CONTENTS

Philang 2009
CONTENTS
Eros Corazza and Kepa Korta, PLENARY
Two Dogmas of Philosophical Linguistics ................................................................................ 7
K. M. Jaszczolt, PLENARY
Time in Language and Thought ................................................................................................. 8
Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, PLENARY
Events as they are....................................................................................................................... 9
Michael Morris, PLENARY
The Myth of the Sign ............................................................................................................... 10
Jaroslav Peregrin, PLENARY
The Myth of Semantic Structure .............................................................................................. 11
Eduardo Abrantes
Sounding Things, Breathing Voices
The Phenomenology of Presence in Acoustic Phenomena ...................................................... 13
Yousef Abu Addous
Word-Order and its Rhetorical and Stylistic Functions in Arabic Language .......................... 14
Victoria Akulicheva
Modern philosophical linguistics approach:
Gender Studies in Foreign and Russian Linguistics................................................................. 15
Janusz Badio
Simulation semantics – an overview........................................................................................ 16
Christian Bassac
Philosophy, linguistics, and semantic interpretation................................................................ 18
Khadija Belfarhi
Language philosophy vs. linguistics philosophy in understanding literary meaning .............. 20
Jan Brejcha
User-interface friendliness and the philosophy of language .................................................... 21
Eugene H. Casad
Thoughts from a Field Linguist................................................................................................ 22
Zuzana Čengerová
Novel linguistic criteria for performatives and their etymological analysis ............................ 23
ElŜbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska
An Unresolved Issue: Non-Sense in Natural Language and Non-classical Logical and
Semantic Systems..................................................................................................................... 24
Tadeusz Ciecierski
Varieties of Context-Dependence ............................................................................................ 25
Andrzej Cieśluk
The de re/de dicto distinction and the problem of essentialism............................................... 26
Marzenna Cyzman
Lying, poets tell the truth …
The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’ by John Searle – a still possible solution to an old
problem?................................................................................................................................... 27
Olena Dobrovolska
Analytic Philosophy of Language and Computational Ontology ............................................ 29
Marie Duží, Bjørn Jespersen and Pavel Materna
The procedural turn and the logos of semantic structure ......................................................... 30
Ingrid Lossius Falkum
Polysemy: Lexically Generated or Pragmatically Inferred? .................................................... 31
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Chris Fox
The Good Samaritan and the Hygienic Cook........................................................................... 33
Olga Garmash
Language as a Space for Appearing and Existing of the Individual Speaking ........................ 34
Brendan S. Gillon
Translational Semantics and Model Theory............................................................................. 35
Justyna Grudzińska
At the Intersection of Logic, Philosophy of Language and Linguistics: Multiple Quantification
as a Case of Semantic Ambiguity ............................................................................................ 37
Andrea Guardo
Is Meaning Normative?............................................................................................................ 38
Arkadiusz Gut
Language, Mindreading and Meta-cognition........................................................................... 40
Housam Hashim
Is the Reconciliation of Realism and Interpretationism of Intentionality Tenable? ................ 41
Lars Hertzberg
Does Language have a Use?..................................................................................................... 42
Carl Humphries
Defeasibility of meaning and expression in language use and its implications for culture and
communication......................................................................................................................... 43
Maria Jodłowiec
Metarepresentation and language: a relevance theoretic approach.......................................... 44
Andrew Jorgensen
Understanding Semantic Scepticism........................................................................................ 46
Roman Kalisz
Philosophical Foundations of a Concept of General Meaning................................................. 47
Henryk Kardela
Ludwik Fleck: The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. In Cognitive Linguistics 48
Filip Kawczyński
The Hybrid Theory of Reference for Proper Names................................................................ 49
Witold Kieraś
Equivalent complexity, linguistic theories and philosophy of linguistics................................ 50
Guilherme F. Rennó Kisteumacher
The Logic of Language: Analytical Pragmatism and Inferentialism as a bridge between
philosophy of language and linguistics .................................................................................... 52
Georg Kjøll
What notion of ‘content’ is needed for a theory of communication?....................................... 53
Joanna Klimczyk
What Is It Like Intending to Cheat the Demon: On the Problem with Modal Intentions ........ 55
Krzysztof Kosecki
The Concepts of Subject and Self in Personification Metaphors in English .......................... 56
Karolina Krawczak
(Inter)subjectivity and objectivity. Meaning at a crossroads ................................................... 57
Agnieszka Kułacka
On the Nature of Statistical Language Laws............................................................................ 58
Alina Kwiatkowska
A plea for a cognitive multimodal semiotics ........................................................................... 59
Agnieszka Libura and Maria Libura
Language gene found and lost. The unhappy marriage of linguistics and genetics................. 60

Philang 2009
Jakub Mácha
Metaphor in the Twilight Area between Philosophy and Linguistics...................................... 61
Wojciech Majka
...Deliberately Man Dwells... On the essence of thinking........................................................ 62
Luis Fernández Moreno
On a Philosophy of Language Dogma: Has Descriptivism Been Refuted?............................. 63
Yrsa Neuman
Scientism? Some thoughts on the historiography of modern linguistics and the philosophy of
language ................................................................................................................................... 64
Joanna OdrowąŜ-Sypniewska
Vagueness and Contextualism ................................................................................................. 65
Ratikanta Panda
Is Anything Static About Meanings? ....................................................................................... 66
Andrzej Pawelec
Language as ‘the House of Being’ vs. language as organon:
The ‘formalism’ of linguistics from a hermeneutic perspective .............................................. 67
Wit Pietrzak
Towards a Hermeneutics of Deconstruction: the Case of Metaphor ....................................... 68
Salvatore Pistoia Reda
Game Theory and Scalar Implicatures ..................................................................................... 69
Wiktor Pskit
Categories and Constructions in Current Syntactic Theory..................................................... 70
Małgorzata Pytlas
Speech Act Theory and philosophy – convergence or divergence?......................................... 71
Jiří Raclavský
Is the logico-semantical analysis of natural language expressions a translation?.................... 72
J. Randolph Radney
The Identity of Participants in Communication ....................................................................... 73
Ewa Rosiak
The Problem with the Notion of Meaning and Reference in the field of Analytic Philosophy74
Monika Rymaszewska-Chwist
So who is right? In search of philosophy behind cognitive science......................................... 75
Joanna Sadowska
Early modern linguistic colonialism and postcolonial appropriation of language................... 76
Fabien Schang and Alessio Moretti
Beyond the Fregean myth: the value of logical values ............................................................ 77
Andrew Schumann
Modal Calculus of Illocutionary Logic .................................................................................... 79
Barbara Sonnenhauser
Subjectivity in philosophy and linguistics ............................................................................... 81
Piotr Stalmaszczyk
Foundational Issues in the Philosophy of Language
and the Legacy of Frege ........................................................................................................... 83
Pierre Steiner
Linguistic Representationalism and Cognitive Representationalism:
Representation as a Twofold Dogma in Philosophy of Language and Cognitive Linguistics. 85
William J. Sullivan
Order......................................................................................................................................... 87
Xymena Synak-Pskit
Beyond Linguistics: Philosophy of Sign and Effacement of Metaphor. Simon and Derrida .. 88
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Aleksander Szwedek
The Ultimate Experiential Basis for Metaphors....................................................................... 89
Ali Taheri and Mehdi Damali Amiri
Syntax and Logic...................................................................................................................... 91
Yukio Takahashi
Consilience in the Study of Language and Humanities ........................................................... 93
Mieszko Tałasiewicz
Asymmetrical Semantics.......................................................................................................... 94
Pius Ten-Hacken
The Search for a Science of Language: From historical linguistics to the genetics of language
.................................................................................................................................................. 95
Luca Tranchini
The anti-realist notion of truth ................................................................................................. 96
Giacomo Turbanti
Belief Reports: Defaults, Intentions and Scorekeeping ........................................................... 97
Sławomir Wacewicz
Concepts as Correlates of Lexical Items .................................................................................. 98
Bartosz Więckowski
On Truth in Time...................................................................................................................... 99
Piotr Wilkin
Proper names via causal descriptions and anchoring............................................................. 100
Justyna Winiarska
Methodological and ontological assumptions in linguistic theories ...................................... 101
Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka
Speech acts and the demarcation of pragmatics..................................................................... 102
Lucian Zagan
Vagueness, Context-Dependence, and Perspective................................................................ 104
Dan Zeman
Meteorological Sentences, Unarticulated Constituents and Relativism................................. 106
Lei Zhu
Sound, Body and Writing: A Phenomenological View of Linguistics as Representation of
Speech .................................................................................................................................... 107
Przemysław śywiczyński
Language and Meaning in Classical Indian Philosophy ........................................................ 108
LIST OF PARTICIPANTS .................................................................................................... 109

Eros Corazza, PLENARY
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Kepa Korta, PLENARY
ILCLI, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain
Philang 2009
Two Dogmas of Philosophical Linguistics
It is commonly assumed that by uttering a declarative sentence, one expresses a
proposition. It is also a common assumption that the proposition expressed is (i) the bearer of
truth value, (ii) the bearer of cognitive value, and (iii) what is (literally) said and
communicated.
To solve Frege-inspired puzzles, some appeal to quasi-singular propositions, i.e.
propositions that are both Russellian and Fregean insofar as their constituents are both
objects/properties and the modes of presentation under which the latter are conceived.
To solve problems pertaining to communication using so-called underdetermined
utterances (“Ania is ready/tall/strong”) and/or sub-sentential assertions (“On top of the shelf”,
“From Paris”) some appeal either to enrichment/expansion or to ellipsis.
We’ll claim that these moves rest on two related dogmas: monopropositionalism and
sententialism. We’ll show how a pluri-propositional framework inspired by Perry’s critical
referentialism allows us to present a unified picture concerning both the problem of cognitive
significance and the problem of communication by underdetermined utterances and subsentential
assertions. Utterance-reflexive contents give us all we need to deal with the
problem of cognitive significance and communication by underdetermined and sub-sentential
assertions without having to enrich the proposition expressed by modes of presentation and/or
un-expressed content.
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K. M. Jaszczolt, PLENARY
University of Cambridge, UK
Time in Language and Thought
Philang 2009
Referring to past, present and future eventualities (events and states) can be performed in a
variety of ways, ranging from the use of lexical and grammatical markers of time, through
automatically assigning salient interpretations to overtly tenseless expressions, to relying on
the addressee’s active, conscious inference of the temporality of the situation in the particular
context. English relies predominantly on tense and temporal adverbials. Thai, on the other
hand, has optional markers of tense, random use of adverbials, and relies largely on situated
meanings, inferred from the shared background assumptions or assigned subconsciously as
default interpretations. Faced with significant cross-linguistic differences in conveying
temporal location, a philosopher of language has to address two core questions:
(1) How is time represented in the mind?
(2) Ho w do linguistic expressions of time relate to the mental representations?
I propose and partially corroborate the hypothesis that the human concept of time is
supervenient (dependent in the sense of definitional characteristics) on the concept of
epistemic possibility. Different expressions of future, present and past time reference
correspond to different degrees of detachment from certainty. This modal supervenience of
the concept of time is universal and requires a semantic tool in which both the cross-linguistic
differences in expressing temporality and the universal underlying modality of the concept
can be represented. In this talk I defend a contextualist approach to semantics and demonstrate
how a particular contextualist theory (Default Semantics, Jaszczolt 2005, 2009) allows for (a)
representing temporality as modality, by means of a single modal operator on semantic
representations, and (b) accounting for cross-linguistic differences in conveying temporal
location, by allocating information about temporality to different sources of information about
meaning and to different processes which interact in producing a semantic representation. In
the process I also present arguments in favour of pragmatic compositionality (Recanati 2004).
Select references:
Jaszczolt, K. M. 2005. Default Semantics: Foundations of a Compositional Theory of Acts of
Communication. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Jaszczolt, K. M. 2009. Representing Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality. Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Recanati, F. 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Philang 2009
Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, PLENARY
University of Łódź, Poland
Events as they are
In the paper I propose to look at events as a phenomenon lying at the intersection of
linguistics, cognitive psychology and philosophy. Events are treated as units of mental
categorization, which can be either simple or complex. Simple events possess one or more
focal roles and a number of accidental roles and a single temporal dimension for a change of a
state of the art. Complex events are in a hyperonimic relation with reference to different types
of actions, acts, activities and processes, combined in one act of perception.
Events, in perception and linguistic expression, can be treated either as a fairly symmetric
pair of entities, when two or more events or their parts are perceived as two or more parallel
units or appear in a symmetric pattern, or else they can be perceived and linguistically
expressed as what I call asymmetric events (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2008), covering the
material, which refers to two or more events of unequal status in an utterance. In other words,
asymmetric events cover ways in which a linguistic description of main events in a sentence is
different (morphologically, syntactically, discursically) from a description of backgrounded
events. The relationship between the more salient events expressed in main constructions and
those whose profiles have been dominated by the more salient ones can be interpreted in
terms of a continuum between constructions which possess autonomous profiles and those
whose profiles are reduced in different ways. I examine parameters which contribute to
forming the asymmetry both within one utterance and also in terms of system differences
between fully elaborated event descriptions and those which are gradually more and more
desententialized and lose or lack their assertive force.
To complete the picture the concepts of a negative state of affairs and negative events will
be discussed and elaborated on (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 1996) in the framework of
cognitive linguistics and construction grammar.
As a conclusion, a cognitively-mediated definition and classification of events will be
presented, involving a critique of the eliminativism claim in mainstream philosophy to see the
reasons, endorsed by Stephen Stich (1994: 362), why, contrary to the claim, mental
representations, intentional states, etc. constitute an ‘empirically respectable’ research
paradigm not only in language but also in philosophy.
References
Lewandowka-Tomaszczyk, Barbara (1996). Depth of Negation. A Cognitive Semantic Study.
Łódź: Łódź University Press.
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara (ed.) (2008). Asymmetric Events. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
Stich, Stephen (1994). “What is a theory of mental representation”. In: Stephen P. Stich and
Ted A. Warfield (eds.) Mental Representation: A Reader.Oxford: Blackwell. 348-364.
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Michael Morris, PLENARY
Department of Philosophy
University of Sussex, UK
The Myth of the Sign
Philang 2009
Everyone just assumes that languages are systems of signs. In this paper I isolate exactly
what that assumption involves: it turns out to depend on an underlying assumption about the
nature of meaning (or at least linguistic meaning) which is not at all unquestionable. Our
facility with our own languages in everyday situations makes it unsurprising that languages
should seem like systems of signs, but this is no reason for thinking they really are. I offer
two reasons for questioning the standard view. One is that it makes it impossible to give a
credible account of poetic language. The other is that the standard view is only rationally
defensible if we adopt an unattractive idealism about the nature of the world. Finally, I sketch
briefly the tasks which confront us if we suppose that languages are not systems of signs, and
argue that they do not look insoluble.

Jaroslav Peregrin, PLENARY
Academy of Sciences, Charles University
Praha, Czech Republic
The Myth of Semantic Structure
Philang 2009
That behind the overt, syntactic structure of an expression there lurks a covert, semantic
one, aka logical form, and that anyone interested in what the expression truly means should
ignore the former and go for excavating the latter, has become a common wisdom. It is this
wisdom I want to challenge in this paper; I will claim that the usual notion of semantic
structure, or logical form, is actually the result of certain properties of our tools of linguistic
analysis being unwarrantedly projected into what we analyze.
In logic, the wisdom that logical form is independent of the surface structure stems mainly
from the seminal analyses of Russell, analyses which were inescapably weighted by the
enormous syntactical parsimony of the logic Russell employed to capture the alleged logical
forms; as a result, there was simply no way for the forms to coincide with the surface ones.
Things would be very different if he had allowed himself a richer logical language, of the kind
commonly used by semanticists today.
In linguistics, the term logical form came to play an important role within Chomsky's
theory of language faculty. Here the term refers directly to a component of an abstract
'mechanism', devised by a theoretician to so as to produce the very expressions which the
speakers of natural language, as a matter of fact, tend to produce; and thus the mechanism
accounts for language faculty merely in a 'black box' style. Yet, despite this crafted origin,
Chomsky, as well as many of his followers, seems to have disregarded the difference between
the theoretical model and what it is a model of, and has promoted logical forms to an ultimate
reality.
All of this has fostered an illusion that the existence of logical forms is an empirical fact –
that getting hold of the logical form of an expression is akin to, say, revealing the inner organs
of an insect. To me, this view is badly misleading: although in certain contexts, disregarding
the gap between a model and reality may be acceptable and helpful, doing so when the nature
of meaning and the nature of language are at stake is disastrous.
What I think should figure as our ultimate empirical basis when studying language, are the
facts concerning people emitting certain sounds (or producing certain kinds of inscriptions),
and using specific types of such sounds in specific ways with specific effects. The overview
of which types of sounds, i.e. which expressions, they use constitutes the field of syntax. Here
is where we encounter the structure of language: the expressions of any natural language form
an open class of compounds based on a finite stock of primitive building blocks, words (or
perhaps, in some cases, some smaller units, like morphemes).
Studying the specific roles of individual expressions within our 'language games', then,
constitutes what has traditionally been called pragmatics; but as we have no other data (and,
in particular, no data directly for what has traditionally been called semantics – no detectable
fibers connecting expressions with things), semantics must be extracted from this basis too.
The syntactic structure remains crucial: the semantic properties of expressions must be
conceived of as compatible with the openness of the class of expressions, i.e. as somehow
'compositionally' projectable from simple to more complex expressions. However, there is no
obvious new kind of structure independent of the syntactic one for semantics to reveal. (True,
not all aspects and elements of the syntactic structure are equally important from the
viewpoint of semantics, so it is often helpful to work with simplified, purified or adjusted
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Philang 2009
versions of the syntactic structure – but these, far from being independent of the basic
syntactic structures, are merely its derivates.)
Thus, an autonomous semantic structure is – in the best case scenario – a convenient
fiction or a working conjecture, or – in the worst – a myth stemming from our uncritical
acceptance of received wisdoms. In the latter case we should be wary of it, for it creates a
dangerous illusion of explanation.

Eduardo Abrantes
New University of Lisbon, Portugal
Philang 2009
Sounding Things, Breathing Voices
The Phenomenology of Presence in Acoustic Phenomena
In his 1773 text “New Apology of the Letter h”, the German philosopher Johann Georg
Hamann contends for the relevance of the, usually unpronounced, letter h in the German
language. This letter stands for breath, or spirit and it is one of the many elements in written
speech that points towards the voice – towards the performance of the grammata into vocal
expression.
What does thought sound like? How does an embodied presence manifest itself so
unequivocally through sound, an invisible medium? How does listening open to a notion of
the interior/exterior in the field of perception?
Moving past the visual and into the sonorous – into a phenomenology of sound, of
listening and embodied presence has been a focus of recent philosophical studies engaged in
an effort to move against the grain of tradition.
In Plato’s Cratylus, a particular form of onomatopoeia is discussed and has a possibility for
the genesis of language, considered as stemming from nature rather than convention. This
hypothesis is not followed through, but Cratylus remains an inspiring exploration of the
rooting of the acoustic matter of each letter, as being the matrix for the giving of names.
Later on, in the phenomenological tradition, we find that for Husserl sound is a
determining element in the constitution of space through its resonating nature; while for
Heidegger it appears as a manifestation of being as an event, a happening in the world that
simultaneously situates and assaults the fluid stability of the dispositional condition – both
thunder and lightning and the intentionality of silence.
Contemporary authors such as Giorgio Agamben (“Potentialities” 2000, “Language and
Death” 1991), Gilles Deleuze (“Logique du Sens” 1969), Jean-Luc Nancy (“On Listening”
2007) or Adriana Cavarero (“For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal
Expression” 2004) have explored the many possibilities of the phenomenology of embodied
sound and musical expression.
Be it the horizon of acoustic perception, the tension between language of meaning and its
pre-verbal stratus, the experience of reverberation in thought or the presence of the other as
vocalized being, many paths converge in the ontological nature of the sonorous phenomena.
This paper attempts to chart some of the main phenomenological approaches in the realm
of sound, focusing on the particular character of the human voice and its resonating,
expressive presence. Breath and rhythm, the aesthetics of musical expression and the interplay
of listening and vocalizing, are taken as examples of a rich and fruitful pathway to
phenomenological reconsideration of the sonic singularity of every individual.
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Yousef Abu Addous
Arabic dept, Qatar University, Qatar
Philang 2009
Word-Order and its Rhetorical and Stylistic Functions in Arabic Language
This paper aims at investigating word-order and its rhetorical and stylistic functions in the
Arabic Language, and discussing the forms and patterns semantically and syntactically.
Therefore this paper will concentrate on the following issues:
1. Types of sentences:
(a) Nominal, which begin with a noun.
(b) Verbal, which begin with a verb.
(c) Local sentence, in which an adverbial expression or attracted precedes.
(d) Conditional sentences.
2. Construction theory, which concentrates on the acquisition of words and phrases according
to the correct usage; it did not neglect the meaning of words in isolation, but its concern was
with meaning in context.
3. The disconnection and the connection. This phenomenon gives the Arabic Language the
freedom to produce various stylistic structures that the speaker can use to express directly the
intended meaning.
4. Rhetorical and stylistic function of word-order.
5. Philosophical dimension: some Arab philosophers who were influenced by Greek
philosophy discussed the issue of language and word-order, and they have a controversy with
grammarians on this issue.

