It is not surprising that young children sometimes misunderstand expressions. There is a well-known children’s game called “Simon Says.” The parent or teacher gives the rule: Only do what Simon says. The adult then says, “Simon says touch your nose,” but sometimes says only “Shake your head.” Children are to comply with the first but not the second. Google provides a brief video as part of its entry for “Simon Says.” It reveals, what is often reported, three- or four-year-olds often comply with both, while slightly older children are more able to make the distinction, but all children love the game. The game is an early introduction to the rules for correct understanding. Understanding correctly is difficult because the main clause determines how the other clause is to be understood.

Here I attempt to tackle difficult questions about essence and reference head-on by making explicit the way that theories of reference impact the plausibility of existence claims about free will and moral responsibility. Here I restrict my focus to the way that "free will" refers in particular, as this is the only term in the constellation of free will, responsibility, and blame that has thus far received much attention in regard to its operative reference-fixing convention. I begin by canvassing some early work on the way various reference-fixing conventions might inform existence claims about "free will" offered by Mark Heller (1996) and Susan Hurley (2000). I then turn to one of the most systematic attempts to analyze the way that "free will" refers currently on offer, Shaun Nichols’ discretionary view. While Nichols’ account of how "free will" refers is already quite hospitable to eliminativism in allowing that eliminativists’ claims that free will does not exist are sometimes true, I also take up a further argument from Gregg Caruso that Nichols’ view actually suggests that eliminativists’ claims are always true. I argue that Caruso’s argument fails, and that in fact Nichols’ discretionary view offers a path to defend preservationism.

Satire is often thought to differ in spirit or function from libel, defamation, gossip, and scandal. Many of the traditional ways scholars have defined satire – as a serious, high-minded mode focused on moral reform – enforce this distinction: the more frivolous and gossipy a satire is, the less it appears to be satire. This essay considers Lady Anne Hamilton’s satire, The Epics of the Ton; or, The Glories of the Great World (1807), a poem that challenges the traditional distinction between satire and gossip. Rare among satires in conceding its reliance on gossip, Hamilton’s poem surveys the sexual misdeeds of London’s fashionable classes, cloaking the identities of the targets. In presenting satire as a mode of printed gossip, Epics confounds the usual gender associations of satire. The poem contests the view, since John Dryden at least, of satire as a public, “manly” mode far removed from the furtive, gossipy genres associated with women, such as secret history and roman à clef. Hamilton uses the cloaked identities in her poem to replicate the play of gossip, where one scandalous tale ensnares many victims. By inviting identification of targets, Hamilton entraps readers into creating the gossip that is supposedly antithetical to satire.

This chapter introduces basic notions and questions about meaning, reference, content, truth, truth conditions, and context-sensitivity in semantic theories of natural languages.

This chapter provides an overview of the research on semantics and related interface phenomena in heritage language grammars, focusing on three main questions: (i) whether the phenomena under investigation are subject to incomplete acquisition and/or attrition in heritage language grammars; (ii) whether heritage language grammars are subject to cross-linguistic influence from the dominant language; and (iii) whether interface phenomena are particularly vulnerable in incomplete acquisition and/or attrition. These questions are investigated in four linguistic domains that fall at the interface between syntax and semantics where there has been a substantial body of research with heritage speakers: semantics of the verbal domain, such as tense/aspect and unaccusativity; semantics of the nominal domain, such as definiteness and genericity; semantics of subject and object expression, including binding and case-marking; and quantifier semantics.

This chapter provides a comparative study of the application of proportionality by English and Greek judges in the field of EC market freedoms. It shows that both English and Greek judges have assumed their mission of juges communautaires de droit commun. Despite this appearance of convergence, I argue, the reception of proportionality follows local patterns of cultural change and local knowledge practices, which affect local lawyers’ possibilities to resist to the process of European integration, as well as their capacity shape this process. Common law pragmatism has allowed English courts to frame normative conflicts between domestic and EC law. When proportionality and the effet utile of EC market freedoms entered into conflict with fundamental constitutional principles of the common law, English judges have occasionally objected to their application. By way of contrast, the perception of law as science has not allowed Greek lawyers to frame normative conflicts between domestic and EC law. Proportionality as a European science has engineered important constitutional change and has considerably compromised the normativity of the Greek Constitution.

In this paper I first worry that Rorty’s attack on various conceptions of “the world” has an alarming tendency to veer from opposition to the kind of realism that he associates with various philosophers, such as Plato, Descartes, or even Kant, into skepticism about ordinary activities including those of observing things and referring to them. I try to uncover the roots of this slide in various semantic doctrines, and explore the distinction between minimalist or deflationist theories of truth, and any wider, and less plausible general doctrine of semantic minimalism.

