syntactic representation of sentences that is free from ambiguities and constitutes the input to semantics. The logical form of a sentence is (at least partially) determined by the syntactic configuration of the expressions it contains, where 'syntactic configuration' refers to a level of representation that, at minimum, specifies the number of an expression's argument places.

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Variadic function and pragmatics-rich representations of belief reports

Cited by 4 publications

References 51 publications

Situated temporal reference: A case for compositional pragmatics?

Situated temporal reference: A case for compositional pragmatics?

Mental Files, Blown Up by Indexed Files

Relativism and Bound Predicates of Personal Taste: An Answer to Schaffer's Argument from Binding

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