Victoria Akulicheva
Moscow State Mining University,
Moscow, Russia
Philang 2009
Modern philosophical linguistics approach:
Gender Studies in Foreign and Russian Linguistics
Recently growing attention has been devoted to a new approach in linguistics termed
gender linguistics in connection with the advent of the category gender in scientific paradigm.
That happened due to the fact that social factor has become determinative in language studies
which are deeply related with an individual.
The history of gender studies originates from the Antiquity and is related with
philosophical conception of gender which divides people into two biological categories –
male and female. The factor of biological category in the language appeared in the Antiquity
during grammatical gender understanding. It was supposed that grammatical gender is
determined by biological division on masculine/feminine. Nowadays the problem of gender
and language is one of the most recent branches of sociolinguistic studies, for years far little
research has been undertaken in the field of gender.
Originally researches in gender linguistics were made on European languages mainly in the
West but don’t have a long history and remain insufficiently studied area in Russian
linguistics. The aim of this report is to examine the translation differences of gender
linguistics, the approaches of the development of gender studies in the West and in Russia and
to point out the issues of gender particularities in language.
Though the concept of “gender” is now in use and is recognized by majority of scientists,
there are some difficulties in translation of this term. In the English language “gender” means
not only grammatical category but also social category. But in the French language despite the
existence of such words as “le genre” that means grammar category, and “le sexe” that means
biological category, the word “le genre” is not used for “gender” designation. Moreover, its
English equivalent is avoided. As a result French language prefers such constructions as
“masculin-féminin”, “l’identité sexuelle”. In Russian linguistics the concept of “gender” is
widely spread as well as its equivalents: gender relations, gender aspects, gender studies.
Furthermore, versatile analysis of gender features fills in gaps in gender linguistics as well
as it also reveals facts important for philosophy, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics,
pragmatics and other disciplines connected with language and society.
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Janusz Badio
University of Łódź, Poland
Simulation semantics – an overview
Philang 2009
Producing as well as understanding language, we perform a mental enactment of the actions
performed or things perceived in the content of the utterance. The role of linguistic units:
words, syntactic patterns, discourse markers is to prompt characteristics of this simulation.
The most prevalent opposing view is logical semantics according to which:
1. Language is meaningful by relating words to abstract,
amodal symbols.
2. These symbols connect to the world.
3. Truth is defined as a fit between words and the world.
Some arguments against the logical view that one could put forward include:
1 People are generally not good at logic.
2 Meaning isn't in the world, it's in people's heads.
a. There exist alternative construals of the same objective scene/situation
b. Language can be meaningful without referring to the world
3 The logical view of meaning does not push us forward in understanding meaning; rather it
poses another question, namely how is it that logical representations are meaningful.
The evidence for simulation semantics comes from observation that:
1 Imagery is omnipresent, and uses the matching neural circuitry as actual action and
perception.
2 The same can be said about memory
3 Understanding language selectively activates motor
and perceptual imagery.
Perhaps one should not ask so much about whether simulation is vital for language
understanding but if it is ubiquitous or rare. If it is widespread and occurs even with
expressions that can do without it, then this cancels such a view of meaning that relates words
to the world; at best it causes that such a view becomes redundant. In fact, evidence suggests
that people activate both perceptual and motor brain regions when they understand language.
But simulation is reported not to be autonomous. It does not operate without instructions.
These instructions must necessarily be in a simplified, linguistic form. In the presentation I
want to undertake the task of presenting the most important tenets of simulation semantics, an
overview of a trend in cognitive linguistics that inspires experimental methodology, badly
needed to defend its strongholds.
Selected bibliography:
Barsalou, L.W. 1999. “Language comprehension: Archival memory or preparation for
situated action?”. Discourse Processes, 28, 61-80.
Barsalou, D. 1999. “Perceptual symbol systems”. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 22, 577-
609.
Bergen, B. 2007. “Experimental methods for simulation semantics”. In Monica Gonzalez-
Marquez, Irene Mittelberg, Seana Coulson, and Michael J. Spivey (eds.) Methods in
Cognitive Linguistics. John Benjamins: 277-301.

Philang 2009
Bergen, B. 2005. “Mental simulation in literal and figurative language”. In: Seana Coulson
and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (eds.) The Literal and Non-Literal in Language
and Thought. Frankfurt: Peter Lang: 255-278.
Bergen B.K. and Chang N.C. 2002. “Embodied Construction Grammar”. In: D. Bailey, N.
Chang, J. Feldman, S. Narayanan 1998. Extending Embodied Lexical Development.
Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society COGSCI-
98, Madison. Simulation-Based Language Understanding
Bergen, Benjamin K. (ms.) Simulation semantics. book in preparation
Clerk, A. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and Mind Together Again. Cambridge :
MIT Press.
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Philang 2009
Christian Bassac
Université de Lyon 2, CRTT & INRIA-Signes, France
Philosophy, linguistics, and semantic interpretation
Although there is agreement among linguists and philosophers that the semantic
interpretation of a sentence is derived from some kind of Logical Form, there is no agreement
as regards the nature of this Logical Form. For linguists (at least for those working in the
Generative paradigm), the Logical Form is a level of interpretation derived from syntactic
structure via operations which are syntactic in nature (e.g. quantifier raising), whereas for
philosophers it is a formal object that reveals its relation to extra-linguistic phenomena. Not
only is there disagreement between linguists and philosophers, but philosophers have distinct
conceptions of Logical Form (See [3]). Obviously, whatever the conception, philosophical or
linguistic, the problem that must be solved is that of translation from a given form to Logical
Form.
The first step towards a solution to this problem was offered in Categorial Grammars
(CGs), as the semantic interpretation here is derived on a par with syntactic derivation, but the
limitations of CGs are well known: they cannot account for extraction phenomena, word
order, etc. Lambek calculus (See [2]), another attempt along these lines, leads to a conception
of syntax as deduction in the format of Gentzen's deduction rules. But this calculus uses tools
from classical logic which are unsatisfactory when applied to NL as:
(1) some connectives of classical logic are not ``true to
(linguistic) life''
(2) in a deduction in classical logic, premisses can be
modified or permuted, which is not the case in a linguistic construction.
We argue here that a solution to these problems is offered by Linear Logic (LL) as defined in
[1]. LL solves the two problems above in the following way:
Problem (1):
A good example of (1), says Girard, is provided by the chemistry formula:
2H2+O2→2H2O, which we would like to paraphrase as
H2 and H2 and O2imply H2O and H2O.
But this is wrong as ``and'' here is not idempotent, hence the need of new connectives used in
LL, ⊗ (tensor) and (linear implication) to express this as:
In LL, with types s, n and np, each lexical item is assigned a formula, for instance:
Det: n np, Intransitive Verb: np s, Transitive Verb: np (np s)
and in a syntactic deduction, connectives of LL and ⊕ (plus) can be applied to account for
extraction phenomena and polymorphic types such as the verb believe (usually dealt with as
coercion phenomena, see [4]) respectively.

Philang 2009
Problem (2):
As in a linguistic deduction there must be no modification of premisses, control over the
consumption of these premisses is necessary, and consequently LL rejects contraction,
weakening and permutation rules (hence the non commutativity of LL) of classical logic,
respectively :
But most importantly, the main interest of LL is that semantic interpretation follows from the
Curry-Howard isomorphism, here manifested by a correspondence between deduction proofs
and λ-terms. An example is:
LL thus offers an elegant solution to the time-honoured ``translation problem''.
References
[1] Girard, J.Y. Linear Logic: its syntax and semantics. Advances in Linear Logic. J.Y
Girard, Y. Lafont, L.Regner (eds) London Mathematical Society Lecture notes Series 222,
Cambridge University Press. 1995, http://iml.univ-mrs.fr/~girard/Synsem.pdf.gz
[2] Lambek, J. The mathematics of sentence structure. The American Mathematical Monthly.
1957.
[3] Lappin, S. Concepts of Logical Form. The Chomskyan Turn. A.Kasher (Ed), Blackwell,
1991.
[4] Pustejovsky, J. The Generative Lexicon. The M.I.T Press, 1995
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Philang 2009
Khadija Belfarhi
University of Annaba, Department of Foreign Languages
Language philosophy vs. linguistics philosophy in understanding literary
meaning.
The philosophy of language opposes the philosophy of linguistics in the type of units of
analysis. Linguistics has a scienticity related to the theorization established through
generalizing laws from normative samples proved to be generalizable. This has limited the
scope of the linguistic analysis to formal units whereby the linguistic analysis does not apply
to those units that are dissimilar.
Linguistics applies strictly and according to principles of its theories whether being
structural or functional. Meaning, for instance, does not go beyond the theories of semantics.
Semantics does not yet possess the tool to explain abstract meaning such as the literary
because the philosophy of semantics is limited to generalizable units and their laws. Strange
type of meaning cannot be explained as it is a particularity that is not yet covered by the
formalism of the semantic theory.
The limits in the philosophy of linguistics would not be the same in the philosophy of
language because the latter operates in a more free and flexible way. The philosophy of
language is free from the formalism of the linguistic theories. It does not operate in vacuum
and far from the linguistic analysis. But it does not bind its analysis to categorized schemes of
analysis. Semantics as opposing the philosophy of meaning does not provide analysis more
than the componential analysis (Kempson, 1977). It cannot yield interpretations to abstract
and ambiguous meaning. It operates as other linguistic analysis which restricts the path and
method of analysis to closed circles. Doing the philosophy of meaning, however, is
principally explaining meaning by any means because philosophizing is as Wittgenstein said,
delimiting thoughts that would be troubles and flaws. The delimitation of thoughts obtains
from a wide range of meaning explanation that the philosopher does after having established
possible explanations. The latter obtains from a free and flexible treatment of language units.
It does not get restricted to a particular method or approach as for example explaining
meaning by means of co-textual or contextual analysis. Rather, the variation of treatment can
yield interpretations that could not be achieved by the linguistic analysis. In this respect, we
refer to Widdowson's thesis (1980) that the units are to be treated as exemplification of the
system. The units in a literary text are an exemplification of other units which can be the
writer's real intended meaning.
This paper aims at differentiating between the philosophy of linguistics and the philosophy
of language basing on illustrations from the literary meaning. The latter focuses on the
philosophy of literary meaning which bases on obtaining the writer's methodological
trajectory, believing it to be the key to the analysis as it would reveal how the writer of
literary works abstracts meaning. Illustrations on philosophizing in literary meaning would
especially be given from Shakespeare's texts as they are ambiguous and poetic.
References
Widdowson, H.G. (1980). Stylistic analysis and literary interpretation. In linguistic
perspectives on literature, M.K.L. Ching, M.C. Haley, and R. F. Lunsford (eds.), 235-
241, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Kempson, R.M. (1977). Semantic theory. Cambridge University Press.

Philang 2009
Jan Brejcha
Charles University of Prague,
Faculty of Arts, Institute of Information Studies and Librarianship
User-interface friendliness and the philosophy of language
Much research has been done in the field of Human-computer interaction (HCI), but very
few papers deal with the relation between language and user-interface (UI) design. We argue
that such an interdisciplinary approach would inform both HCI and language philosophy and
also could answer the question what makes an interface user-friendly.
Building upon the seminal work of Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle and Grice we intend to
show how it is important to structure the UI according to the natural language we use. For
example, when we intend to print something from a computer, we start a language game with
the UI designer. According to the HCI semiotic engineering theory, she is present at the time
of interaction through the interface she created. The language game ends by printing the
requested document and the interaction can end since nothing has to follow. These acts should
follow also the Grice's maxims (e.g. the UI should be adequately concise and informative).
Following this perspective we can analyze various interaction language models in order to
evaluate its semantics in the given context. The interaction language can be extracted from the
UI e.g. by looking into the "subject-verbum-object" (SVO) model inherently used. We regard
the interaction meaningfulness and the respecting of Grice's maxims to be the cornerstone of
good user experience, proper usability and user-friendliness.
This paper concludes by discussing the pragmatics and benefits of an UI evaluation
method based on language philosophy and semiotic engineering in the context of current HCI
usability study.
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Eugene H. Casad
University of Gdańsk and SIL-Mexico
Thoughts from a Field Linguist
Philang 2009
This presentation presents a discussion of the contrast between a structuralist account of
language data and analysis and an empirical approach to both. The structuralist view seeks to
account for data description and explanation in terms of a language internal abstract
characterization of the data without any reference to language users and their purpose and
intents in the way they use their own language. The empiricist account is usage based
approach to linguistic description and explanation and explicitly brings in the purposes and
intents of speakers via a number of theoretical constructs such as grounding, the notion of
reference points and the viewing arrangement, among others. These two contrastive
approaches ask partially different kinds of questions and look at different kinds of data. The
role of speakers’ intuition is a particularly clear area where the two approaches differ. Much
of my discussion will consist of an anecdotal account of a field linguist, whose job it was to
learn to speak an indigenous language of Mexico, analyze its sound structure, work with the
people of the community to develop a teachable and readable orthography and go on to
document the language as well as he could. It highlights experiences of all that and the
discovery of data that predisposed me to take a highly empirical approach to linguistic
description and explanation of Cora linguistic usage.
The first of these experiences came when a Federal School Director, himself a native
speaker of Cora, came into the house and made the following pronouncement: “Gene, I have
13 ways to say that I have a hole in my head”. He then proceeded to list them one by one. I
duly wrote them down. That was my introduction to the Cora system of locative verbal
prefixes.
We were also becoming aware of a system of topographic adverbs. At the time, I had no
idea of what these adverbs meant. Our list of adverbs in this set increased as we continued our
efforts to use what we had learned of the language. Finally, I had a set of 66 of these adverbs.
At first I grouped them according to the initial segment at the left. The adverbs grouped into
sets of three. Some had an initial y-, others had an initial m- and the third group had an initial
a- vowel or u- vowel. There were thirteen or 14 of these groups. I then realized that I would
have fewer groups if I focussed on the adverb final “suffix’. This gave me six sets, but, of
course, did not tell me what they meant. So, I went back to my school teacher friend and
asked him about this. In about 30 seconds he laid it all out: uphill, downhill, at the side of hill,
upriver, downriver and across the river were the designations of these “suffixes”. Later on, he
tied this system in with the locative verbal prefixes when he spontaneously told me about six
different ways to talk about where one was going with respect to the lay of the land. All of
this was just the beginning.

Zuzana Čengerová
Charles University of Prague, Faculty of Arts
Institute of Romance Studies, Czech Republic
Philang 2009
Novel linguistic criteria for performatives and their etymological analysis
In this paper we are going back to Austin's performatives. We build upon his looking into a
definition of performatives from both the linguistic and the pragmatic point of view. There are
still lots of questions awaiting an answer and we deal with them in the first part of the paper.
Concerning Austin's performatives, can we find a universal and simple definition valid for all
of them? How can linguistics help? Is the difference of languages relevant? We are trying to
describe the performative verb (and performative acts) according to several linguistic criteria.
For this reason, we introduce some new terms and, on the contrary, we do not work with some
Austin's terms. We agree with his definition that performatives are speech acts with which we
perform something by pronouncing them. We add, that by using a performative we modify
the thing in question in a certain way. We characterize them in a novel way by "social
validity" (this means that their pronouncing or not is connected with some social
consequences - e.g. greeting, apologizing, citation in a scientific publication) and by
"conventionally-effective meaning" (it is the meaning contained in fixed, conventional
formulas which normally have a concrete effect on the addressed person).The performatives
are further characterized by a "dynamic nature". That means that utterance of a performative
is followed by an effect on the addressed person. We divide the performatives into three
categories according to the presence of the verb in the enunciation: explicitly verbal,
implicitly verbal and historically fixed non verbal enunciations.
In the second part we look for the "primitive" performatives and their characteristics and
origin. Here we use etymological analysis as a method. First we focus on the dichotomy
"future/performative" and we arrive to the conclusion that modal verbs nowadays used for
expression of future had at the beginning their original, concrete meaning which was only
later transformed into meaning of future. Further we focus on the origin of performatives. The
first performatives were mapped onto concrete gestural movements or rituals or speaking in
general.
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ElŜbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska
Departament of English Language
Jagiellonian University, Poland
Philang 2009
An Unresolved Issue: Non-Sense in Natural Language and Non-classical
Logical and Semantic Systems
Addressing myself to the main theme of the Conference, I can venture the statement that
the/a ‘philosophy of linguistics’ determines what specific ‘philosophies of language’ we need
in solving linguistic problems. I deliberately say ‘philosophies’ since linguists have always
listened to various philosophical schools and currents for the simple reason that as researchers
we need to draw our inspiration from different sources.
Natural language is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to describe. The author believes
that it is a Janus-faced system, which calls for a double explanation. On the one hand it can
generate well-formed and fully interpretable expressions (supported by syntactic rules and
Logical Form), on the other (and contrary to Chomskian idealism about a grammar as
generating only well-formed strings) it allows for the production of all kinds of ill-formed and
deviant expressions, difficult to interpret or barely interpretable. As a literary semanticist,
dealing with the question of different degrees of anomaly and non-sense in language, I want
to raise again the question to what extent non-classical logics and unconventional semantics
have proved useful in analysing fictional discourse and figuration.
My interest lies both in the modal extension of classical logic, allowing us to work within
the framework of Possible Worlds Semantics (GTS – Game-Theoretical Semantics of J.
Hintikka included), and in non-standard (deviant) systems of many-valued and free logics,
which can help (but have not done it conclusively) a literary semanticist in solving the
recalcitrant issues of ‘truth-in-fiction’ and reference-failure. Taking into account the
contribution of the Polish school of philosophical and mathematical logic to the development
of non-standard systems (J. Łukasiewicz, S. Leśniewski, Cz. Lejewski, S. Jaśkowski, A.
Mostowski), it seems proper for a Polish linguist to inquire about the utility of such systems
in considering the intricacies of natural semantics. Meinongian semantics, although frowned
upon by many on philosophical grounds, is not to be so easily dismissed, either.
The unpredictability of natural language and the inventiveness and creativity of its users,
especially in the field of figuration, teaches us also that certain problems in stylistics and
poetics disclose the limitations of particular methodologies. Catachresis, a far-fetched,
difficult metaphor (called also ‘bold metaphor’) will be my case study in this respect. Among
more interesting paradigms that can be postulated to deal with catachresis, the Possible
Worlds Theory of Metaphor and Language-Games Theory of Metaphor draw heavily from
philosophy and logic.

