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1. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Dunja Jutronić Introduction
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2. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Una Stojnić Précis for Context and Coherence:: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence
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This précis outlines some of the key themes in Context and Coherence. At the core of Context and Coherence is the meta-semantic question: what determines the meaning of context-sensitive language and how do we interpret it as effortlessly as we do? What we can express with language is obviously constrained by grammar, but it also seems to depend on various non-linguistic features of an utterance situation, for example, pointing gestures. Accordingly, it is nearly universally assumed that grammar underspecifies content: the interpretation of context-sensitive language depends in part on extra-linguistic features of the utterance situation. Contra this dominant tradition, the book develops and defends a thoroughly linguistic account: context-sensitivity resolution is entirely a matter of grammar, which is much more subtle and pervasive than has typically been noticed. In interpreting context-sensitive language as effortlessly as we do, we draw on our knowledge of these subtle, but pervasive, linguistic cues—what I call discourse conventions. If this is right, the dominant, extra-linguistic account must be rejected. It not only mischaracterizes the linguistic conventions affecting context-sensitivity resolution, but its widespread, and often implicit, endorsement leads to philosophically radical conclusions. The recent arguments for non-truth-conditional and non-classical semantics for modal discourse provide just one illustration of this point. But appeals to context are quite common within a wide range of debates across different subfields of philosophy, and they typically assume the extra-linguistic model of context-sensitivity resolution. If the account of context-sensitivity developed in Context and Coherence is on the right track, such arguments have to be reconsidered.
3. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Peter Pagin Linguistic Conventions or Open-Ended Reasoning: Some Questions for Una Stojnić
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This short paper has the character of a critical notice of Una Stojnić’s book Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence (Stojnić 2021). It is mainly concerned with Stojnić’s strong claim that linguistic phenomena related to prominence and coherence, in particularthe interpretation of pronouns, are governed by linguistic conventionsand are not pragmatic in nature. On these matters, my views areopposite to Stojnić’s.
4. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Magdalena Kaufmann From Coherence Relations to the Grammar of Pronouns and Tense
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Stojnić (2021) argues that the content of linguistic utterances is determined by the rules of natural language grammar more stringently than what is generally assumed. She proposes specifically that coherence relations are encoded by the linguistic structures and determine what individuals count as most prominent, thereby serving as the referents of free (“demonstrative”) pronouns. In this paper, I take a close look at the empirical evidence from English and Serbian that she offers in support of this position. Considering these data points in connection with additional linguistic data (also from German and Japanese), I argue that there is no compelling evidence for the assumption that coherence relations directly determine the resolution of pronouns. Instead, grammatical restrictions imposed by different types of pronouns and tenses have a larger impact on the meaning conventionally expressed by complex utterances than what is generally assumed in the literature on coherence relations.
5. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Alexandru Radulescu Intentionalism and the Natural Interpretation of Discourses
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Intentionalism is the view that a demonstrative refers to something partly in virtue of the speaker intending it to refer to that thing. In recent work, Una Stojnić has argued that the natural interpretation of demonstratives in some discourses is that they do not refer to the objects intended by the speaker, and instead refer to other things. In this paper, I defend intentionalism against this charge. In particular, I argue that the data presented by Stojnić can be explained from an intentionalist point of view. The explanations take two forms: either the audience’s reaction to the discourse does not concern reference, or the natural interpretation is wrong. This latter claim has been defended by Stojnić in other work as applied to word identification and is neutral between intentionalism and Stojnić’s objectivism. It is also very plausible. But it takes away the import of the argument from natural interpretation, at least in the form discussed here.
6. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Sašo Živanović, Peter Ludlow The Syntax of Prominence
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The standard view on discourse pronoun resolution is that determining the antecedents of discourse pronouns is typically a function of extralinguistic reasoning. In contrast, Stojnić (2021) argues that pronoun resolution is a function of linguistic facts. In this article we offer what we take to be a friendly amendment to the technical aspects of Stojnić’s proposal. Our point of departure will be with our idea that prominence is not determined by the position of the candidate antecedent within a stack, but rather by its position within standard syntactic tree structures, extended to include discourse-level trees. Our proposal leans on the notion of p-scope, a proof-theoretic accessibility relation among tree nodes which we develop in Ludlow and Živanović (2022), and the notion of closeness built on standard accounts of syntactic locality. The key idea is that a pronoun’s antecedent resolves to its closest p-scoper; specifically, p-scope determines the potential antecedents, and the closeness relation orders these by prominence. Coherence relations, which we provisionally represent as syntactic heads, can be then seen as affecting accessibility and prominence indirectly, in virtue of their position in traditional LF tree structures.
7. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Michael Devitt Incoherent Meanings
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8. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Fabrizio Cariani, Michael Glanzberg What is a Tense, Anyway?
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We study three different conceptions of tense emerging from semantics, syntax and morphology, respectively. We investigate how they bear on the question of the relationship between tense and modality as they emerge in Cariani’s The Modal Future (2021).
9. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Acknowledgement to Referees
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10. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 3
Table of Contents of Vol. XXIII
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articles
11. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Elay Shech, Michael Watkins The Problem of Perceptual Agreement
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We present the problem of perceptual agreement (of determinate color) and submit that it proves to be a serious and long overlooked obstacle for those insisting that colors are not objective features of objects, viz., nonobjectivist theories like C. L. Hardin’s (2003) eliminativism and Jonathan Cohen’s (2009) relationalism.
12. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Andrej Jandrić, Radmila Jovanović Kozlowski Transitivity and Humeanism about Laws
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Humeanism about laws has been famously accused of the explanatory circularity by David Armstrong and Tim Maudlin, since the Humean laws hold in virtue of their instances and, at the same time, scientifically explain those very instances. Barry Loewer argued that the circularity challenge rests on an equivocation: in his view, once the metaphysical explanation is properly distinguished from the scientific explanation, the circularity vanishes. However, Marc Lange restored the circularity by appealing to his transitivity principle, which connects the two types of explanation. Lange’s transitivity principle has been widely discussed and criticised in the literature. In view of counterexamples, Lange refined both the principle, by taking into account the contrastive nature of explanation, and the requirement of prohibition on self-explanation. Recently, Michael Hicks has developed a new strategy for defending Humeanism about laws from the refi ned circularity challenge, critically appealing to the contrastive nature of both explanations and meta-explanations. We will argue that his strategy fails.
13. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Iñigo Valero Bare Projectibilism and Natural Kinds: A Defense
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Projectibility has traditionally been given a prominent role in natural kind theories. However, where most of these theories take projectibility to be a necessary but insufficient feature of natural kinds, this paper defends an account of natural kinds according to which the naturalness of kinds is to be identified with their degree of projectibility only. This view follows thus the path opened by Häggqvist (2005), although it goes significantly further on two main respects. First, I develop and discuss two important dimensions of projectibility that are overlooked in Häggqvist’s work. Second, I address two recent important objections (Magnus 2012 and Spencer 2015) against projectibility-based accounts.
14. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Maarten Van Doorn A Tension in Some Non-Naturalistic Explanations of Moral Truths
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Recently, there has been some excitement about the potential explanatory payoffs the newish metaphysical notion of grounding seems to have for metaethical non-naturalism. There has also been a recent upsurge in the debate about whether non-naturalism is implausibly committed to some acts being wrong because of some sui generis piece of ontology. It has, in response, been claimed that once we have a clear enough picture of the grounding role of moral laws on non-naturalism, this is not (objectionably) so. This move, I argue, is inconsistent with certain constraints on what non-naturalist-friendly moral laws must be for them to do the explanatory work non-naturalism requires of them elsewhere. In other words, there is tension between the grounding reply to the supervenience objection and the grounding structure implied by some responses to the normative objection.
15. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Stijn Bruers Unwanted Arbitrariness
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I propose a new fundamental principle in ethics: everyone who makes a choice has to avoid unwanted arbitrariness as much as possible. Unwanted arbitrariness is defined as making a choice without following a rule, whereby the consequences of that choice cannot be consistently wanted by at least one person. Other formulations of this anti-arbitrariness principle are given and compared with very similar contractualist principles formulated by Kant, Rawls, Scanlon and Parfit. The structure of arbitrariness allows us to find ways to avoid unwanted arbitrariness. The two most important implications of the anti-arbitrariness principle are discussed: non-dictatorship and non-discrimination.
16. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Huseyin S. Kuyumcuoğlu Reassessing the Exploitation Charge in Sweatshop Labor
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One common argument against sweatshops is that they are exploitative. Exploitation is taken as sufficient reason to condemn sweatshops as unjust and to argue that sweatshop owners have a moral duty to offer better working conditions to their employees. In this article, I argue that any exploitation theory falls short of covering all standard cases of sweatshops as exploitative. In going through the most prominent theories of exploitation, I explain why any given sweatshop can either be wrongfully exploitative or not, depending on the exploitation theory being considered and the circumstances of the application. I conclude by suggesting that sweatshop critics had better find other reasons besides the charge of exploitation to protest or interfere with these workplaces.
17. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1
Boris Čulina How to Conquer the Liar and Enthrone the Logical Concept of Truth: an Informal Exposition
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This article informally presents a solution to the paradoxes of truth and shows how the solution solves classical paradoxes (such as the original Liar) as well as the paradoxes that were invented as counterarguments for various proposed solutions (“the revenge of the Liar”). This solution complements the classical procedure of determining the truth values of sentences by its own failure and, when the procedure fails, through an appropriate semantic shift allows us to express the failure in a classical two-valued language. Formally speaking, the solution is a language with one meaning of symbols and two valuations of the truth values of sentences. The primary valuation is a classical valuation that is partial in the presence of the truth predicate. It enables us to determine the classical truth value of a sentence or leads to the failure of that determination. The language with the primary valuation is precisely the largest intrinsic fixed point of the strong Kleene three-valued semantics (LIFPSK3). The semantic shift that allows us to express the failure of the primary valuation is precisely the classical closure of LIFPSK3: it extends LIFPSK3 to a classical language in parts where LIFPSK3 is undetermined. Thus, this article provides an argumentation, which has not been present in contemporary debates so far, for the choice of LIFPSK3 and its classical closure as the right model for the truth predicate. In the end, an erroneous critique of Kripke-Feferman axiomatic theory of truth, which is present in contemporary literature, is pointed out.
18. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1
Walter Veit Evolutionary Game Theory and Interdisciplinary Integration
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Interdisciplinary research is becoming more and more popular. Many funding bodies encourage interdisciplinarity, as a criterion that promises scientific progress. Traditionally this has been linked to the idea of integrating or unifying disciplines. Using evolutionary game theory as a case study, Till Grüne-Yanoff (2016) argued that there is no such necessary link between interdisciplinary success and integration. Contrary to this, this paper argues that evolutionary game theory is a genuine case of successful integration between economics and biology, shedding lights on the many dimensions along which integration can take place.
19. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1
Igor Wysocki, Łukasz Dominiak How Does Justice Relate to Economic Welfare?: A Case Against Austro-Libertarian Welfare Economics
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This paper argues—contra some Austro-libertarians—that whether a given exchange is welfare-enhancing or welfare-diminishing does not depend on whether that exchange is just or unjust, respectively. Rather, we suggest that in light of our two thought experiments, Austro-libertarianism has at least a pro tanto reason to conceive of justice and welfare as two logically distinct ideals. This would in turn, most interestingly, predict the possibility of (a) just but welfare-diminishing exchanges and (b) unjust but welfare-enhancing ones. Upon considering possible rejoinders to our points, we suggest that Austro-libertarians abandon a justice-based notion of welfare.
20. Croatian Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1
Michael Omoge Imagination, Thought Experiments, and Personal Identity
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Should we descry the nature of the self from thought experiments? Shaun Nichols says ‘maybe,’ but only if we use thought experiments that do not recruit the indexical “I” (non-I-recruiting). His reason is that the psychology of “I” perforce mandates that imagination responds to thought experiments that recruit it (I-recruiting) peculiarly. Here, I consider whether he is correct about non-I-recruiting personal identity thought experiments. I argue positively using the same framework, i.e., considering the underlying psychology.