Chapter 6 focuses on meaning and the interpretation of language. It contrasts the meaning of words, which we have stored in our mental lexicon and which we refer to as lexical meaning, with grammatical meaning, such as tense and aspect, gender, and number. There is also pragmatic meaning which depends on our knowledge of the world and contextual information. The difference between denotation, connotation, and reference are explored and basic concepts such a synonymy, antonymy, homonymy, etc. are introduced. Prototype theory is analyzed with appropriate examples. The chapter links to syntax by examining subcategorization, including transitive and intransitive verbs, and also thematic roles and their relation to syntactic structure. It presents the difference between sentences, propositions, and utterances, explaining in depth the importance of truth conditions. The chapter presents important concepts of entailment, contradiction, presupposition, and implicature and concludes with a brief discussion on theoretical frameworks such as cognitive and formal approaches to semantics.

The chapter presents the theory of interactive alignment and primarily focuses on the alignment of linguistic representations underlying the utterances that each speaker contributes to the dialogue. Such representations enable interlocutors to formulate phrases, words, or gestures that move the dialogue forward. We also consider two dimensions of alignment (focal vs. global, and linguistic vs. dialogue model) and how alignment relates to reference and the role of dialogue routines in support of alignment.

The chapter shows how interlocutors achieve alignment of dialogue models -- that is, both situation models and dialogue game models. Such alignment is the basis of successful dialogue. We discuss the importance of co-reference for alignment of situation models. We then consider the role of meta-representation of aiignment in dialogue and how this controls what people choose to say next. We consider the relationship between focal alignment of dialogue models and what is in the shared workspace. Finally, we discuss the relationship between alignment and common ground.

Chapter 1, “Inner Sense as the Faculty for Inner Receptivity”, sets the stage by introducing Kant’s basic model of representation and by defining two pairs of concepts that will guide my analysis: reflexivity and referentiality, on the one hand, and objective and subjective validity on the other. Through an examination of the historical context, the chapter develops an account of inner sense as a transcendental faculty of sensibility, and gives preliminary accounts of central concepts, including affection, sensation, appearance, intuition, perception, and experience. As a result, the chapter suggests that – by analogy with outer sense – inner sense receives inner appearances and yields distinctively inner intuition according to its specific form, i.e., time. The full argument for this claim will be put forward only in Chapter 2. Finally, by considering insights concerning the faculties for desire and feeling from the third Critique and the Anthropology, the chapter develops a broader notion of inner receptivity as susceptibility to all mind-internal causes.

Rorty’s only extensive and systematic treatment of Saul Kripke’s work, “Kripke on Mind-Body Identity” puts Kripke’s arguments back into an often overlooked historical and philosophical context that sheds new light on them and their viability and overall significance. Anyone interested in mind-brain identity theory, in particular, those who think it was shown to be untenable by Kripke’s criticisms and remain puzzled by its still being alive and well, will appreciate Rorty’s explanations why those criticisms, in fact, must “leave the issue about mind-body identity where it stood.” Rorty predicts that in the wake of Kripke’s criticisms, “The old issues will go over into the new vocabulary – with less talk about meaning and more about reference, but without dialectical loss to either side.”

Many think of the difference between sensation and perception in terms of information – perception carries information, but sensations, the raw feels that occur prior to perception, do not. A standard, biological account of information holds that it occurs only for information consumers. How is it that sensations become informational, and to whom do they become informational? In this chapter I argue that perception comes about due to attention directed by a subject. Attention is the process by which sensations are organized according to the subject’s interests, allowing them to have meaning for the subject, or to become informational for the subject. I compare this account to those that find attention to be necessary for the binding of features into objects, the creation of an objective spatial framework, or perceptual knowledge. I reject the first two accounts, ultimately arguing for a similar conclusion to those in the third, such as Campbell and Dickie. Experiential support for my account is the universal foreground/background structure of conscious perception, a structure that I argue depends on attention. Along the way I discuss at length the work of Treisman and Merleau-Ponty.

Reference is a phenomenon both of experience and thinking. It happens when a focal point for meaning is selected by the meaning-maker from the infinities of the world. The meaning – taking form as a mental representation, an act or object of communication, or an interpretation – “stands for” something in the world. Reference involves the specification of particular instances and general concepts, their circumstances as entities or actions, and their properties as qualities or quantities. Things in the world might be identified as entities or actions, though, by transposition actions may be construed as entities, and entities as actions. Entities and actions can be particular – a single instance – or multiple, defined in their generality as concepts. By transposition, by way of conceptualization, instances can be connected to the general. This connection of the instance to the general is by means of generalizable properties, including qualities and quantities.

Chapter 3 provides an overview of two influential pragmatic approaches to reference: Accessibility theory and the Givenness Hierarchy. Both accounts have been claimed to be compatible with relevance theory. However, it has also been claimed relevance theory alone cannot account for the full range of data and that these auxiliary scales of activation are necessary additions. In this chapter these claims are examined, and some objections are raised. The more general objections relate to the nature of the relevance-theoretic approach to utterance interpretation and how scales of encoded activation might fit with this. More specific objections relate to how the activation scale accounts deal with stylistic or so-called special uses of referring expressions. Finally, some examples of proper names in English are briefly discussed to illustrate how highly context sensitive the choices made by speakers can be, and to demonstrate the crucial role played by considerations of style and genre.

The final chapter brings together the themes from across the volume and revisits the research questions which have driven the discussion. The main conclusions are briefly summarized and some suggestions are made for possible implications of the work and for future directions.