Philang 2009
Tadeusz Ciecierski
Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, Poland
Varieties of Context-Dependence
It is a truism that a linguistic sign may have many semiotic properties. It is also a truism
that most of those properties (especially semantic and pragmatic ones) are somehow contextdependent.
On the other hand, it is not an easy issue to describe how context-dependencies of
different sorts of properties are interrelated. In general, three theoretical strategies are
possible: (i) one may propose some sort of unifying theory of context-dependence (e.g. Robert
Stalnaker’s concept of the context set may be seen as a step in this direction); (ii) one may
argue that there are mutually irreducible ways in which particular properties (of some sort) are
dependent on the context; (iii) one may consider intermediate approach which precisely
distinguishes different types of context-dependence while simultaneously trying to
interconnect some of them (the aim of the latter approach is to single out a basic class of
context-dependent functions of expressions).
In my paper I am going to address mainly the third above-mentioned strategy. To do this I
will briefly describe selected types of context-sensitive semiotic properties. Next, I will
discuss several classifications of context-dependence that can be found in the literature (those
classifications are often presented as concerning contexts themselves rather than contextdependent
properties. Nevertheless, since the types of context are characterized functionally,
the difference is only apparent and not real). Then I will consider some arguments against the
unification strategy. Finally, I am going to introduce two notions of derivative contextdependency.
First (which will be called “analytic”) concerns situations in which a semiotic
property is defined in terms of other semiotic properties. Second (which will be called
“reductive”) is modeled on the concept of supervenience and may be defined as follows (α is
an arbitrary expression-type, c and c’ are pragmatic contexts, ‘’ means that the
expression α occurs in the context c, and ‘= F’ means identity with a respect to the property
F):
A semiotic property P is (contextually and reductively) derivative from a semiotic property
Q, iff:
[1] ∀α∀c∀c’ ¬◊[ = Q ∧ ≠ P ]
and
[2] ∃α∃c∃c’ ◊[ = P ∧ ≠ Q ]
Both concepts of derivative context-dependency will be applied to the previously introduced
cases of (context-sensitive) semantic and pragmatic properties. Finally, general perspectives
of the proposed approach to the initial problem will be discussed.
Selected references:
Eros Corazza (2004) Reflecting the Mind. Indexicality and Quasi-Indexicality. Oxford.
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (1970), Aspects of Language: Essays and Lectures on Philosophy of
Language, Linguistic Philosophy and Methodology of Linguistics, Magnes Press.
Jerzy Pelc (1967) ‘A Functional Approach to the Logical Semiotics of Natural Language’,
[in:] Pelc (ed.) Semiotics in Poland 1894-1969, Reidel Publishing Company, 1979.
François Recanati (2007) Perspectival Thought: A Plea for (Moderate) Relativism, Oxford.
Robert Stalnaker (1999) Context and Content, Oxford.
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Andrzej Cieśluk
Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, Poland
Philang 2009
The de re/de dicto distinction and the problem of essentialism
The de re/de dicto distinction appears in many linguistic and theoretical contexts, on the
one hand modal sentences, belief ascriptions, quotation expressions and the other hand
reasonings bounding up with essentialism/antiessentialism or the internalizm/externalism
debates. I will show that these contexts can be reduced to three types. Two of them are
connected with the status of propositions. The third is connected with the ontological relation
between properties and objects.
The de re/de dicto distinction can be presented in terms of differences in the scope of the
intensional operator. This is a syntactic criterion. Quine claims that intentions are the
creatures of darkness and the distinctions makes no sense as there is no such thing as de re.
However, the distinction can be characterized on the basis of co-referential terms that are
interchangeable salva veritate. This is a semantic criterion. The de re/de dicto distinction can
also be characterized using the objection-property relation. In that case de re comes to be
connected to essentialism, i.e. the view that certain properties belong to certain objects
necessarily.
I will show that the de re/de dicto distinction can be characterized in light of the
abovementioned contexts. In addition, I explain how the ontological issue is based upon
logical and linguistic assumptions that lie at the bottom of the de re/de dicto distinctions.

Marzenna Cyzman
Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland
Philang 2009
Lying, poets tell the truth …
The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’ by John Searle – a still possible
solution to an old problem?
The purpose of this article is to find out whether Searle’s idea of sentence in a literary text
is still relevant. Understanding literary utterances as specific speech acts, pretended
illocutions, is inherent in the process of considering the sentence in a literary text in broader
terms. Reference to ideas formulated both in the theory of literature as a speech act (R.
Ohmann, S. Levin) as well as in logic, ontology and the theory of literature (J. Pelc, H.
Markiewicz, R. Ingarden) will render it possible to adequately place and assess Searle’s
theory. Confronting Searle’s theory with the order in a literary work (the relation between the
text and the literary work, the status of the presented world, the issue of reference and fiction)
will in turn render it possible to determine how empirically adequate Searle’s theory is. These
investigations will be carried out in the first part of the paper.
In the second part it appears necessary to report on the conception of the logical status of
the fictional statement.
‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’ by John Searle:
1. A work of fiction is constituted by the pretended
illocutions. The author of a work of fiction pretends to perform a series of illocutionary
acts. There are two types of rules: vertical rules that establish connections between
language and reality (nonfictional text), and horizontal conventions that break the
connections established by the vertical rules (fictional discourse). John Searle’s conclusion
then is this: the author pretends to perform illocutionary acts by way of actually uttering
sentences.
2. In the work of fiction the author does not really refer
to a fictional character because there was no such antecedently existing character: by
pretending to refer to a person he creates a fictional person; by pretending to refer to an
object the author pretends that there is an object to be referred to.
3. Most fictional stories contain nonfictional elements:
we can indicate real references to real objects (such as London, Baker Street, Russia – the
Searle’s examples). Searle asks a question: what is the test for what is fictional and what is
not? The philosopher concludes that this test for what the author is committed to is what
counts as a mistake. If in the work of fiction something is – for example – geographically
impossible, we will know that the author blundered.
4. The author of a fictional story can insert utterances in the story which are not fictional
(Searle’s example: the first sentence in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina). It is a genuine assertion
which is part of the novel, but not part of the fictional discourse.
5. The acceptability of the ontology seems to be the most important. If it is concerned, the
author can create actually everything. However, in Searle’s opinion, there is no universal
criterion for coherence: it depends on the type of works of fiction and it seems to be a
function of the special contract between author and reader about the horizontal
conventions.
In the third part of the paper the ways of formulation of the problem of fictional discourse,
rooted in linguistic conceptions of Searle, will be discussed (the list of problems is not
exhaustive):
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Philang 2009
1. It is very difficult to draw the line between pretended and nonpretended illocutions. Searle
actually does not indicate correct criterion. The fictional text contains the class of
illocutionary acts but also it causes nonpretended perlocutionary acts in a reality. If the
sentences in a work of fiction were used only to perform some pretended illocutionary
speech acts, they would not have to have normal meaning for readers. I would like to
discuss the question of what makes it possible for a literary work (for pretended
illocutions) to cause perlocutionary effects in the order of reality. What are the
mechanisms by which the pretended illocution invokes the genuine perlocution?
2. How does the author (or anyone) pretend the act of reference? It is always intentional: it is
the special act which contains the concept of intention built into it. My conclusion then is:
the act of reference is always genuine because it is always intentional, that is why there is
no difference between the act of reference in a literary work and the analogical act in the
act of speech in the order of reality. If we agree that there are two types of reference (two
types of illocutions) in a literary work, we receive a conception of the heterogenic text
which includes two different types of the statements. Accordingly, the formulation of any
concept of the presented world in a literary work will not be possible. Pretended
illocutions refer to fictional objects, and genuine assertions refer to real objects. These two
types of existence cannot constitute the presented world. This is not acceptable from
ontological (and logical!) point of view.
3. In order to solve Searle’s problems I reach for the conception of cognitive function in a
literary work, formulated by Katarzyna Rosner (see O funkcji poznawczej dzieła
literackiego, Wrocław 1970). The literary work can refer to the reality not from the level
of the statement, but from the level of the presented world (which is understood as a
model – the symbolic system which indicates some aspects of reality). Also my research
indicates that there may be a connection between the two phenomena: the intentional
presented world created in a work of fiction and our reality.
4. Accordingly, my conception of the logical status of literary statements is only the base of
the ontological theory of an object. In order to provide criterion of coherence I reach for
the ontological conceptions of objects, formulated by A. Meinong (see also T. Parsons, J.
Paśniczek).
The conclusion of this paper is that Searle’s theory is not still possible solution to an old
problem. In Searle’s theory the problem is noticed but in fact – he does not provide correct
solution. However, it can be still interesting introduction to further analyses.

Philang 2009
Olena Dobrovolska
Kharkiv National University of Radioelectronics, Ukraine
Analytic Philosophy of Language and Computational Ontology
Analytic philosophy of language gave way to a variety of sub-disciplines. Now, in the 21st
century, we can reveal the connection between analytic philosophy and computational
(formal) ontology: both concern the ideas of creation of artificial language and conceptual
scheme; strive for knowledge formalization, for strict, simple formulation; try to establish
connection between language and reality. It is interesting to compare how linguistic problems
are solved within philosophy of language and within ontology engineering.
In the context of computer and information sciences an ontology is defined as an explicit
specification of conceptualization, as a conceptualization, as a logical theory. Ontology
defines a set of representational primitives using which we can model a domain of discourse.
Some concepts of analytic philosophy could be prototype of formal ontology. Initially
Vienna Circle's member R. Carnap introduced into practice the notion “linguistic framework”
– a system of ways of speaking, subject to new rules. The idea of “linguistic framework” is
similar to the idea of “conceptual apparatus” of K. Ajdukiewicz - Lvov-Warsaw School
member. Both “linguistic framework” and “conceptual apparatus” correspond to ontology as
conceptual structure.
One more Lvov-Warsaw school’s member A. Tarski considered the notion “metalanguage”
that we can compare to ontology or ontology structure. Meta language is the
language in which we are talking about another (object-) language.
W.V.O.Quine also considered in his work “Ontological relativity” “background language”
that can be compared to top-level ontology. Background language consists of primary terms
and is used to stop the regress in definition.
Key concept of Wittgenstein's «Philosophical Investigations» is «primitive language» or
«language game» – a rule governed activity. This concept can be compared to domain
ontology because each word derives its meaning from its use in language game, and every
language game describes one particular domain.
Also D. Davidson in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” analysed opinions of his
predecessors and contemporaries on problems of translation and interpretation of conceptual
scheme. In his opinion, conceptual scheme is a way of organizing experience; a system of
categories that give form to the data of sensation; a point of view from which individuals,
cultures or periods survey the passing scene. The definition of ontology as conceptual
structure is similar to these Davidson’s definitions.
It is commonly accepted that philosophic foundations of formal ontology are the ideas of
phenomenology and some ideas of W.V.O. Quine, R. Carnap, H. Putnam but we have
revealed the connection between computational ontology and analytic philosophy and have
shown that the theories of analytic philosophy of the first half-middle of the twentieth century
could also be the basis of formal ontology.
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Philang 2009
Marie Duží
VSB-Technical University Ostrava, Czech Republic
Bjørn Jespersen
Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
Pavel Materna
Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic
The procedural turn and the logos of semantic structure
This talk is a plea for a realist procedural semantics, which is at variance with denotational
semantics (such as model theory) and pragmatist semantics (such as inferentialism).
Our theory requires a robust concept of semantic structure as an extra-linguistic, logical
object, because objective procedures, whether of one or multiple steps, are inherently
structured. The leading idea is that to analyze a piece of language is to assign an
algorithmically structured procedure to it as its meaning. Which pieces of language are
appropriately matched off with which procedures is in turn to be governed by various
constraints. Key constraints ought to include compositionality, referential transparency in all
sorts of context (i.e. thoroughgoing anti-contextualism), and a near-match between the syntax
of (disambiguated) linguistic items and the semantic structures they encode. In particular,
particular categorematic sub-expressions will match procedures, such that compound
expressions will match procedures that are themselves composed of sub-procedures. We
explain why syntactic trees, though illustrative diagrams, fall short of capturing semantic
structures by being, logically, set-theoretic ordered n-tuples.
We propose placing our procedural semantics within the general Fregean programme of
explicating sense (Sinn) as the mode of presentation (Art des Gegebenseins) of the entity
(Bedeutung) that a sense determines. To this end we use Tichý’s Transparent Intensional
Logic (TIL), explicating senses in terms of procedures known as TIL constructions. Our
vision of semantics comes with a top-down approach, going from procedures to their
products, which may be lower-order constructions or non-constructions such as possibleworld
intensions and extensions (individuals, truth-values, sets, etc). Whereas denotational
semantics assigns only procedural products to expressions as their references and pragmatist
semantics eschews reference in favour of socially constituted rules, our procedural semantics
has expressions refer to constructions, which are higher-order objects.
We demonstrate how procedural semantics accommodates the compositionality and
transparency constraints in hyperintensional, intensional and extensional contexts.
Transparency is obtained by furnishing expressions with constructions as context-invariant
meanings. Compositionality is obtained by a strict demarcation between procedures and their
products. We distinguish using a construction as a constituent of a compound construction
and mentioning a construction that is itself the object of predication in a hyperintensional
context. If a construction is used to produce its product, it is used intensionally or
extensionally. If the former, the produced function is itself the object of predication, and if the
latter, the value of the produced function as an argument is the object of predication.
Going with this programme of procedural semantics, however, raises a batch of questions
deserving and demanding to be answered. Just how finely are senses sliced? What is the
ontological status of a sense? How does a sense determine something? Our answers, roughly,
are these. Constructions determine their products by constructing them. Since senses are
procedures, any two senses are identical just when they are procedurally indistinguishable.
We define the relation of procedural isomorphism on the set of constructions, individuating
senses in terms of this relation.

Ingrid Lossius Falkum
University College London, UK
Philang 2009
Polysemy: Lexically Generated or Pragmatically Inferred?
The phenomenon of polysemy (e.g. bake in bake a cake/bake a potato, or begin in begin a
book/begin reading a book) has been investigated from a range of theoretical perspectives
(e.g. Langacker 1984, Nunberg 1996, Ravin & Leacock 2000). Still there is no clear
consensus as to what exactly it amounts to or whether it is semantic, pragmatic, or (somehow)
both. This paper discusses the generative account of polysemy (Pustejovsky 1995), and argues
that rather than treating the phenomenon as being lexically generated, it should be given a
wholly pragmatic account within the relevance-theoretic framework (Sperber & Wilson 1995,
Carston 2002).
Pustejovsky (1995) accounts for polysemy in terms of a set of generative devices operating
over complex lexical entries. E.g. the polysemy of bake is an instance of ‘co-composition’,
where information carried by the complement acts on the governing verb, taking the verb as
argument and shifting its event type (in bake a cake, from ‘change-of-state’ to ‘creation’). The
interpretation of begin a book is a case of ‘type coercion’, where the denotation of book is
‘coerced’ into an event denotation consistent with information stored in its lexical entry
(begin reading a book), as a result of begin selecting for an event as its argument type.
However, by positing such default interpretations for lexical items, the theory fails to
account for the flexibility of the processes involved in the modulation of lexical meaning, and
thus makes a range of wrong predictions (e.g. by type coercion, begin a car means begin
driving a car). Another problem is the way the theory builds world knowledge into the
lexicon, in particular, into the so-called ‘qualia structure’ of a lexical item, thereby blurring
the distinction between linguistic knowledge and general world knowledge.
These problems are avoided on the relevance-theoretic account, where lexical
interpretation is seen as an inferential process, guided and constrained by expectations of
relevance. Here polysemy is analysed in terms of the independently-motivated pragmatic
processes of saturation/free enrichment and ad hoc concept construction. E.g. begin a book is
analysed as either a case of contextual saturation of a lexically given variable (begin comes
with a variable, indicating that its complement is an event or activity) or pragmatic
enrichment (a conceptual constituent which is not articulated in the linguistic form of the
utterance is contextually derived). The polysemy of bake results from the construction of
different contextually-dependent concepts on the basis of encyclopaedic information
associated with the concept linguistically-encoded by bake.
This analysis does not require ‘default’ interpretations to be computed (and eventually
cancelled in the presence of contextual information pointing to a different interpretation). Nor
is there any need to posit complex lexical entries or any arbitrary cut-off points between
aspects of general knowledge that are part of the lexicon and those that are part of the general
knowledge system. I claim that the pragmatic approach presents a simpler, more unified
account of the phenomenon, and avoids the problems of misinterpretation associated with the
generative theory.
References
Carston, R. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication.
Oxford: Blackwell.
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Langacker, R. 1984. Active zones. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of The
Berkeley Linguistics Society, 172-188.
Nunberg, G. 1996. Transfers of meaning. In Lexical Semantics: The Problem of Polysemy.
Pustejovsky, J. & Boguraev, B (eds.), 109-132. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pustejovsky, J. 1995. The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Ravin, Y, & Leacock, C. (eds.). 2000. Polysemy:Theoretical and Computational
Approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford:
Blackwell.

Chris Fox
University of Essex, UK
Philang 2009
The Good Samaritan and the Hygienic Cook
When developing formal theories of the meaning of language, it is appropriate to consider
how apparent paradoxes and conundrums of language are best resolved. Unfortunately, given
the complexity of language, it is not always entirely clear how to apportion the "blame" for
our intuitions about a given example, and how the interpretation of language is best factored
into different aspects of meaning. Furthermore, variations in the wording sometimes appear to
give rise to very different intuitions. Perhaps it is variations in the behaviour of similar
examples that may help give some clues as to the appropriate factorisation of the
interpretation of language, and help us to refine our understanding of problematic phenomena.
In the case of Deontic Logic, which seeks to model reasoning with obligations and
permissions, there are a range of familiar paradoxes, including the so-called Good Samaritan
Paradox (Prior 1958), where we wish to avoid any implication that we ought to rob someone
if we assent to the obligation to "help a robbed man". Such an obligation may be expressed by
a sentence like the following.
(1) You must help a robbed man.
The fact that we do not normally take this to mean that we are obliged to rob someone leads to
questions about the implicit scoping of the obligation operator with respect to modifier
expressions (Castañeda 1981), or whether obligation distributes across conjunction, as in
Standard Deontic Logic (e.g. McNamara 2006). In the literature, the intuitions about such
examples is assumed to be clear and obvious, even if the means by which they are best
captured is open to some debate.
The quality and nature of these intuitions might be undermined, or perhaps refined, if we
consider examples of the same form, but with different words, such as
(2) You must use a clean knife.
In this case, we may be happy to conclude that there is an obligation to ensure the knife has
been cleaned. But what then is the source of the intuition that there is no obligation to rob in
(1)? Perhaps our intuitions about how such examples are best analysed is influenced by preexisting
moral assumptions and value judgements (e.g., that it is wrong to rob). If we fail to
take this possibility into account, then our intuitions about specific examples may lead us
astray when seeking universal rules governing deontic statements. If we are to take
possibility into account, then the question remains as to how we are to do so. We could
consider obligations as defeasible (Bonevac 1998, Makinson and van der Torre 2003). More
specifically, we might attribute our intuitions to some defeasible generic interpretation
(Carlson & Pelletier 1995). Alternatively, we might consider the different intuitions arising
from some implicit focus on "help" in (1) and "clean" in (2). This exemplifies the difficulty in
attributing our intuitions about a particular example to a particular facet of language, and the
need to look for examples that challenge our intuitions when formulating general principles.
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Olga Garmash
Kharkiv Karazin National University, Ukraine
Philang 2009
Language as a Space for Appearing and Existing of the Individual Speaking
We apply to V. V. Bibihin’s suggestion: “… we name the space, where a man finds his
place and recognizes himself, the world. In such case, a new guess appears: language as a
man’s environment is the world.” [V. V. Bibihin. The Language of Philosophy.] A man enters
this “world”, studying or perceiving language, receiving a message about an event of the real
world. Language becomes a key for communication, cognition, but at the same time fetters, of
which some people try to necessarily get rid, like of a curtain over the world. But the world
reminds about itself in the presence of the language.
The “world” in which a man realizes himself, where his history is performed, isn’t an
empty space. Language is a space motion inside which is non-meaningless, marked with signs
and filled with different “I”. Finding and recognizing oneself is accompanied with separating
from others. If in the world a man recognizes his reflection, he recognizes his name, given to
him or created by himself, in the language. Separating from the other in language, establishing
distance is connected with the forming of a “voice.” But acts of individual speaking must
have the one basis to be heard. Therefore, language is not the set of voices, but the field where
they appear and exist.
Ch. S. Pierce notices that “in his imagination he [a man] imagines something like contour,
schematic sketch of himself” [Charles Sanders Pierce. The Logical Basis of Sign Theory.] But
we should separate stages of the building and the reading. In the first case: a sketch,
comparing with language, is always more dynamic (because it has many variants of finishing)
than the work which is static as the filled speaking. But at the moment of reading the finished
speaking has many meanings, is dynamic for understanding (in the result of which for Claude
Levi-Strauss the situation of necessary exchange of inter-supplemented values, the situation
of “neutralisation” appears).
Speaking suggests belonging (or conquering) right to speak. Helene Cixous in the
article “Medusa’s Laughter” states that a woman has a desire to get language, “create her
word and shoot up”, “right for herself and her name”. We notice that the process of speaking
legitimacy is important for both sexes, and this happens both outward and inward. The
position of inside legitimacy is “to let oneself speak from oneself”, to transform one’s own
history. There are two different positions: the defining of meaning and significance of one’s
otherness and the bravery to define oneself independently.
The act of speech appropriating is a shattering invasion in history. “to become(!) of
one’s own free will” anything, to speak of one’s own free will – in this Ferdinand de Saussure
sees the difference between speech and language: speech contains individual combinations
and acts of phonation depending on a speaker’s will. But act of speaking (legitimacy of
oneself, one’s sense, one’s history, creating of oneself) can have different forms, it is much
wider that act of oral speaking: a man writes, keeps silence, draws, dances and so on.

Philang 2009
Brendan S. Gillon
Department of Linguistics, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Translational Semantics and Model Theory
Even a cursory review of the five or so textbooks on natural language semantics – for
example, Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990) and Heim and Kratzer (1998) – reveals that
the development of this field depends essentially on earlier developments in analytic
philosophy of language. Perhaps the figure who looms most large is that of Richard
Montague. Richard Montague developed an idea, already entertained but dropped by Tarski
(1936), Church (1956) and Rosenbloom (1950), among others, to do for natural language
what model theory does for logical notation. One way Montague (1970) suggested to put this
into practice is to provide a recursive characterization of the well-formed expressions of a
natural language and then to provide a recursive translation of the well-formed expressions
into a higher order intensional logic. The higher order intensional logic has an antecedently
defined model theory. Thus, Montague reasoned, by the composition of the translation
function and the structure for the higher order intensional logic, one obtains an assignment of
model theoretic values to the well-formed expressions of the natural language.
Though this approach, often referred to as translational semantics, has been almost
universally adopted by semanticists, there is reason to think that translational semantics does
not, in fact, do what it is thought to do, at least as it is pursued, namely, to provide natural
language with a model theory. Let us see why. Recall that, in the model theory of formal
notation, the values of the basic expressions are stipulated and the complex expressions are
recursively defined in terms of less complex expressions. The assignment of values to
expressions is not arbitrary; which interpretation an expression can receive is constrained by
its syntactic type. In other words, an expression's syntactic type determines its semantic type.
For example, in classical quantificational logic, individual constants are assigned individuals
from the universe of the interpreting structure; they are not assigned either subsets of the
universe or sets of n-tuples drawn from it. Indeed, as is well known, expressions of a certain
syntactic type can be assigned any value of the corresponding semantic type. Structures which
do not obey this restriction are not legitimate. Surprisingly, the fundamental constraint that
syntactic type determines semantic type is utterly lacking in translational semantics, at least as
it is practiced by the vast majority of semanticists. Perhaps this is due to the widespread
misunderstanding among linguists that higher order intensional logic is a level of syntax, an
error already common place in the 1980's (Dowty, Wall and Peters 1981 p. 264). There are
types, to be sure, but they are the syntactic types of the higher order intensional logic into
which the expressions of a natural language are translated. There are no syntactic types rooted
in the syntax for the expressions of the natural language which are being translated. It is not
possible to provide a model theoretic treatment for expressions without syntactic types.
References:
Chierchia, Gennaro and McConnell, Sally 1990 Meaning and Grammar. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press.
Church, Alonzo 1956 Introduction to Mathematical Logic. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Dowty, David, Wall, Robert E. and Peters, Stanley 1981 Introduction to Montague Semantics.
Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Col
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Philang 2009
Heim, Irena and Kratzer, Angelika 1998 Semantics in Generative Grammar. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing.
Montague, Richard 1974 ‘The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English’. In:
Formal Philosophy. The Papers of Richard Montague.
Rosenbloom, Paul C. 1950 Elements of Mathematical Logic. New York, New York: Dover.
Tarski, Alfred 1935 ‘The concept of truth in formalized
languages’. In: Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics (J. H. Woodger tr) Oxford: Oxford
University Press (1956). 2nd edition (edited and introduced by John Corcoran,
Indianopolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company), 152-278.

Philang 2009
Justyna Grudzińska
Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, Poland
At the Intersection of Logic, Philosophy of Language and Linguistics:
Multiple Quantification as a Case of Semantic Ambiguity
Consider the following quantified sentence:
(1) Every man loves some woman.
It is familiar that in logic and philosophy of language a sentence-string such as (1) is assumed
to have two possible interpretations. In using (1) a speaker could mean that every man
admires at least one woman (possibly a different one for each man) or that there is some one
woman whom all the men admire. This is usually described as scope ambiguity: either ‘every
man’ takes scope over ‘some woman’ or vice versa.
Although the ambiguity hypothesis is a standpoint with respectable roots in Frege’s and
Russell’s work, it has been challenged in linguistics. The more popular position nowadays is
that the linguistic system gives one of the quantifiers wide scope over the rest of the (1), and a
pragmatic process provides the other interpretation (following suggestions by Grice, 1975).
Or it is held that the linguistic system dictates nothing at all about the relation between the
scopes, and pragmatic derivation is essential in arriving at the truth-conditional content (Bach,
1982). Or one can also adopt the new option of default interpretations: the idea that the (1) has
one preferred, presumed, salient interpretation (following the proposal by Jaszczolt, 2002). In
my paper I will argue for the solution that preserves the intuitions behind the ambiguity
hypothesis - I will defend the view that an expression (a word or a sentence) of a language L
is semantically ambiguous if a grammar for L (understood as the cognitive mechanism that
maps sentences onto meanings) encodes a class of interpretations (specifies the space of
possible semantic interpretations of that expression). I will argue both against the position of a
unitary semantics: ambiguous expressions encode a single sense; and against that of radical
pragmatics: ambiguous expressions encode no senses at all.
Following Poesio (1996), I would like a theory of ambiguity that both explains what it
means for an expression to be semantically ambiguous (theory of grammar) and is consistent
with some plausible about the way humans disambiguate (theory of interpretation). In arguing
for the plausibility of the ambiguity hypothesis, I want to defend and further develop the idea
that human grammars encode ambiguity by means of underspecified representations. It is very
implausible to assume that the hearer in response to the speaker’s utterance must generate all
the senses of an ambiguous expression. There could be too many such senses, and yet humans
are able to deal with these expressions effortlessly. Instead of giving a traditional enumeration
of sentence interpretations or word senses, the idea is to relate them to one another into one
coherent structure, e.g.: work on underspecified logical forms as a way of characterizing the
space of possible semantic interpretations of a sentence (Schubert and Pelletier, Hobbs and
Schieber, Poesio); work on polymorphic representations as a way of characterizing the
multiple senses of a word (Pustejovsky, Mineur and Buitelaar).
In my attempt at providing a plausible account of semantic ambiguity, I will be using a
combination of approaches and methods: theories of grammar (such as Government and
Binding Theory), tools of mathematical logic, linguistic studies and the results of
psycholinguistic experiments.
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Andrea Guardo
Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
Is Meaning Normative?
Philang 2009
In recent works, Paul Boghossian has maintained that, whereas it may be the case that the
concept of mental content turns out to be normative, the concept of linguistic meaning surely
is not. According to Boghossian, the reason of this asymmetry is that “it is not a norm on
assertion that it should aim at the truth, in the way in which it is a norm on belief that it do so”
(2003, p. 39).
In my paper, I argue, first, that even if it is not a norm on assertion that it should aim at the
truth, it is nonetheless a norm on assertion that it should be a commitment to the truth of what
is asserted (see MacFarlane 2005a, 2005b) and, second, that this shows that linguistic
meaning is normative in nature.
More precisely, Boghossian accepts that:
(1) The concept of linguistic meaning presupposes that of correctness criteria (for the sake of
argument, I grant to Boghossian that this is not sufficient to prove that linguistic meaning is
normative, at least not in an interesting sense; in fact, the point is controversial – see Grice
1989).
But:
(2) In the case of linguistic meaning, there is a strong link between correctness criteria and
rule-following.
And:
(3) Following a rule is performing an action that we must be able to justify.
From (1), (2) and (3) it follows that:
(4) The concept of linguistic meaning presupposes that of justification and, therefore, those of
reason, commitment etc…
But:
(5) Such concepts are normative in nature.
Hence:
(6) So is meaning.
References
Blackburn, S., 1984, “The Individual Strikes Back”, in Synthese, LVIII, pp. 281-301.
Boghossian, P., 1989, “The Rule-Following Considerations”, in Mind, XCVIII, pp. 507-549.
Boghossian, P., 2003, “The Normativity of Content”, in Philosophical Issues, XIII, pp. 31-45.
Boghossian, P., 2005, “Is Meaning Normative?”, in C. Nimtz, A. Beckermann (eds.),
Philosophie und/als Wissenschaft, Paderborn.
Brandom, 2008, R., Between Saying and Doing, New York-Oxford.
Davidson, D., 1992, “The Second Person”, in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XVII, pp. 255-
267.
Dretske, F., 1981, Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Oxford.
Fodor, J., 1990, “A Theory of Content, II”, in id., A Theory of Content and Other Essays,
Cambridge-London.
Grice, P., 1989, “Meaning Revisited”, in id., Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge-
London.
Kaplan, D., 1989, “Demonstratives”, in J. Almog, J. Perry, H. Wettstein (eds.), Themes From
Kaplan, New York-Oxford.

Philang 2009
Kripke, S., 1982, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Oxford.MacFarlane, J. 2005a,
“Making Sense of Relative Truth”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, CV, pp. 321-
339.
MacFarlane, J., 2005b, “The Assessment Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions”, in
OxfordStudies in Epistemology, I, pp. 197-233.
Sellars, W., 1974, “Language as Thought and as Communication”, in id. Essays in Philosophy
and its History, Dordrecht-Boston.
Wittgenstein, L., 1953, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford.
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Philang 2009
Arkadiusz Gut
Department of Philosophy, Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
Language, Mindreading and Meta-cognition
Probably there is no philosopher, psychologist or linguist, who wouldn’t be intrigued by the
following question: How much of what is unique about the human mind is owed to language?
One of the current hypotheses claims that public language is responsible for our ability to
display second order cognitive dynamics. In order to investigate the alleged role of language
in second order dynamics (our ability to think about thoughts) some concentrated on the
attribution of thought to other people i.e. on “mind reading” abilities. Evaluating series of
experimental results (for example: The false belief task), some philosophers and
psycholinguists have put forward a strong claim that language is a necessary prerequisite for
an acquisition of a mind-reading capacity. In broader sense the conclusion is often drawn that
capacity to attribute a thought to other people deploys symbolic representations made
available by the language faculty and that natural language is the medium (vehicle) for second
order thinking. In my lecture I assume that the analysis of false belief task opens the true area
where one can investigate not only the evidence for a number of general affirmations
concerning the language/thought relationship, but also describe the relationship between
mindreading and meta-cognition. Some philosophers and linguists, however, put forward a
strong hypothesis that the acquisition of language, verbal communication with others,
observation of other minds and attributing mental states to other subjects is that what enables
us to acquire knowledge of our own mind (to develop meta-cognitive abilities). Implied in
this view is a suggestion that the knowledge of our own mind is acquired through attribution
of thoughts to other subjects, i.e. mindreading has the priority over the meta-cognition. In my
presentation I will to show that this line of thought is based on the general idea that language
is regarded as a necessary precursor for second order cognitive dynamics, i.e. the acquisition
of specific language constructions fosters our ability to think consciously of mental
representations. In the final part I will show that general assumption concerning the alleged
role of language is a weak one because of numerous reasons. In my investigation, I will not,
however, attempt to minimalize the function of language in cognition. Thus, in my arguments
against the hypothesis that we think in language I will not follow the performance-based
account put forward by Fodor and Leslie. I will rather refer to some ideas that are based on
the view that specific human linguistic and communicative abilities require our capacities to
reason about intentions of other persons. By the same token, I am interested to present the
argument that the employment of a conventional linguistic symbol presupposes our ability to
display second order cognitive dynamics (both meta-cognition and mindreading . Therefore, I
will attempt to show that language is not a device that re-programs our cognitive abilities and
creates a new kind of cognition but is rather an external resource that may scaffold our higherorder
cognitive abilities.

Housam Hashim
University College, London, UK
Philang 2009
Is the Reconciliation of Realism and Interpretationism of Intentionality
Tenable?
The purpose of my paper is to give an accurate understanding of the view that we normally
have of ourselves as agents that are subject to an array of states that are meaningful such as
beliefs and desires, fears and choices. Most theorists within the philosophy of mind and
cognitive sciences hold that the ascription of such propositional attitudes is a form of
theoretical explanation with beliefs, desires and the rest its theoretical postulates. Theorists on
the subject of the nature of attribution of belief are usually divided into two camps. These
camps are usually taken to be mutually exclusive. The realist towards the attribution of belief
holds that the subject of whether a person has a particular belief or not is a matter of fact.
Here a belief is seen as an objective property of that person. The interpretationist towards the
subject of the nature of the attribution of belief on the other hand argues that whether a person
has a particular belief or not is a matter of interpretation. The question that I address in this
thesis is whether there is a third option. That is, is the reconciliation of realism and
interpretationism in belief attribution tenable? I am sceptical that this is possible. I argue that
if this reconciliation is not tenable then in order to avoid the elimination of what I think is a
correct understanding of ourselves we should interpret the subject of belief in terms of
usefulness and utility in the prediction and explanation of our behaviour. I argue, therefore
that the descriptions of intentional psychology are practically ineliminable and have meaning.
I argue, however that beliefs, desires, hopes and fears do not refer to any tangible internal
states that are causally significant in the explanation of behaviour.
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Lars Hertzberg
Department of Philosophy
Åbo Akademi University, Finland
Does Language have a Use?
Philang 2009
According to a prevalent view, linguistic communication consists in using linguistic
expressions as a means of bringing about an effect in a listener. This view presupposes that
the utterance and the speech situation can be identified independently of one another, i.e. the
relation between them is external. This presupposition is shared by behaviourists and
generative grammarians (Chomsky) alike. It is here argued that the presupposition is
untenable: an utterance and its use are internally related, i.e. they are mutually constitutive. It
is shown that the effect of an utterance (as far as the effect is linguistically relevant) cannot,
on the one hand, be described except in relation to what was said, and that what was said
cannot, on the other hand, be identified independently of what the speaker was doing in
speaking; this, in turn, can only be seen by taking note of the context. (Thus, whether the
speaker’s words were ambiguous cannot be determined by looking only to the phonological
character of the utterance; neither is the meaning of an utterance dependent on the mental
content of the speaker or the listener’s reaction. Rather, it depends on the practical context of
speaking.) The argument holds both for utterances aiming at a practical result (commands,
warnings, instructions, etc) and for expressive utterances (thanking, apologizing, greeting,
etc.). It is, accordingly, misleading to speak about language having a use, as if language were
a system the character of which is independent of what is done with it. Because of this, the
suggestion that someone might have mastered the language system, in the sense that he might
be able to formulate grammatically correct sentences and to identify grammatical errors, while
not being capable of making use of utterances, is not coherent. The entire situation involving
the speaker, the listener, and their relation in the context of life in which the utterance is made
is what constitutes an utterance as a linguistic act. Because of this it is misleading to suppose
that rules of language are what enables us to understand what someone is saying; rather it is
our understanding of what is said that enables us to see how the rules of language apply to it.

Carl Humphries
University of Bielsko-Biała (ATH), Poland
Philang 2009
Defeasibility of meaning and expression in language use and its implications
for culture and communication.
The conception of language developed in Wittgenstein’s later work emphasises the varied
sorts of context-dependence language use must possess to be consistent with the conditions
under which, as language learners, we discover it to be meaningful. It follows from this that
approaches that treat all cultural phenomena (including language use) as only meaningful in
virtue of their place in an overarching cultural system (e.g. one that assigns meanings directly
to signs) must be mistaken. Poststructuralists have drawn from the latter model the idea that
the assignment of meanings to signs on particular occasions is necessarily defeasible (and so,
from the point of view of communicative understanding, unstable). According to
Wittgenstein’s model, though, the contextual conditions under which we first discover
particular forms of language use to be meaningful can also imply that their meanings are nondefeasible
(e.g. when they are necessarily situated in practices that consist of embedded
structures of practical action).
Even so, not all relevant aspects of how human beings behave when they interact and
communicate conform to the Wittgensteinian model of context-dependency. Some instances
of verbal utterance (e.g. involving expletives), as well as many instances of how human
beings present themselves expressively to one another involving intonation, facial expressions
and gestures, do not require any specific context to be judged relevant. (In the absence of any
circumstances that would help to indicate a context-dependent meaning for these, we still take
them to be expressively revealing of a person’s mood, which itself may possess
communicative relevance – e.g. when a person says ‘I’m happy’ in a sad tone of voice, but for
no clearly apparent reason.) Because they are not in themselves context-dependent, any
communicative significance such cases have must, in principle, be defeasible, if it is to be
consistent with the fact that we can also discover them to be capable of taking on additional
context-dependent forms of significance in the right circumstances.
Hence the intuition of poststructuralists – that there is something in human communication
that is necessarily defeasible – turns out to be a good one after all, even if it does not justify
the generalisations about language, culture and communication that they have sought to make
on the basis of it. Indeed, this paper will aim to show that the wider philosophical or cultural
implications of that insight can only be seen when it is placed alongside a Wittgensteinian
account of context-dependent meaning instead of competing with the latter.
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Maria Jodłowiec
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Philang 2009
Metarepresentation and language: a relevance theoretic approach
The main goal of the paper is to show how relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95,
2002, Wilson & Sperber 2004) models communication as necessarily involving mind-reading
mechanisms and to present arguments, advanced by Sperber (1994, 2000) and Wilson (1999,
2005), which suggest that metarepresentational abilities must have preceded the development
of language as a sophisticated tool of communication in the evolutionary development of
man.
Relevance theory is a model of human overt intentional, that is ostensive, communication
rooted in some observations about human cognitive functioning. The fundamental assumption
about how interpreters recover the communicator’s meaning is that ostensive stimuli come
with a guarantee that they have been intended to be optimally relevant. This tacit law
underlying comprehension processes in general, and understanding utterances in particular, is
formalised on the relevance theoretic model as the presumption of relevance, the corollary to
the Communicative Principle of Relevance.
The presumption of relevance and the Communicative Principle of Relevance provide the
backbone of the utterance comprehension heuristics which Sperber and Wilson formulate. In
accordance with this procedure, the hearer is assumed to “follow a path of least effort in
constructing an interpretation of the utterance (and in particular in resolving ambiguities and
referential indeterminacies, in going beyond linguistic meaning, in supplying contextual
assumptions, computing implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility, and … [to] stop when
[the interpreter’s] expectations of relevance are satisfied” (or abandoned) (Sperber & Wilson,
2005: 360). This heuristics predicts that the first interpretation found relevant enough by the
interpreter will be recognised as the one intended by the communicator, to the exclusion of
other possible interpretations that the utterance might be compatible with (Wilson & Sperber,
2002: 605, Žegarac, 2006: 1703).
On the relevance-theoretic approach it is furthermore assumed that, when deriving
optimally relevant meanings, interpreters may take into account some information which is
available to them through metacommunicative insight. In other words, it is postulated within
this framework that comprehenders will not simply fall for the first interpretation that the
presumption of optimal relevance recovers, but on certain occasions, will discard this
interpretation as unlikely to be intended as optimally relevant by the communicator and will
search further for another optimally relevant meaning. This may happen when an utterance
will yield an accidentally optimally relevant interpretation, an accidentally irrelevant
interpretation or an interpretation that will merely seem optimally relevant even though it is
genuinely not optimally relevant as it appears to the interpreter. All the three instances are
cases of a mismatch between the first relevant interpretation accessed and the interpretation
that is or might be assumed to be optimally relevant due to metacommunicative
considerations, that is thanks to the fact that the interpreter will engage in doing what is
referred to in the literature as reading the speaker’s mind.
The three interpretational strategies will be discussed and comments on why it seems more
plausible to hypothesise that the disposition to metarepresent evolved in homo sapiens before
language will be offered.

Selected references:
Philang 2009
Sperber, Dan (1994). Understanding verbal understanding. In J. Khalfa (Ed.), What is
intelligence?( 179–198). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sperber, Dan (2000). Metarepresentations in an evolutionary perspective. In D. Sperber (Ed.),
Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (117-137). Oxford University
Press,
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson (1986/1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson (2002). Pragmatics, modularity and mind–reading. Mind and
Language, 17, 3–23.
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson (2005). Pragmatics. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 17,
353-388.
Wilson, Deirdre (1999). Metarepresentation in linguistic communication. UCL Working
Papers in Linguistics, 11, 127–161.
Wilson, Deirdre (2005). New directions for research on pragmatics and modularity. Lingua,
115, 1129–1146.
Wilson, Deirdre & Dan Sperber (2004). Relevance theory. In L. Horn & G. Ward (Eds.), The
handbook of pragmatic (607–632), Oxford: Blackwell.
Žegarac, Vlad (2006). Believing in: A pragmatic account. Lingua, 116, 1703–1721.
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Philang 2009
Andrew Jorgensen
School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Ireland
Understanding Semantic Scepticism
Kripke concluded ‘there can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word’ (1982, p.
55). This startling thesis raises many questions: How are we best to understand the thesis? Is
it self-refuting or incoherent? If it is true, how did he convey it to us, and how did we
understand it? In my talk I say why…
1. I think the thesis is best understood as a version of semantic nominalism (to be contrasted
with J.J. Katz’s Realism about language and Chomskian Conceptualism/Internalism). In
brief, the argument is that scepticism implies sentences don’t express propositions. This
can be construed as saying words/sentences do not really belong to semantic types, which
is a form of nominalism. The benefit of the reinterpretation lies in bringing to bear
conceptual resources and analogies from nominalist interpretations of other areas to
linguistic phenomena.
2. I argue scepticism is not incoherent. I respond to Paul Boghossian’s famous argument from
‘The Status of Content’ (1990) that irrealist theses about content are incoherent. In brief,
my response trades on distinguishing sentences and propositions and I argue that
Boghossian’s criticisms cannot get a grip on a properly formulated scepticism once the
distinction is made.
3. I offer a picture that reconciles the apparent first-person phenomenal experience of
understanding the sceptical thesis with the strict consequences of the thesis, if true. In
brief, the experience of understanding the thesis, given a traditional picture of
understanding as a propositional attitude, entails we ‘grasp’ the sceptical propositions that
no sentence expresses a proposition. For the sake of argument, this is a relationship
between a person and a proposition. But scepticism insists no one means a proposition and
no sentence expresses a proposition. These are additionally demanding relationships. ‘S’
expresses p iff S is uniquely semantically related to p. The sceptic denies the uniqueness of
the relation between person and proposition (or between sentence and proposition), not the
existence of the relation. Hence the first person evidence of a connection with propositions
is compatible with the truth of scepticism (since the first person evidence says nothing
about uniqueness)
I conclude that we must return to the study of language from a nominalist perspective (now
associated exclusively with the Bloomfeldian tradition) because only it can accommodate the
sceptical critique.
References:
Paul Boghossian (1990) “The Status of Content” Philosophical Review, 157-84.
N. Chomsky (1966) Cartesian Linguistics Harper and Row. J.J. Katz (ed.) (1985) The
Philosophy of Linguistics Oxford University Press.
Saul Kripke (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language Harvard University Press.

Roman Kalisz
University of Gdańsk, Poland
Philang 2009
Philosophical Foundations of a Concept of General Meaning
Most recently I have been developing a concept of general meaning. The idea
comprises assessment of linguistic utterances on cognitive scales such as true – false, good –
bad, beautiful – ugly. A producer of a message shows his/her relation in varying degrees
toward one or more of the above scales. The scales reflect basic interests of human beings. At
this level axiological stances of various cultural orientations are revealed in the best way, e.g.
liberalism in economy is praised by circles close to NajwyŜszy Czas ‘Highest Time’ in Poland
and condemned by socialists let alone communists. General meaning reflects fundamental
beliefs and attitudes to life by humans. We want to know the truth regardless of detailed
lexical representations in an utterance.
Philosophical background which supports this view is connected with various
axiological theories including ethics and aesthetics. Such studies as Pawłowski’s (1987)
monograph non aesthetics show the history of human thought aiming at objective parameters
of determining what is beautiful and what is a kitsch.
The next step in the development of the concept of general meaning is the placement
of a given utterance on a given scale or scales. A ‘so called parenthetical test serves this
purpose. The principle of scalarity is exploited here although not in entirely orthodox way.
The final step in our analysis is the translation of general meaning into lexical and
even morphological meaning through the tool of ‘semantic skeleton’ which reflects degree of
schematicity of human understanding and reasoning.
Reference:
Pawłowski, Tadeusz. 1987. Wartości estetyczne. Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna.
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Philang 2009
Henryk Kardela
Maria Curie Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland
Ludwik Fleck: The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. In
Cognitive Linguistics.
The question: What is a fact? is a fundamental epistemological question that any adequate
scientific theory, a viable linguistic theory included, can hardly evade. Ever since Thomas
Kuhn’s (1962) famous book The structure of Scientific Revolutions the general consensus
seems to have been reached among scientific communities that
(i) scientific endeavor develops through changes in paradigms and changes of paradigms;
(ii) no scientific progress can be divorced from its social context, and
(iii) there are no bare facts; all (relevant) facts are theory laden.
Importantly, in his book, Thomas Kuhn points to Ludwik Fleck, a Jewish-born Polish scholar
and medical scientist, whose book Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1979),
originally published in German in 1935, has been a source of inspiration to him.
Indeed, in his book, Ludwik Fleck, when analyzing the history of the Wassermann
reaction, shows that “the facts” which led to the discovery of the true causes of syphilis were
“socially constructed”, being determined by the then prevailing thought style (Denkstil),
shared by the thought collective (Denkkollektiv), i.e. “a community of persons mutually
exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction”).
The paper aims at showing that the general framework of Cognitive Linguistics,
represented, among others, by Ronald Langacker’s (1987, 1991, 2000, 2008) model of
Cognitive Grammar and Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980, 1999) theory of Conceptual Metaphor,
fits Ludwik Fleck’s (1979) description of a thought style in that Cognitive Linguistics
(i) offers a basis for the social and cultural conditioning of scientific knowledge, where facts
are viewed as a function of the current thought style;
(ii) constrains and determines the way of thinking;
(iii) disallows alternative modes of perception of “facts”, thereby excluding proper
communication between different theoretical frameworks (for example, between
cognitive linguistics and generative grammar), and, finally
(iv) defines empirical discovery as a development or a transformation of thought style which
initially admits of no exception to its system.
References
Paul Boghossian (1990) “The Status of Content” Philosophical Review, 157-84.
N. Chomsky (1966) Cartesian Linguistics Harper and Row.
J.J. Katz (ed.) (1985) The Philosophy of Linguistics Oxford University Press.
Saul Kripke (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language Harvard University Press.
Lakoff, G., Johnson, M. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh.The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge
to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Langacker, R. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. 2 Vols. Stanford.
Langacker, R. 2000. Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Langacker, R. 2008. Cognitive Grammar. A Basic Introduction. Oxford: OUP.

Philang 2009
Filip Kawczyński
Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, Poland
The Hybrid Theory of Reference for Proper Names
How does the reference of proper names work was one of the issues raised most frequently
in the twentieth-century philosophy of language. Well known opposition between the
Description Theory and Kripke’s Casual Theory set the trend of that discussion. The
descriptivists, on the one hand, placed great emphasis on intentional content (expressed by
definite descriptions) involved in using proper names and, as Kripke has shown (in Naming
and Necessity) they expected too much from that. On the other hand, what is characteristic for
Kripkean Casual (or `Chain’) Theory is the deficiency of intentional aspect, what makes the
theory irrelevant to the actual way of using names (see arguments against the Casual Theory
in Evans’ The Casual Theory of Names and Putnam’s Explanation and Reference). All in all,
both classical theories of reference for proper names wrestle with miscellaneous difficulties
and do not give the answer for the question about reference.
What may be – and in my opinion should be – applied as an antidote to that awkward state
of affairs is a Hybrid Theory of reference. One of the first and probably the most famous
hybrid theory was proposed by Evans in The Varieties of Reference.
Evans rightly remarks that every single use of a proper name appears within some
PRACTICE of using that name as referring to some particular object. Thus, Evan’s main goal
was to give an account of how does such practice run. In doing that he introduces a distinction
between producers and consumers of a practice, describes reference-borrowing process as
consisting in cooperation of speakers connected in a kind of communication network and
explains the nature and role of intentional content speakers posses about a bearer of a name.
Probably, the most important Evans’s thesis is that information possessed by a speaker about
the bearer of a name do not determine which object the speaker refers to when using the name
(as it was claimed by descriptivists). However, such information determine which practice
speaker’s use of the name belongs to.
In my paper I would like to present my view on the reference of proper names which is
inspired to a large extent by Evans’s ideas. I will take a closer look at the act of naming itself,
the specific roles played by producers and consumers in injecting new information into the
practice and the consequences of using attributive and referential definite description to fix
reference within reference-borrowing. I will also attempt to extend, as well as particularize,
Evans’s claims about the function that information fulfils in determining the reference of a
name and show how the Hybrid Theory allows us to answer the main question concerning
proper names, namely: what determines which object is the reference of a given use of a name
in a given context and why exactly this object is the reference?
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Philang 2009
Witold Kieraś
Institute of Philosophy, Warsaw University, Poland
Equivalent complexity, linguistic theories and philosophy of linguistics
Charles Hockett in his book (Hockett, 1958) formulated so called equivalent complexity
thesis (or equi-complexity thesis) concerning so called grammatical complexity of natural
languages:
Objective measurement is difficult, but impressionistically it would seem that the total grammatical
complexity of any language, counting both morphology and syntax, is about the same as that of any other.
This is not surprising, since all languages have about equally complex jobs to do, and what is not done
morphologically has to be done syntactically (Hockett, 1958).
For years the thesis was widely approved but recently it was put in doubt on the basis of the
claim that creole languages are significantly simpler on all levels of grammatical analysis
(phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic) (McWhorther, 2001). McWhorther’s
claim brought back to live the discussion on the notion of grammatical complexity and the
equi-complexity thesis itself.
The aim of the paper is to present and discuss the equi-complexity thesis on the ground of
philosophy of linguistics and present the problem as relevant (though rarely discussed) for
this field of philosophical investigations.
First of all, one of the interesting issues is the analysis the notion of grammatical
complexity which is in Hockett’s work somewhat vague. Recent attempts to this problem
distinguish at least two types of grammatical complexity: relative and absolute (Miestamo,
2006b; Kusters, 2008). Relative complexity is relativised to users and is based on second
language acquisition. The absolute approach refers to the number of parts in a system, or, in
information-theoretical terms, to the length of the description of phenomena of certain
language. But this distinction does not solve the problem of a proper definition, it rather opens
the discussion. Especially in the absolute approach (the more popular one) which faces two
main problems: choosing linguistic phenomena that are relevant for complexity (problem of
representativity) and calibration of results obtained for these phenomena (problem of
comparability). (Miestamo, 2006a)
The second problem is how major linguistic theories define grammatical complexity or
how the notion could be defined on the ground of these theories. The most interesting case is
Chomskian methodology, in which grammatical complexity could be (at least in some sense)
understood simply as belonging to a certain class of formal languages in Chomsky’s hierarchy
(Chomsky, 1959). Also interesting issue on the ground of linguistic theories is to analyze how
potential answer to equi-complexity thesis (positive or negative) would affect these linguistic
theories. Again, generative linguistics as the one that has the strongest psychological
implications, is the most interesting one. It seems that this theory is the most “complexitysensitive”,
since the negative answer to the thesis could undermine the idea of universal
grammar.
Last but not least: the problem of grammatical complexity and equi-complexity thesis has
some certain features of philosophical problem and I hope to put some light on why this
problem should be interested for a philosopher of language and linguistics.

References
Philang 2009
Chomsky, N. (1959). On certain formal properties of grammars. Information and control,
2:137–167.
Hockett, C. (1958). A Course in Modern Linguistics. Macmillan, New York.
Kusters, W. (2008). Complexity in linguistic theory, language learning and language change.
In Miestamo, M., Sinnemäki, K., and F., K., editors, Language Complexity: Typology,
Contact, Change. Studies in Language Companion Series 94, pages 3–22. Benjamins,
Amsterdam.
McWhorther, J. (2001). The world’s simplest grammars are creole grammars. Linguistic
Typology, 5:125–166.
Miestamo, M. (2006a). On the complexity of standard negation. In Suominen, M., Arppe, A.,
Airola, A., Heinämäki, O., Miestamo, M., Määttä, U., Niemi, J., Pitkänen, K. K., and
Sinnemäki, K., editors, A Man of Measure: Festschrift in Honour of Fred Karlsson on
His 60th Birthday, Special Supplement to SKY Journal of Linguistics, pages 325–356. The
Linguistic Association of Finland.
Turku.Miestamo, M. (2006b). On the feasibility of complexity metrics. In Kerge, K. and
Sepper, M., editors, Finest Linguistics. Proceedings of
the Annual Finnish and Estonian Conference of Linguistics. Tallinn, May 6-7, 2004, pages
11–26. Tallinn University Press.
Miestamo, M. (2008). Grammatical complexity in a
cross-linguistic perspective. In Miestamo, M., Sinnemäki, K., and F., K., editors, Language
Complexity: Typology, Contact, Change. Studies in Language Companion Series 94, pages
23–41. Benjamins, Amsterdam.
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Guilherme F. Rennó Kisteumacher
Milton Campos Faculty of Law,
Minas Gerais, Brazil
Philang 2009
The Logic of Language: Analytical Pragmatism and Inferentialism as a
bridge between philosophy of language and linguistics
One of the most impressive developments in philosophy of language was the systematic
approach that had the main conviction of language as system of representation of states of
affairs, and that, through its formal analysis, we could obtain almost all of the conclusions of
our worldly philosophical issues. Nevertheless, this project was subject to several critiques by
an opposed perspective that took the meaning of linguistic expressions as intrinsically
dependent on their use. Linguistic pragmatism of this sort dominated philosophy of language,
and it seemed to condemn the systematic theoretical formulations about language to
impossibility and mistake: language could not have a core capable of adequate philosophical
or scientific description. This picture was recently questioned, putting forward a claim that
these two approaches were, in fact, not completely opposed, but rather complementary. They
influence each other mutually, since philosophy of language, in its analytic and pragmatic
form are interwoven and could be conjoined as well with the fundamental developments of
formal semantics and contemporary linguistics approaches. This perspective is already
presupposed in the philosophical perspective of inferentialism, provided by Sellars and
developed by Brandom. Inferentialism is pragmatic in its commitments, but is also capable of
analyzing the logical inferential structure implicit in our explicit practice of linguistic use.
That ideal is pursued as well in Brandom’s most recent analytic pragmatism, a project that
seeks to conjoin both perspectives: as rigorously analytical towards semantics, without letting
go of the basic pragmatic standpoint, through a complex pragmatic mediated semantic
relation, capable of being translated in a meaning-use analysis. With this, it is formed a
metatheoretic conceptual apparatus that could be in place for translating meaning in terms of
use and at the same time be available as a systematization for our philosophical and scientific
scrutiny. For this, it was claimed that both approaches could not only perform this task, but
also significantly demonstrate overcomes in many of the main problems of philosophy of
language in the 21st century, as well as provide a way to bring closer achievements in
contemporary linguistics to the developments in philosophy of language, since both
inferentialism and analytic pragmatism also pretend to explain theoretically the acquisition
and development of language in human behavior. In this article, we pretend to evaluate what
can and what cannot be done in these directions with the conceptual tools provided by them:
how does it actually solves some central ‘myths of the study of language, and how it does still
leave some of them open; how it can show the interconnection of formal semantic analysis
and the pragmatization of philosophy of language; how is it able to bring closer linguistics to
philosophy of language; and how this structure justifies itself in a broadly construed
perspective of our contemporary sciences and philosophies that study the linguistic
phenomenon. It should be claimed that a holistic conceptual perspective is needed, as well as
a good use of the insights of pragmatism regarding the inherent social structure of our
discursive practice.

Georg Kjøll
Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature
University of Oslo, Norway
Philang 2009
What notion of ‘content’ is needed for a theory of communication?
A very intuitive theory of how communication works is that, in linguistic interaction,
people entertain propositions which they convey to each other by way of language. We share
thoughts, or we utter words put together in such a fashion that their meanings correspond
directly to what we think. But are the propositions in our heads of the same type and
metaphysical mould as the meanings expressed by natural language utterances? Or, put
another way; is the content of our thoughts of the same type as the content of our
communicative acts?
In this paper I argue that there may be good reasons not to treat the answer to this question
as a clear and unreserved ‘yes’. Using a recent debate in linguistics/ philosophy of language
between Cappelen and Lepore (2007) and proponents of Relevance Theory (Sperber and
Wilson 1995, Carston 2002, Wedgwood 2007) as a case study, I show that there seem to be
different theoretical requirements in place for the content of utterances on the one hand, and
thoughts on the other.
Developing a Gricean point, Sperber and Wilson hold that linguistic interaction can
succeed without there being “a failsafe algorithm by which the hearer can reconstruct the
speaker’s exact meaning” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 44) and that often it is sufficient that the
speaker’s meaning and the hearer’s interpretation are similar enough for co-ordination to take
place. Cappelen and Lepore (2005, 2007) contend that this commits Relevance Theory to
what they label the “non-shared content principle”, and object that there’s nothing in
Relevance Theory which guarantees a workable standard of similarity, since any two items
are similar in some respects.
I argue that Cappelen and Lepore overlook the fact that Sperber and Wilson propose an
account of interpretive resemblance which is explicitly designed to address this objection. In
their view, propositions are entertained not in isolation but in a context of mentally
represented background assumptions, and “two propositions resemble each other in a given
context to the extent that they share logical and contextual implications in that context”
(Wilson 1995: 208, see also Sperber and Wilson 1985/6). Relevance Theory may be seen as
an attempt to explain how, in linguistic interactions, the appropriate context and degree of
resemblance are constrained by the hearer’s expectations of relevance. I argue that this allows
for a coherent similarity theory of communication, without excluding the principled
possibility of two speakers having identical thoughts.
But even though Sperber and Wilson’s view of similarity of communicated content allows
Relevance Theory to defend a radical contextualist theory of communication, their view
presupposes identity of propositional content at the level of thought. Drawing on arguments
from Fodor (1998), I show how Relevance Theory’s similarity criterion for communicated
content relies on the literal sharing of identical propositions, the “contextual implications” of
the quote above. I end by using this insight to establish a methodological point about the
division of labour between philosophy of mind and linguistics/philosophy of language.
References
Cappelen, Herman and Lepore, Ernest 2005: Insensitive semantics: a defense of semantic
minimalism and speech act pluralism. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
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Philang 2009
Cappelen, Herman and Lepore, Ernest 2007: 'Relevance Theory and shared content'. In
Pragmatics. Burton-Roberts, Noel (ed) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan pp. 115-35.
Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and utterances. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fodor, Jerry A. 1998: Concepts: where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre 1995: Relevance: communication and cognition. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. 1985/6 ‘Loose talk’. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
LXXXVI, pp 153-71.
Wedgwood, Daniel. 2007. ‘Shared assumptions: Semantic minimalism and Relevance
Theory’. In Journal of Linguistics 43/3, pp. 647-681.
Wilson, Deirdre 1995: 'Is there a maxim of truthfulness?' UCL Working papers in linguistics,
7, pp. 197-212.

Joanna Klimczyk
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology,
Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw
Philang 2009
What Is It Like Intending to Cheat the Demon: On the Problem with Modal
Intentions
Robert C. Stalnaker once said that “Believing in possible worlds is like speaking prose. We
have been doing it all our lives” (R.C. Stalnaker, Possible Worlds). In my paper I offer a
sketchy argument for fallibility of that hypothesis in the domain of practical philosophy,
precisely with regard to intention. My skepticism mainly bears on a moderate version of
modal realism as is defended by Stalnaker himself, who depicts possible worlds in terms of
possible states. On the face of it, the whole idea of adopting the ‘possible worlds’ framework
to understand the phenomenon of intention may seem attractive and promising. After all, both
our intuitions and everyday practices support thinking about possible intentions, i.e. intentions
that we might have had if something went otherwise. Moreover, we do often form intention
after careful consideration of possible scenarios of actions. So what is wrong with accounting
for intentions along the lines of possible states of mind? To begin with, it is not obvious
whether reflection on alternative intentions in terms of possible states of mind provides us
with any valuable knowledge about our actual situation in the world. Or to put it more
accurately, does the fact that ‘possible worlds’ framework to a certain degree structures our
practical deliberation, implies that ‘possible worlds’ help us to receive some important
knowledge of who we are as agents who might have acted on a different intention? The
answer is: no. What kind of alternative we have in mind when we think of intentions that we
might have had? In what follows, I will concentrate on diminishing the ‘myth of possible
worlds’ with regard to its fruitful applicability to the theory of action, broadly conceived. I
draw an important distinction between my being able to imagine my different courses of
action (for example my poisoning the present president of France), and the possibility of my
having an intention to poison the present president of France. I argue that the second one is
impossible in the sense that we cannot conceive what it is like to have a particular intention
without having this intention. The proof of the pudding is in its eating. Another problem
appears when we try to think about modal intentions that refer to non-existing objects, as it is
in evil demon example. To get things more complicated, I do not take the demon example to
be a test for our imagination. I take the demon example to introduce another kind of modality,
which is the modality of reasons and argue that possible reasons for having a concrete
intention and the mere possibility of this concrete intention are two different things that
should not be conflated. I conclude with an observation that the ‘possible worlds’ framework
is not a universally applicable philosophical device.
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Krzysztof Kosecki
Chair of English and General Linguistics
University of Łódź, Poland
Philang 2009
The Concepts of Subject and Self in Personification Metaphors in English
The paper assumes the standpoint of contemporary cognitive linguistics, which emphasizes
the role of metaphor in human conceptual system (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; 1999). In their
analysis of the concept of the SELF, Lakoff and Johnson (1999: 267-289) argue that a person,
being a whole, is metaphorically divided into two parts – the SUBJECT and the SELF (or
SELVES). The former involves the experiencing consciousness, reason, will, and judgment,
and is always conceptualized as a PERSON. The latter involves “the body, social roles, past
states, and actions in the world” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 269). Among other possibilities,
it can be conceptualized metaphorically as an OBJECT.
The paper argues that the same metaphor underlies many of the self- compounds in
English. Such expressions are used to describe objects and mechanisms, e.g. ‘self-propelled’,
‘self-locking’. It follows that Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980: 33-34) personification metaphor is
much more common and has a more elaborate structure than was originally assumed. Not
only various phenomena, such as, e.g., inflation, but also objects, are conceptualized as
persons. If the bifurcated structure of subject-self (Kövecses 2005: 54) is also metaphorically
imposed on objects, it may lead to chaining of metaphors in the understanding of such
concepts.
References
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2005. Metaphor in Culture:Universality and Variation.
Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and
Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Philang 2009
Karolina Krawczak
School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
(Inter)subjectivity and objectivity. Meaning at a crossroads
The present paper discusses meaning – understood as an epiphenomenon of cognition, context
and convention – with reference to the notions of (inter)subjectivity and objectivity. Particular
attention is paid to the interrelatedness of objective and intersubjective elements in the
constitution of a fully-fledged person capable of meaning construction.
The subject’s awareness of and sensitivity to his somatic and social situation, which are
absolutely indispensable for his appropriate maturation, hinge on the perceived presence of
other subjects, as substantiated by their corporal and verbal expression. It is only before such
an embodied and socio-culturally situated consciousness that the world of meaning, immersed
in semiosis, can unfold. Meaning is therefore shown to be relativized to the subject situated in
intersubjective experience and expression by way of his psychosomatic architecture. Meaning
emerges from the interaction of contextual stimuli with conventional conceptual and verbal
material. In this interaction, situational frames are imposed by the subject upon relevant
segments of background knowledge, managed by means of signifying relations. In the
significant triad of cognition, convention and context, the first component stands behind the
phenomenon present to consciousness, the second one relates to the activated linguistic
material, whereas context provides for the online conceptual structure that arises from the
interaction of the three elements in the mind. Naturally, cognition is of critical consequence,
but it would remain a meaningless stream without the intervention of context, and an
inexpressible consciousness without the interplay of intersubjectively perpetuated convention.
The conceptual perspective of the considerations outlined above embraces three
supposedly remote lines of thought – cognitive linguistics, Peircean semiotics, and
phenomenology, as construed by Husserl and his intellectual heir Merleau-Ponty. It is
demonstrated how these theoretical routes converge on a relatively parallel view of the
concepts under scrutiny, which, in turn, indicates how the field of cognitive linguistics can be
historiographically and conceptually enriched.
Selected references :
Burks, Arthur W. (ed.) 1958. The collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. VII-VIII.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (electronic version)
Hickey, Raymond (ed.). 2003. Motives for language change. Cambridge: CUP.
Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to
phenomenological philosophy. Dordrecht – Boston – London: Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol.1. Stanford: SUP.
Langacker, Ronald. 1990. “Subjectification”. In: Cognitive Linguistics 1-1, 5-38.
Langacker, Ronald. 1991. Concept, image and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar.
Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Langacker, Ronald. 1999. Grammar and conceptualization. Berlin – New York: Mouton.
Langacker, Ronald. 2006. “Subjectification, grammaticalization and conceptual archetypes”.
Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1976. Proza świata. [La Prose du monde]. Warszawa: Czytelnik.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1981.Course in general linguistics. Fontana: Collins.
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Agnieszka Kułacka
University of Wrocław, Poland
Philang 2009
On the Nature of Statistical Language Laws
Mauro Dorato in The Software of the Universe. An Introduction to the History and Philosophy
of Laws of Nature says: “Although the discovery of laws is commonly regarded as the most
important goal of the scientific enterprise, as well as being the engine of the technological
revolutions that continue to transform our lives, the role of the law of nature play in our
knowledge has not been understood, and is still at the centre of lively discussions among both
scientists and philosophers” (Dorato, 2005: IX). Is the nature of the law and its role in
Linguistics fully and well understood by the researchers?
In my presentation I will draw an outline of the definition of law of science and one of its
types: the statistical law. I will shortly discuss the approach of Neogrammarians to studying
language laws. My main focus will be on the contemporary state of art in Statistical
Linguistics with regard to discovery and verification of statistical language laws.
References
Dorato, M. 2005. The Software of the Universe. An Introduction to the History and
Philosophy of Laws of Nature. Hants: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

Alina Kwiatkowska
University of Łódź, Poland
Philang 2009
A plea for a cognitive multimodal semiotics
The purpose of this paper is to postulate a closer collaboration between researchers in
language and the scholars analyzing visual images. The cognitive linguistics enterprise has
opened the way, perhaps for the first time ever, for the representatives of both disciplines to
meet on a common ground. They may now begin their study at a common point of departure -
the laws and mechanisms of perception, cognition, and mental construal, which determine the
form of both visual and verbal realizations. If one takes this vantage point, one may expect to
find that the differences between images and texts are largely superficial, resulting mainly
from the properties of their material substance, and that they are constructed on similar
principles. In my paper, I would like to examine some of such similarities of organization
between pictorial images and texts - both icons of what should be called "the syntax of
perception", and I will argue for the need to broaden the cognitive framework so that it would
enable a unified analysis of both of these forms of representation.
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Agnieszka Libura
University of Wrocław, Poland
Maria Libura
Lazarski University, Warsaw, Poland
Philang 2009
Language gene found and lost. The unhappy marriage of linguistics and
genetics
Back in the 1990s, FOXP2, a gene found on chromosome 7, was proclaimed to be "the first
language gene", or even the gene for grammar. The association between FOXP2 and language
development was first reported in a unique family known as the KE family. Nearly half of the
family members presented a phenotype the most striking feature of which was a severe speech
and language disorder. The early studies focused on the apparent grammatical processing
problems. When a single mutation was identified as the cause underlying the disorder, the
discovery was boasted as the ultimate proof of linguistic nativism. However, it soon turned
out that the impairment was not as selective as the first reports claimed. Far from it, the
mutation was found to affect brain development in general.
This paper shows how a linguistic ideology led to a misconceived view of genetics. It also
addresses the more general question: Can language be tracked back to specific genes at all?

Jakub Mácha
Dep. of Philosophy
Masaryk University Brno,
Brno, Czech Republic
Philang 2009
Metaphor in the Twilight Area between Philosophy and Linguistics
Metaphor as a linguistic phenomenon has been studied by philosophers since Aristotle and by
linguists as well. The key question addressed by philosophers since the last century is whether
metaphor has meaning or not. Although the question is ambiguous in many ways, from a
linguistic point of view, it makes no sense. From this point of view, every metaphor must
have some meaning or else it is meaningless, i.e., nonsense. This outlook is altogether correct
and can shed light on the philosophical character of our question. It should rather read,
whether the concept of a linguistic meaning is an appropriate tool to explain the intricate
nature of the metaphor. The positive answer is prevalent in the philosophical linguistics and
by the majority of philosophers of language. However, it can be argued that such a
categorization of the metaphor under the wings of the linguistic meaning makes it a marginal
phenomenon of language: it says every metaphor has a similar meaning as a literal statement,
but is in some way harder to find. Some additional effort is necessary to find a specific
metaphorical meaning of a given metaphor. The negative answer to our question would imply
that not every metaphor can be studied in the framework of the linguistic meaning or at least it
is not convenient to do so. This idea (raised by Max Black and developed by Donald
Davidson) opens us a new way of classification of metaphors. There are strong metaphors,
which cannot be analyzed in terms of a linguistic meaning; and there are extinct or dormant
metaphors to which can be assigned some meaning or meanings. These metaphorical
meanings can be studied by empirical linguistics and subsequently listed in a lexicon. Such
inquiry can be made with strong metaphors as well, but there will be no end to what a
metaphor means or can mean. In linguistic terminology, strong metaphors are extensively
polysemous. There are cases in between, e.g. metaphors having a single meaning which varies
according to the context (a scheme suggested by John Searle). It would be wrong to maintain
that strong metaphors cannot be studied by empirical linguistics. This discipline cannot study
their meaning, however, but particular ways of construction of a metaphorical meaning. It can
investigate a procedure, which on occasion does not lead to a single outcome. This setting has
many notable advantages: One abstract scheme concerns all metaphors (strong and extinct)
alike and the empirical linguistics can investigate its particular manifestations. Further,
metaphors can be analyzed according to word classes or other linguistic categorizations (in
addition to the ordinary predicative form). Another attractive linguistic issue is to study the
process of dying of metaphors and to find extinct metaphors behind ordinary literal statements
(the project of George Lakoff). In conclusion, it can be said that a clear borderline between
philosophy of language and linguistics is a way to a better understanding of metaphor and
language in general.
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Wojciech Majka
Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny, Kraków, Poland
Philang 2009
...Deliberately Man Dwells... On the essence of thinking
For Heidegger language is not limited to performative or communicative aspect. Rather, it is
one of the ways in which being discloses itself. The language that we have in mind here is
what Heidegger calls Sprachwesen (linguistic essence). In other words, we are dealing here
with a primordial form of language that, as Heidegger understands, speaks us rather than we
speak it. Henceforth, the basic attitude that we should adopt towards language is that of
listening (not speaking) to this primordiality from within which we speak and letting it be
articulated and predicated of being. More than being connected with the formation of actual
utterances primordial language structures our moods in the sense that it construes the
existential relations that hold between us and the world. In this way it is more connected with
mood than with abstraction and logic. Primordial language discloses mood which we may
here, ad libitum, compare with linguistic essence. The very idea of essence is also worthy here
of our heedfulness. Traditionally, essence was seen as a static concept that corresponded to
the Platonic conception of eidos or the Aristotelian postulate of morphe (form). Heidegger,
however, makes the concept dynamic by averring that essence changes together with our
Weltanschauung. Henceforth, primordial language by referring to essence submerges us in a
certain mood or attitude that we have towards being. Ours is the age where all ontological
value is reduced down to resourcefulness, usability and technology, whilst the medieval
attitude, for example, was pervaded with a variety of forms of religious associations. In short,
our understanding of essence is victim of the same élan vital as we are ourselves.

Philang 2009
Luis Fernández Moreno
Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science,
Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
On a Philosophy of Language Dogma: Has Descriptivism Been Refuted?
In contemporary Philosophy of Language it is usually claimed that the description theory
of reference – for short, descriptivism concerning different sorts of terms, such as proper
names and natural kind terms, has been refuted, due to the objections from the causal theory’s
advocates, like Kripke and Putnam, put forward on the seventies of the last century. I will
question that claim, that has acquired the character of a dogma, and allege that descriptivism,
at least concerning natural kind terms, can still be maintained. I will concentrate my
considerations on one of the main sorts of natural kind terms, the so-called “substance terms”,
such as “gold” and “water”, and will sketch a version of descriptivism on them which proves
to be immune from the main objections from the causal theory’s advocates. That version of
descriptivism is grounded on the extension to substance terms of some proposals by classical
descriptivists such as Searle and Strawson about proper names.
According to Searle and Strawson the reference of a proper name is determined by a
sufficient number of descriptions that speakers associate with the name, but these authors
admit different sorts of descriptions, and in spite of Kripke’s claims to the contrary, not only
those formulated in purely general terms. Among the descriptions that the average speaker
can associate with a term, both authors include descriptions in which the speaker defers the
reference of the term to other speakers. In this regard descriptivism can accept Putnam’s
thesis of the division of linguistic labour, according to which the average speaker is disposed
to defer the determination of the reference of natural kind terms to other members of his
linguistic community, namely the experts, and descriptivism can claim that all speakers
associate descriptions with the substance terms they use, though some of the descriptions
associated by non-experts have the function of deferring the reference of those terms to their
reference in the use by experts. Now, experts regarding a substance, like gold, will associate
with the term “gold” a set of identifying descriptions, and at least some of them will not
involve the notion of reference; so Kripke’s non-circularity condition is fulfilled. Come to this
point, descriptivism can maintain that the referent of the term “gold”, such as it is used by
experts and hence also by the rest of the members of our linguistic community, is the
substance that satisfies a sufficient number of the descriptions that experts concerning gold
associate with the term “gold”. Therefore the thesis of descriptivism according to which the
reference of substance terms is determined by a sufficient number of the descriptions
associated with them applies, strictly speaking, according to this version of descriptivism,
only to experts concerning the substance in question.
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64
Yrsa Neuman
Åbo Akademi University, Finland
Philang 2009
Scientism? Some thoughts on the historiography of modern linguistics and
the philosophy of language
In historical accounts, the linguistic turn is often placed around the time of Frege and
Saussure at the end of the 19th Century. In popular accounts by linguists as well as by
philosophers of language, it is often presented as a decisive breakthrough within all language
research; language became an object of study. The foundations for modern linguistics were
set, and along with the emergence of analytic philosophy, philosophy of language was born.
This connection is no accident, but it is rendered very differently by different scholars.
Langacker, in his introduction to linguistics, gives a very short thumbnail history of
linguistics. He warns against belittling the deep contributions by traditional grammarians, but
nevertheless presents the history of linguistics as progressive: “As our theories of language
structure become more sophisticated, we become more conscious of the fact that traditional
grammarians were not so far off the track” (Langacker 1967: 8) Their accounts, in
Langacker’s view, were just incomplete. “In recent years linguists have recognized that
meaning and syntax are crucial to an understanding of language… language cannot be studied
fruitfully just by observing linguistic behaviour…Generative grammar… represents both a
revolution in grammatical thinking and a reaffirmation of the validity of structural insights
about language that have been accumulating for many centuries” (Langacker 1967: 10).
Langacker sees generative grammar as the culmination of a development and as a crucial
insight. Linguists know more and more about language as time goes by. Scientific progress is
a general expansion of “our” knowledge thanks to specific insights or breakthroughs. Within
philosophy, an analogous mode of thinking about the progress of philosophy is exemplified
by Collin & Guldmann (2000), according to whom Locke simply did not realise how
important language was for philosophy. Locke, in Collin and Guldmann’s account, is to say
the least, primitive.
A very different account of the linguistic turn is given by the philosopher Sören Stenlund
(2002). He is interested in the way the world was conceived around the time Frege and
Saussure; the ways of thinking that were prevalent at the time. The linguistic turn, in his
account, is not a scientific break-through but rather a shift of interest. New conceptions of
language came to be in connection with new world views; for example, the discovery of new
continents had challenged the idea that there is a common humanity, an innate common sense
which all human beings possess.
These different accounts of the history of language study manifest very different
perspectives of our intellectual history and of the theoretical questions which linguistics and
philosophy of language both engage with. The differences may be characterised with the help
of dichotimies like internalist-externalist and concepts like scientism.
References
Collin, Finn & Guldmann, Finn: Språkfilosofi, Nya Doxa, Stockholm 2000 (Danish original
1998).
Langacker, Ronald W: Language and Its Structure: some fundamental linguistic concepts,
2nd Ed, Harcourt, NY 1973.Stenlund Sören: “On the Linguistic Turn in Philosophy”, in
The Practice of Language, ed. Gustafsson & Hertzberg, Kluwer Academic Publishers,
Dordrecht 2002.

Philang 2009
Joanna OdrowąŜ-Sypniewska
Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, Poland
Vagueness and Contextualism
Vagueness is by no means a new problem in the philosophy of language. The sorites
paradox – which is due to vagueness – dates back to the times of Eubulides of Miletus.
However, recently a new theory of vagueness has been offered.
One of the most characteristic features of vague expressions, the feature that distinguishes
them from all other expressions, is that they admit of borderline cases, i.e. cases of which it is
doubtful whether a given expression applies to them or not. For each of vague predicates there
are some positive cases, i.e. cases which clearly possess the relevant property, some negative
cases, i.e. cases which clearly do not possess the relevant property and some borderline cases.
Since it is unclear whether or not borderline cases should be included into one of the clear
extensions, one does not know which truth-value should be ascribed to statements referring to
these cases. The apparent lack of sharp boundaries between different kinds of cases makes
vague expressions susceptible to sorites paradoxes (such as the Bald Man paradox, which
may be formulated thus: A man with 0 hairs on his head is bald. For every n, if a man with n
hairs on his head is bald, then a man with n+1 hairs on his head is bald. Therefore, a man with
1.000.000 hairs on his head is bald.) Moreover, there seems to be no sharp boundaries
between positive, borderline and negative cases, which amounts to the existence of the
phenomenon of higher-order vagueness. Since there is no sharp boundary between, e.g.,
positive and borderline cases, borderline cases of borderline cases must exist.
Thus, an adequate theory of vagueness should fulfil at least the following three conditions:
(a) it ought to decide which truth-value the borderline statements possess;
(b) it should resolve the sorites paradox;
(c) it should explain the existence of higher-order vagueness.
The most popular theories of vagueness are supervaluationism (which is a semantic theory)
and Timothy Williamson’s epistemic conception. However, neither of these theories enjoys
common acceptance amongst philosophers. The former has problems explaining higher-order
vagueness, the latter rests on counterintuitive assumptions.
Recently, a new solution has been proposed: contextualism. It is argued that vague terms
resemble indexicals and this claim allows contextualists to argue that although the sorites
premises are true, they do not support the disastrous conclusion. According to contextualists
the sorites reasoning commits a fallacy of equivocation: vague terms appearing in the
premises have different meanings because of the context -shift.
In my talk I will try to assess the contextualist theories of vagueness and show whether
their solution to the sorites paradox is adequate and whether they explain the phenomenon of
higher-order vagueness correctly.
Selected bibliography
Delia Graff Fara, Profiling Interest Relativity, Analysis 68 (2008), 326-335.
Delia Graff Fara, Shifting Sands: An Interest-Relative Theory of Vagueness, Philosophical
Topics 28 (2000), 45–81.
Joanna OdrowąŜ-Sypniewska, Zagadnienie nieostrości [The Problem of Vagueness], WFiS
UW, Warszawa 2000.
Diana Raffman, Vagueness and Context-Relativity, Philosophical Studies 81 (1996), 175-92.
Jason Stanley, Context, Interest-Relativity and the Sorites, Analysis 63 (2003), 269-281.
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66
Ratikanta Panda
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences
IIT Bombay, India
Is Anything Static About Meanings?
Philang 2009
The two disciplines of philosophy of language and linguistics can not be compartmentalized
into theoretical or practical aspects of language study. Whereas philosophy of language
concerns itself with the ultimate end of any language, i.e. the origin and meaning of its
constituent words, linguistics concerns itself broadly with syntactic organization of those
words, their semantic evolution. Thus, semantics comes out as the meeting ground between
the two disciplines. On this meeting ground, the two sciences can profitably benefit from each
other. This paper focuses on the semantic aspect of a language as to how ‘Meaning’ emerges
within a given context. The context can be seen as a dynamic scenario which is influenced by
the sociological reality of the speakers and the listeners most of all. Internet and technology
revolution will be seen as the major influencing agencies in creating and modifying contexts
in 21st century. The coming up of internet discussion forums, mobile SMSs are the new
contexts wherein Meanings of the words are defined and redefined constantly. Immediately, it
raises the question - is anything static about meanings? How do people understand meanings
amid this technology revolution? Wittgenstein’ ideas will be explored in the end and it will be
argued that despite of its apparent disadvantages, Wittgensteinian use theory still offers a
satisfactory answer regarding the static-ness of meanings amid the 21st century information
explosion.

Andrzej Pawelec
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Philang 2009
Language as ‘the House of Being’ vs. language as organon:
The ‘formalism’ of linguistics from a hermeneutic perspective
The ‘formalist’ nature of linguistics is explained by Gadamer in his discussion of
Humboldt (Gadamer 1993: 439-443). His argument is embedded in the hermeneutic vision of
language as “opening up a world” for human beings (the Heideggerian ‘House of Being’).
Gadamer points out that linguistics divorces language from this primary (‘originary’ in the
phenomenological sense) context of 'opening up' for us a range of experience and treats
language merely as a tool (Buehler’s organon, cf. Buehler 1965: 24-8). Gadamer’s
observation is not conceived as a criticism of linguistics: the discipline – a set of ‘methods’ or
controlled ways of dealing with linguistic phenomena – must 'objectify', i.e. focus on
language as separate from the world it ‘reveals’. The argument shows that language is not just
a tool (but a way of being specific to humans), while any linguistic method is necessarily
‘perspectival’ – its validity is limited.
Against this background, I want to discuss McNeill’s attempt (2005) to explain
linguistic/gestural expression. McNeill shows how the notion of ‘inhabiting language’
(proposed by Merleau-Ponty) may be integrated into a dynamic conception of linguistic
expression (or “imagery-language dialectic”, as he calls it). McNeill’s work – as well as
Chafe’s (1994) – may be viewed as an important call to reconsider the current status of
linguistics.
References
Buehler, K. (1965). Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache, Stuttgart.
Chafe, W. (1994). Discourse, consciousness, and time, Chicago.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1993). Truth and Method, London.
McNeill, D. (2005). Gesture and Thought, Chicago.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, London.
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Wit Pietrzak
University of Łódź, Poland
Philang 2009
Towards a Hermeneutics of Deconstruction: the Case of Metaphor.
The aim of this presentation is to explore the disparate discourses in two philosophies of
language of the twentieth century: the Heideggerian post-Kehre hermeneutics and Derrida’s
deconstruction, in order to specify an area of exchange between them. In the present paper it
is argued that the relation between the two philosophies may be traced to the various uses of
metaphor. Both Heidegger and Derrida throughout their writings employ a number of
complex metaphorical expressions to elucidate their theories and it is these metaphors that
rivet the attention inasmuch as, when inspected at close quarters, an affinity appears to arise
between them. First, Heidegger’s writings are probed into in order to amplify his concept of
“language as Saying or letting appear” (1982: 47) which he conceived of in his essays from
On the Way to Language; a scrutiny of his metaphor of “godhead’s appearance in the
manifestness of the sky” (1975: 223) unearths its essentially deconstructive potential that
shows itself in the way the passage unfolds to conclude with an irresolvable paradox. Then a
reference to Derrida’s key analysis of metaphor in philosophical texts that he carries out in his
meditations of “White Mythology” allows to view Heidegger’s perception of language as
being on the threshold of severing its links with logocentrism. Once Heidegger’s project has
been sketched, it can be argued that, in turn, Derrida falls prey to the German philosopher’s
understanding of language as Saying in his essay on Kafka’s parable “Before the Law.” An
analysis of a passage on the role of the guardian in the story (1992: 204) in the present article
goes to show that Derrida reposes his hope, if only implicit, of the teleological fulfilment of
his efforts in the space of metaphorical language. In conclusion a delineation of the sphere of
metaphor as an exchange ground is provided. As a result, metaphorical language becomes the
scene of the quest for the Being in language that was undertaken by Heidegger as well as the
multi-level space of writing in a Derridean sense which now seems to explode the meanings
into traces and supplements with a view to purging language so that it might reconstitute itself
anew. The recurrence through metaphor thus becomes the telos of language in that in its
continuous re-emergence consist the promise of an eternal return of the life-bestowing and
sense-giving force. In this way deconstruction and hermeneutical exegesis may finally be seen
attired in their proper garbs of the shepherds of language that impel it to be ever more
productive and lively; falling back on Heidegger, in the being (deconstructive recurrence) of
language dwells its potential for the unconcealment of its Being.
References
Derrida, Jacques. 1992. “Before the Law.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. London:
Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “White Mythology. Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” Margins of
Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1982. “A Dialogue on Language.” On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter
D. Hertz. San Francisco: HarperCollins.
Heidegger, Martin. 1975. “…Poetically Man Dwells….” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans.
Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon Books.

Philang 2009
Salvatore Pistoia Reda
Doctoral school Cognitive Science, University of Siena, Italy
Game Theory and Scalar Implicatures
According to a position inspired by Grice (1989), that received some further contributions
from Horn (1972) and Krifka (1995), derivation of implicatures occurs at level of the whole
sentence, after that compositional mechanisms have done their job. This approach gave birth
to other researches focused on the possibility of interpreting scalar implicatures using tools
and concepts of game theory. For instance, Jäger has recently proposed an interesting
parallelism between Grice conversational maxims and solutions concepts of game theory in
deriving scalar implicatures: rational speakers use different strategies in order to strengthen
the correct interpretation of their statements.
Chierchia (2005) tries to demonstrate, by the way of an ingenious formalism, the
possibility of embedded scalar implicatures, i.e. processed in parallel with the computation of
"standard" meaning. Such a possibility seems to contradict the use of alternative implicatures
as rational strategies in order to strengthen the informational content of the sentences.
According to Chierchia, scalar implicatures are grammatically-driven.
In this talk I will present some arguments that seem to support the suitability of an
interpretation of scalar implicatures in terms of a particular branch of game theory,
evolutionary game theory. Being a grammatical computed process, scalar implicatures will be
considered, according to this approach, as the result of an evolutionary process coherent with
Universal Grammar principles, specifically the perfect integration of the different interfaces.
The concepts and tools of evolutionary game theory will be used in order to try to reconstruct
the phenomenon.
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Philang 2009
Wiktor Pskit
Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland
Categories and Constructions in Current Syntactic Theory
This paper is concerned with the issue of basic theoretical constructs in linguistic theory. It
attempts to analyse the status of such concepts as ‘category’ and ‘construction’ in current
approaches to syntax. The major concern is the category-construction distinction and its role
in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), Simpler Syntax (Culicover and Jackendoff 2005)
and Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001). An attempt is made to identify
philosophical assumptions that underlie this distinction as well as to reflect on certain general
trends in linguistic theory that this opposition appears to illustrate.
One of the major issues is the problem of what constitutes syntactic primitives and what is
merely epiphenomenal. Different views on this matter represented by the above-mentioned
approaches appear to stem from different sets of linguistic data that are analysed by
researchers, and, above all, different methodologies, which in turn involve certain
philosophical assumptions, including traditional philosophical oppositions such as
rationalism-empiricism, realism-antirealism, objectivism-subjectivism.
A significant shift might be observed from the treatment of units in syntactic structure as
classical (Aristotelian) categories to a view postulating a continuum of linguistic structures.
This change of perspective has some consequences for linguistic universals and the level of
description at which they should be sought.
References:
Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program. MIT Press.
Croft, W. (2001) Radical Construction Grammar. Oxford University Press.
Culicover, P.W. and Jackendoff, R. (2005) Simpler Syntax. Oxford University Press.

Philang 2009
Małgorzata Pytlas
Departament of English
Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland
Speech Act Theory and philosophy – convergence or divergence?
The aim of this paper is a philosophical analysis of Speech Act Theory from the perspective
of hermeneutics and semiotics. Comparison and contrast of the three aforementioned theories
might incite a discussion over reciprocal relations of philosophy and linguistics which seem to
separate themselves from each other. A compound interpretation of sets of actions on the
basis of Speech Act Theory and philosophical approaches may be far more explanatory and
profound than on the three isolated bases. Therefore, the fields ought to be perceived as
interrelated and complementary rather than distant and excluding. According to Speech Act
Theory, meaning of the acts sets conditions to comprehension and further possible actions to
be undertaken by the participants of the situation. Thus, a proper understanding and feedback
are anticipated. Furthermore, in terms of interpreting, hermeneutics and semiotics are both
incorporated in the speech acts as one ought to comprehend and analyze a particular act in
order to react to it properly in a consecutive message. Moreover, logical positivism of Vienna
Circle, with verificationist theories of meaning and rationalism, are an ideal medium for the
acts interpretation. Last but not least, symbolic interactionism proposes the value of meaning
which when ascribed to people’s actions provokes their feedback to these particular acts.
Bearing in mind proposals of John Langshaw Austin and John Searle about utterances and
further notes on the intentions and thoughts accompanying the performance of speech acts,
one can construct a linguistic interpretation of certain social actions. Incorporating Charles
Sanders Peirce’s and Roman Jakobson’s views on the process of communication and the
value of meaning, one may enrich a primary version of the speech acts interpretation.
Together with a hermeneutical theory of mind and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s opinions on
interpretation, it is plausible to create a philosophical and linguistic model of speech analysis.
When employing sociological approach towards meaning, proposed by George Herbert Mead
and Herbert Blumer, one may amplify a primarily one-way interpretation and attitude towards
speech acts. All in all, this paper attempts to demonstrate how an interdisciplinary cooperation
may facilitate scientific achievements.
Selected bibliography:
Austin, John Langshaw. 1962. How to Do Things With Words. Cambridge: Massachusetts.
Dybel Paweł. 2004. Granice rozumienia i interpretacji. O hermeneutyce Hansa-Georga
Gadamera. Kraków: Universitas.
Gadamer Hans-Georg. 2004. Prawda i metoda. Zarys hermeneutyki filozoficznej. Warszawa:
PWN.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1997. Wybór pism semiotycznych. Hanna Buczyńska-Garewicz (ed.)
Warszawa: Polskie Towarzystwo Semiotyczne.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1991. Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic. James Hoopes (ed.)
Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press.
Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge
University Press.
Silverman, Hugh (ed.) 1991. Gadamer and hermeneutics. London and New York: Routledge.
Turner, Jonathan. 1988. A Theory of Social Interaction. Stanford, CA: SUP.
Turner, Jonathan. 1991. The Structure of Sociological Theory. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
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Jiří Raclavský
Dept. of Philosophy, Masaryk University
Brno, the Czech Republic
Philang 2009
Is the logico-semantical analysis of natural language expressions a
translation?
The logico-semantic analysis of natural language (LANL) aims at explication of meanings
of natural language expressions by means of rigorous means. It is explication, since an
analytician (a logician or linguist using logic) does understand the meaning of a given
expression ‘E’ already, but the pre-theoretically grasped meaning is turned into an exact one.
His/her finding(s) usually takes form of an analytician’s sentence: (In the language L,) the
meaning (analysis) of the expression:
E
is:
ϕ
Seeing expressions ‘E’ and ‘ϕ’ and ‘is’, one is tempted to conclude that the logico-semantical
analysis of natural language expressions consists in the translation of natural language
expressions onto formal language ones; let us call this view translational thesis, TT. (It is
entirely correct to maintain that the analytician must use certain expression (such as ‘ϕ’) in
order to communicate his/her finding about the meaning of ‘E’. It does not follow, however,
that she provides a translation.) Despite that TT seems to be the right thesis, it produces
serious problems. For instance, one must ask what the meaning of ‘ϕ’ is. In accordance to TT,
the analytician should offer some third expression of some (perhaps) third language which has
the same meaning, thus these three expressions are intertranslatable. Vicious infinite regress
of translations results from this. Another odd consequence of TT is that the analytician is
construed as proposing congruence of two descriptions; i.e., the analytician’s sentence is
paraphrased to ‘The meaning of ‘E’ (in L) is the same as the meaning of ‘ϕ’ (in the formal
language Lϕ)’. However, ‘the meaning of ‘E’ (in L)’ does not really present the rigorously
modelled meaning of ‘E’; thus the meaning of ‘E’ is in fact left unexplicated. Therefore,
provided that the very project of LANL is not idle at all, TT must be wrong. Thus when doing
LANL, we do not provide translations.
Various related details must then be explained. Among others, the present author offers the
logico-semantic analysis of the analytician’s sentence by means of Pavel Tichý’s transparent
intensional logic. The role of the analytician formal language Lϕ within his/her natural
language L is elucidated too. (The linear form of the analytician’s sentence is ‘(In L,) the
meaning of the expression ‘E’ is ϕ’ − not, as a defender of TT puts it, ‘(In L,) the meaning of
the expression ‘E’ is the expression ‘ϕ’ ’.) The author also explains the way we were able to
understand Lϕ when it was originally exposed to us and explained, e.g., by means of L. All
these themes revolve around the substantial difference between investigated language and
explicative language (this distinction has only insignificant connection with objectlanguage/meta-language
distinction). The function of the explicative language within the
investigated language is ‘conceptual’ (not ‘usual’). Thus it is quite natural that the parts
(expressions) of the explicative language within the investigated language have distinct
‘supposition’ than the usual parts of the investigated language; as a result their meanings are
categorically distinct, hence they cannot be inter-translatable at all.

J. Randolph Radney
Trinity Western University of Langley,
British Columbia, Canada
Philang 2009
The Identity of Participants in Communication
In the examination of the nature of communication, the nature of the identities of the
communication participants is often assumed uncritically or presumed irrelevant to an
understanding of the communication event. Further, the question of how participants
experience their own identities and those of others in the communicational context, in terms
of a description, is left out of discussion. The examination of these questions is vital to
development of an integrated theory of language and communication, such as is proposed by
Roy Harris, Nigel Love, and others.
While the behaviour of participants in communication events is observable (and, to some
limited extent, recordable for later analysis) and the experience of any of the participants is
directly perceived by the participants themselves, the nature of that lived experience has not
been investigated—still less the lived experience of an Other in conversation. Although the
nature of communication from the standpoint of the relative status of the participants has been
noted in psychology, sociology, and linguistics work—such topics as patient-doctor, studentteacher,
and employee-employer conversations, to name a few—and what might be called
genderlects have been documented in English, the establishment, maintenance, and
negotiation of such identities, and in particular, the lived experience of such identities, have
not.
The claim is made and supported in this essay that three crucial processes occur in
communication that establish, negotiate, and maintain the identities of those who participate
in communication. These are hospitality, charity, and compassion; they are processes initiated
not by speakers, but rather by the community as a whole (the total group of people in the
communication event). This presentation assumes certain perspectives in addition to those
typically associated with integrationist linguistics. The most well-known of these perspectives
is usually attributed to a line of philosophical thinking initiated by Edmund Husserl and
developed by Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. An important
contributor to these discussions is Gemma Corradi Fiumara, whose examination of
unexplored aspects of communication from the standpoint of philosophy of language
contributes a helpful perspective to this essay. In addition, less well-known insights are drawn
from some linguists, particularly the work of Ken and Evelyn Pike and Helen Fraser.
The importance of such a presentation cannot be overstated, for, if we wrongly understand
the nature of participants’ experience of themselves in communication, no amount of
creativity in exploring communicative events can make up for the errors that will necessarily
evolve from such misunderstanding.
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Ewa Rosiak
Department of Sociology and Philology
The State College in Skierniewice, Poland
Philang 2009
The Problem with the Notion of Meaning and Reference in the field of
Analytic Philosophy
Although there were some significant attempts to build up a proper theory of the meaning and
reference of expressions, nevertheless in the field of philosophy of language the 20th century
seems to have been predominated by tendencies of quite the opposite kind. The great part of
contribution to the latter was made by some representatives of analytic philosophy, who are
well known from their efforts to attack step by step almost everything that could be taken as
the foundation of such a theory (e.g. Vienna Circle, Quine, or Rorty). However, some of them
made their own attempts to work out an explanation of the notion of meaning, or reference as
well – e.g. Wittgenstein and his picture theory of meaning, Putnam and his causal theory of
meaning etc. What seems particularly interesting is the case of Quine, who after becoming
famous for his frontal attack on the notion of analyticity and, consequently, the notion of
meaning, proposed some explanation for both of them. It seems that however the problem of
meaning and reference of expressions appears to be far from being conclusively solved, the
refutation of some dogmas does not mean farewell to these notions.

Monika Rymaszewska-Chwist
University of Gdańsk, Poland
Philang 2009
So who is right? In search of philosophy behind cognitive science
The purpose of this paper is to present an account of the nature of human mental activity and
interaction with the external world from the perspective of the theory of embodied realism
advocated by cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson, and to search for philosophical
assumptions over time which underpin contemporary cognitive science. The body-mind
problem has inspired philosophers to come up with a number of diverse, often contradictory
theories aiming to delineate the nature of human thought and reason in reference to our
corporeal existence in the world. Materialists and idealists have always been in dispute over
what reality is and how it is received. Idealistic philosophy stood in opposition to the
materialists' holding that the external world is somehow created by the mind, for material
objects are mere ideas not to be studied independently of the mind. The materialistic
viewpoint assumes an inseparable relationship of material substance (body) and soul (mind).
Reality from this perspective has a material character and all mental processes are derivative
of matter. Nevertheless, moderate materialists took account of multiple physical, biological,
social or cultural factors that affect perception and thus consciousness. Embodied realism
challenges this most pervasive philosophical dichotomy. It takes on the materialistic outlook
in that it regards human cognition as a matter of neural activity in the brain which is triggered
by series of organism-environment interactions. Yet, the theory is not devoid of inherent
idealistic aspects. Therefore, in the context of an overview of major philosophical
assumptions, I would attempt to indicate that the philosophy behind cognitive sciences is a
fruit of multi-generational struggle to answer crucial ontological and epistemological queries.
And that, in fact, embodied realism is an eclectic and unifying approach to the body-mind
problem which has emerged in its definite form mainly thanks to the advancement of
neurosciences allowing for an insight into the nature of human brain and processes governing
cognition.
Basic references:
Johnson, Mark (1987). The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and
Reason. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Johnson, Mark, George Lakoff (2002). Why cognitive linguistics requires embodied realism.
In: Cognitive Linguistics 13-3. Walter de Gruyter. 245-263.
Kucner, Andrzej. Przedmiot, źródła i drogi poznania. W: Opara, Stefan, Andrzej Kucner,
Beata Zieleniewska (red.) (2003). Podstawy Filozofii. Olsztyn: Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu Warmińsko-Mazurskiego, 33-44.
Stumpf, Samuel Enoch (1993). Socrates To Sartre. A History of Philosophy. New York:
McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Tatarkiewicz, Władysław (1988). Historia Filozofii. Tom I-III. Warszawa: PWN.
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Joanna Sadowska
University of Łódź, Poland
Philang 2009
Early modern linguistic colonialism and postcolonial appropriation of
language
This paper offers a survey of the postcolonial approaches to language. In the prefatory part,
the rise of postcolonialism and its subsequent establishment as one of the major critical
discourses in today’s humanities is briefly sketched out. The context of the ensuing analysis is
largely informed by the historico-political critique. The status of language in today’s
postcolonial discourse is determined to a significant extent by its role in the early modern
colonial context, which not only predated it but, perhaps much more importantly, conditioned
the rise and development of the postcolonial studies. Therefore, in the first part of the analysis
the notion of linguistic colonialism is investigated. Questions are posed such as: In what sense
was language “the perfect instrument of empire” (Nebrija 1492 qtd Greenblatt 2007: 23)?;
How did it not only carry meaning but was rather performative of it and, thus, organized and
legitimatized power-relations? In the subsequent part of the paper, the focus is shifted to the
twentieth-century postcolonial perspective and the status of language within its conceptual
framework. Firstly, the postcolonial paradigm is charted with special attention given to the
role of Foucault’s discourse theory and his elaboration of the concept of power, as well as
Edward Said’s Orientalist discourse and his notion of knowledge. Furthermore, the
postcolonial approaches to ideology, resistance, truth and representation are brought into the
interpretative orbit. Subsequently, the role of language is scrutinized with reference to all
above outlined notions constituting the postcolonial paradigm. Finally, having arrived at the
postcolonial view of language as an ultimate medium of power and carrier of hierarchy, the
process of language appropriation is delineated. How is the language of the colonizer
recaptured and remoulded in the twentieth and the twenty first century so as to ‘bear the
burden’ of the colonized peoples’ own cultural experience (Ashcroft et al. 2002:38). In
conclusion, language appropriation in the postcolonial context is perceived as one of the most
complex and gripping linguistic processes, which has a philosophy of survival hidden behind
it.
References:
Greenblatt, S. 2007. Learning to Curse. Essays in early modern culture. New York and
London: Routledge.
Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths, H. Tiffin. 2002. The Empire Writes Back. London: Routledge.

Philang 2009
Fabien Schang
LHSP H. Poincaré, University of Nancy 2, France
Alessio Moretti
University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Beyond the Fregean myth: the value of logical values
Two of the main topics are considered in the following paper, namely: myths of
objectivism and subjectivism in philosophy and language, on the one hand; the concept of
truth in philosophy and language, on the other hand. In a nutshell, the point is to make use of
logical values as mere algebraic objects from an information-theoretical approach of meaning.
One of the most prominent myths in the contemporary analytic philosophy is the so-called
“Fregean Axiom” from [1], as dubbed by Suszko in [8]. It has been depicted in [5] as follows:
The theory with which Frege's name is especially associated is one which is apt to strike one at first as rather
fantastic, being usually expressed as a theory that sentences are names of truth-values.
In contrast to this Fregean objectivist myth of truth-values, a Peircean revival insisted upon
the role of use in order to determine the meaning of any expression in a language. The result
of such a theoretical division is a general opposition between two views of semantics: a realist
referential semantics (Frege, Davidson), according to which the meaning of any expression is
given by its referent; an anti-realist use-based semantics (Dummett, Lorenzen), according to
which the meaning of any expression depends upon the way it is used in a context-dependent
discussion.
Does it mean that the formal advantage of computability (truth-functionality, recursive
definitions, and the like) that prevailed in referential semantics should be abandoned by
whoever rejects the Fregean myth of meaning? The present paper wants to answer negatively:
there is room for a use-based formal semantics, in which the logical value of a sentence is not
its putative referent but the information it conveys. Let us call by “Question Answer
Semantics” (thereafter: QAS) the corresponding formal semantics (in [6]): a non-Fregean
many-valued logic in the trend of product systems (Jaskowski in [3], Prior), where the
meaning of any sentence is an ordered n-tupled of yes-no answers to corresponding questions.
The technical device is an algebraic semantics with logical values, but the classical concepts
of truth and falsehood are rejected into the metalanguage and replaced by two basic values of
affirmation (yes = 1) and denial (no = 0).
If the relevance of a theoretical model is to be tested by its explanatory capacity, a sample
of philosophical problems will be approached in order to justify the relevance of QAS. These
include: (a) the meaning of logical negation, and its deep connection with the theory of
opposition (in [4]); (b) illocutionary forces, and the logical analysis of speech-acts (denial,
scalar implicature in [2]); (c) change in meaning, and the use of dynamic operators for belief
sets (in [7]).
References
[1] Frege, G.: “Negation”, in M. Black and P. T. Geach (eds.), translations from the
Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Blackwell, Oxford (1960)
[2] Horn, L.: A Natural History of Negation, Univ. of Chicago Press (1989)
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[3] Jaskowski, S.: “Recherches sur le système de logique intuitionniste”, in Actes du Congrès
International de Philosophie Scientifique (1936), 58-66; reprinted in S. McCall (ed.),
Polish Logic (1920-1939), Oxford University Press (1967)
[4] Moretti, A.: The Geometry of Logical Oppositions, PhD Thesis, University of Neuchâtel
(2009)
[5] Prior, A.N.: Time and Modality, esp. Ch. 6, Univ. of Oxford (1957)
[6] Schang, F.: “Truth-values are not the whole story (A question-answer semantics for
paraconsistent speech-acts)”, Proceedings of WCP4, submitted.
[7] Schang, F.: “Belief revision from an algebraic perspective (A four-valued dynamic
doxastic logic and its applications within n-valuation)”, Proceedings of LOCCOL08,
to be submitted.
[8] Suszko, R.: The Fregean axiom and Polish mathematical logic in the 1920’s”, Studia
Logica 36(1977), 377-380.

Philang 2009
Andrew Schumann
Department of Philosophy and Science Methodology,
Belarusian State University,
Minsk, Belarus
Modal Calculus of Illocutionary Logic
Illocutionary logic plays an important role in modern analytical philosophy of language
and in logical models of speech acts: its aim is to explain how context can affect the meaning
of certain special kinds of performative utterances. Recall that performative utterances are
understood as follows: a speaker performs the illocutionary act (e.g. act of assertion, of
conjecture, of promise) with the illocutionary force (resp. assertion, conjecture, promise)
named by the performative verb by way of representing himself as performing that act.
The first formalization of illocutionary logic was created by J.R. Searle and D.
Vanderveken in [1]. In our paper we proposed a modal calculus in that illocutionary forces
and performances are considered as logical operations of a special kind. As a result, we
constructed an easier formalization of illocutionary acts than usual ones. We also developed
some applications of this logic to model-theoretic semantics of natural language and to natural
language programming. In abstract we give only general definitions of performance and
illocutionary force.
Consider a propositional language L that is built in the standard way with the additional
unary operator F (it is called performance). The atomic propositions (Var := {p, p1, p2, …})
can have only one of two truth values: 1 and 0. These truth values – for various illocutionary
points – have various interpretations, and we consequently have various interpretations of
performance.
• Assertive illocutionary point: 1 is an abbreviation for “satisfiability in reality” (true), 0 is
an abbreviation for “unsatisfiability in reality” (false).
• Commissive illocutionary point: 1 is an abbreviation for “satisfiability by an action of a
speaker”, 0 is an abbreviation for “unsatisfiability by an action of a speaker”.
• Directive illocutionary point: 1 is an abbreviation for “satisfiability by an action of a
hearer”, 0 is an abbreviation for “unsatisfiability by an action of a hearer”.
• Declarative illocutionary point: 1 is an abbreviation for “satisfiability by a state of affairs”,
0 is “unsatisfiability by a state of affairs”.
• Expressive illocutionary point: 1 is an abbreviation for “expressibility by an attitude”, 0 is
an abbreviation for “inexpressibility by an attitude”.
The language L is associated with some matrix M = in
that
(1) {1, 1/2, 0, -1/2} is the set of truth values and 1 is the designated truth value,
(2) ¬ and F are unary operators for negation and performance, respectively:
¬ x = 1 - x if x ∈ {1, 0} and ¬ x = -x if x ∈ {1/2, -1/2}.
F x = x - 1/2 if x ∈{1, 0} and F x = x if x ∈ {1/2, -1/2}.
(3) ∧, ∨, ⇒ are binary operations for conjunction, disjunction, and implication, respectively:
x ∧ y = max(x, y) if x, y ∈ {1/2, -1/2} and x ∧ y = min(x, y) in other cases.
x ∨ y = min(x, y) if x, y ∈ {1/2, -1/2} and x ∨ y = max(x, y) in other cases.
x ⇒ y = max(y, min(¬(x ∨ 0), ¬ y), min(¬ (x ∨ 0), ¬ (¬ y ∨ 0))).
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From various interpretations of the truth values 1 and 0 and interpretation of F it follows
corresponding interpretations of truth values 1/2 and -1/2. The value 1/2 (resp. -1/2) is for
performance of propositions with 1 (resp. 0).
Let e be an evaluation of atomic propositions, i.e., e : Var → {0, 1}. We can extend of e to Ve
: L → {1, 0, 1/2, -1/2} by the operations in the matrix M.
Let ϕ ∈ L and e : Var → {0, 1}. The performance of ϕ, i.e. F(ϕ), is called defective for e if
Ve(F(ϕ)) = -1/2, i.e. Ve(ϕ) ∈ {0, -1/2}.
On the base of the language L, we can build a new language in the Montegue style with the
additional modal operators F + σ for σ ∈ {s, s1, s2, …}. The objects s, s1, etc. are “situations”.
For the operator F + s we have the following interpretation:
F + s(ϕ) = in the situation s, the performance of ϕ is not defective.
The modal operators F + σ are called a successful illocutionary force.
In our theory we can analyze the performative verbs (e.g. ‘order’ and ‘ask’). For any
performative verb A and for any proposition p we put S(A.p) := {s : F + s(p)}. Moreover, for
any performative verbs A and B, we will say that A is stranger than B if for every proposition
p:
S(A.p) ⊂ S(B.p).
As Searle wrote, in our theory we can prove that ‘order’ is stranger than ‘ask’.
References
J.R. Searle and D. Vanderveken, Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984.

Barbara Sonnenhauser
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen
Institut fuer Slavische Philologie
Philang 2009
Subjectivity in philosophy and linguistics
Since Benveniste (1974/1958) and Lyons (1982), the notion of ‘subjectivity’ has been
playing an increasing role in linguistics (cf., e.g., Traugott 1989, Langacker 1990). However,
this notion carries with it a number of problems that have been a matter of renewed interest
for philosophy since the 1960s. These problems basically amount to the question of how to
objectify ‘the subjective’ and cannot be ignored in linguistics by simply ignoring philosophy,
as Lyons (1994) prefers to do. Not taking into account the philosophical aspects, the notion of
subjectivity becomes superfluous for linguistics which may instead resort to something like
‘egolinguistics’ as exemplified, e.g., by Dahl’s (2000) notion of ‘egophoricity’. If, however,
one decides to stick to ‘subjectivity’, philosophical aspects have to be taken into account as
well – a rather fruitful endeavour as will be argued in this paper.
In linguistics, ‘subjectivity’ is commonly understood as the „expression of self and the
representation of a speaker’s […] perspective or point of view in discourse“ (Finegan 1995:
1), obviously assuming the existence of some subject (whatever that may be) subjectivity can
be ascribed to. This assumption, in turn, is based on an inadequate model of communication
which can be traced back to Jakobson’s (1971/1960) analogy of linguistics and
communication theory and regards the speaker as agentive subject, language as ready-made
object and the hearer as passive recipient. The main problems linguistics is faced with dealing
with subjectivity are quite the same as philosophy is – duality (partitioning the world into
‘the’ subjective and ‘the’ objective actually reduces to merely one ontological notion, cf.
Günther 1978), identity (is it possible to assume the subject’s or self’s identity over time?),
circularity (reference to a speaking subject as the origin of subjectivity) and tautology (every
choice of linguistic entities reflects some kind of speaker’s choice).
This paper argues that a semiotic conception of subjectivity is able to overcome most of
these problems, provided that the sign is conceived in the sense of Peirce, i.e. as triadic
relation starting off a dynamic and dialogical sign process. This triadic relation establishes the
sign as agent, it overcomes dyadic thinking and thus allows for the establishment of a
distributed subjectivity (cf. Günther 1978) that is not tied to some a priori given subject. The
dynamicity of the sign process makes it possible to escape circularity and helps to solve the
problem of identity over time – the ‘self’ arises in the course of this very process and as its
necessary consequence. The tautology linguistic analysis are faced with may thereby also be
accounted for. Subjectivity is nothing exceptional, but is immanent in the sign process; it has
nothing to do with lexical content of specific expressions, with speaker’s perspective or
attitude. Languages may render this inherent subjectivity explicit, e.g. by introducing a
parallel sign process into the current one. This is the case, for instance, with parentheticals
and other means to indicate speech within speech, and speech about speech, as Vološinov
(1993/1929: 125) calls it.
References
Benveniste, É. 1974/1958. Über die Subjektivität in der Sprache. Benveniste, É. Probleme der
allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft. München, 287-297
Dahl, Ö. 2000. Egophoricity in discourse and syntax. Functions of Language 7/1, 37-77
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Finegan, E. 1995. Subjectivity and subjectivisation: an introduction. Stein, D. & Wright, S.
(eds.). Subjectivity and subjectivisation. Cambridge, 1-15
Günther, G. 1978. Idee und Grundriß einer nicht-Aristotelischen Logik. Hamburg
Jakobson, R. 1971/1960. Linguistics and communication theory. Selected Writings, Vol. II.
The Hague, 570-579
Langacker, R. 1990. Subjectification. Cognitive Linguistics 1/1, 5-38
Lyons, J. 1982. Deixis and Subjectivity: Loquor, ergo sum? Jarvella, R. & Klein, W. (eds.).
Speech, place, and action. Chichester, 101-124
Lyons, J. 1994. Subjecthood and subjectivity. Yaguello, M. (ed.). Subjecthood and
subjectivity. The status of the subject in linguistic theory. Paris, 9-17
Traugott, E. 1989. On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: an example of
subjectification in semantic change. Language 65/1, 31-55
Vološinov, V. N. 1993/1929. Marksizm i filosofija jazyka: osnovnye problemy
sociologičeskogo metoda v naukeo jazyke. Moskva.

Piotr Stalmaszczyk
Chair of English and General Linguistics
University of Łódź, Poland
Philang 2009
Foundational Issues in the Philosophy of Language
and the Legacy of Frege
According to Davies (2006: 29) the “foundational questions in philosophy of language
concern the nature of meaning, understanding, and communication”, which basically means
that “philosophers are interested in three broad aspects of language: syntax, semantics and
pragmatics” Martinich (2009: 1). A possible – though indirect – way of approaching those
important questions is to view them from the perspective of other disciplines, such as, for
example, logic. Inquiry into language from the perspective of logic, especially formal logic,
has often resulted in interesting theoretical claims, incorporated subsequently into linguistic
research.
One of the most important logicians whose influence upon the philosophy of language and
modern linguistics, especially semantics, has been profound throughout the twentieth century,
was Gottlob Frege, the co-founder of analytic philosophy. Frege is usually associated with
revolutionising propositional logic, devising a symbolic language for logic, providing the
seminal analysis of the meaning of an expression, and formulating the compositionality
principle. In this paper I concentrate on only one issue: Frege’s views on language and their
possible implications for contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics.
Frege was one of the first modern logicians to see the need for a conceptual notation, and
devoted his first major work, Conceptual Notation. A Formula Language of Pure Thought,
modelled on Arithmetic, 1879, to this problem. In the Preface to that work, he claimed that: “it
is a task of philosophy to break the power of words over the human mind, by uncovering
illusions that through the use of language often almost unavoidably arise concerning the
relations of concepts, by freeing thought from the taint of ordinary linguistic means of
expression”. As it is clear from the quote, Frege did not consider spoken language as a
sufficiently precise instrument for logic. He pointed to the need for a language made up of
signs, clear of any double meaning, and even claimed that “the main task of the logician is to
free himself from language and to simplify it. Logic should be the judge of languages” (in
“Letter to Husserl”, 1906). Elsewhere, he stated that “Instead of following grammar blindly,
the logician ought rather to see his task as that of freeing us from the fetters of language”
(Logic, 1897).
Pietroski (2004: 29-30) has recently remarked that Frege “bequeathed to us some tools –
originally designed for the study of logic and arithmetic – that can be used in constructing
theories of meaning for natural languages”. The claim of the present paper is that some of the
‘Fregean tools’ may prove useful in analyzing also such traditional linguistic notions as
‘predication’. The paper also discusses some of the consequences of Frege’s “struggle against
language and grammar”, and implications for contemporary research in philosophy of
language and linguistics.
Selected bibliography:
Beaney, Michael. (ed.) 1997. The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Carl, Wolfgang, 1994. Frege’s Theory of Sense and Reference. Its Origins and Scope.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Davies, Martin, 2006. Foundational Issues in the Philosophy of Language. In: Michael Devitt
and Richard Hanley (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 19-40.
Dummett, Michael, 1973. Frege: Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth.
Gut, Arkadiusz, 2005. Gottlob Frege i problemy filozofii współczesnej [Gottlob Frege and
Problems of Contemporary Philosophy]. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL.
Heck Richard and Robert May, 2006. Frege’s Contribution to Philosophy of Language. In:
Ernest Lepore and Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of
Language, Oxford: OUP, 3-39.
Martinich, A. P. 2009. General Introduction. In: A. P. Martinich (ed.), Philosophy of
Language. Critical Concepts. Volume 1. London & New York: Routledge, 1-18.
Morris, Michael, 2007. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Pietroski, Paul M. 2004. Events and Semantic Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sainsbury, R. M., 2002. Departing from Frege. Essays in the Philosophy of Language.
London and New York: Routledge.
Stalmaszczyk, Piotr, 2006. Fregean Predication: Between Logic and Linguistics. Research in
Language 4, 77-90.
Thiel, Christian, 1968. Sense and Reference in Frege’s Logic. Dordrecht: D. Reidel
Publishing Company.
Tichý, Pavel, 1988. The Foundations of Frege’s Logic.
Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Pierre Steiner
Compiègne University of Technology, France
Philang 2009
Linguistic Representationalism and Cognitive Representationalism:
Representation as a Twofold Dogma in Philosophy of Language and
Cognitive Linguistics
In this paper, I will first clarify the contents of two different kinds of representationalism
on language: linguistic representationalism (LR) and cognitive representationalism (CR).
Recent philosophy of language easily deflates the former one, but considers the latter one as
an undeniable premise (a dogma) in the philosophical explanation of linguistic productions,
since the latter ones are seen as expressing mental phenomena – and so does cognitive
linguistics, according to which language is an appendage of cognition (cognition in brain).
In order to point to the stakes and problems underlying this assimilation of language to an
expression of mind or to an appendage to cognition, I will then present a constructive
criticism of CR, addressed to both philosophers of language and cognitive linguists – since it
relies on conceptual arguments, but also on empirical ones borrowed from non-classical
cognitive science.
Crucial authors of twentieth century philosophy of language (amongst others Dewey,
Wittgenstein, Quine, Austin, Rorty, Davidson) have proposed influential criticisms of LR
understood as the thesis according to which the primary purpose of language is to represent
reality. Linguistic productions (utterances, inscriptions) are meaningful by depicting,
describing or mirroring some part of reality. Their truth depends on their accurateness or
correspondence with reality.
Following the authors mentioned above, language is not a mirror of reality; it is first a tool
for acting, communicating and thinking in some context. Linguistic productions have
referring properties in so far as they are contentful; their content is inherited from their
contextual use. The representing, describing or mirroring functions of linguistic productions
are contingent; they consist in one contextual application amongst others of language. The
representing purposes of language are always embedded in wider contexts of use.
Recent philosophy of language generally agrees with this criticism of LR, while it still
endorses a more fundamental (and pernicious) kind of representationalism: CR, namely the
thesis according to which the aboutness relations between the linguistic productions of agents
and the context of activities these agents refer to by means of these productions is necessarily
mediated by subpersonal cognitive (“mental”) representations (occurring in the producer (in
forms of meaning-intentions) and in the receiver (in forms of understanding or interpreting
conceptual acts) of these productions). Mental representations (intracranial tokens of
concepts) have intrinsic intentionality, while linguistic representations only have derived
representational powers (Searle, Fodor).
According to CR, the manifold non-representational uses of language crucially depend on
the existence and production of mental representations. Even if linguistic activity involves the
production of linguistic representations for the sake of or in action, it basically remains a
representation (or expression) of mental representations: linguistic representations produced
in (or made for) action are necessarily understood and used by representational mental
processes that take the context of use of these linguistic representations into account
(Récanati). To get meaning from use (having no representational purpose), computations on
mental representations of use are still required. These representational processes have several
names, depending on the linguistic framework in which they take place: concepts (Fodor),
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conceptual frames (Fillmore, Minsky), structures of expectancy (Tannen), scenes, scripts
(Shank), domains, mental images (Croft), mental spaces (Fauconnier, Turner).
Some philosophers of language (Travis, McDowell) have already proposed interesting
criticisms of cognitive CR, but without considering that there also are empirical or naturalistic
arguments against it, arguments we can find in extracranial cognitive science (putting
cognition out of the head).
1) Once one seriously considers the ways intracranial
entities that are supposed to be mental representations and linguistic representations work,
it appears that there are too many differences between them so that they may not be
different instances of the same kind, the representational kind. Recent works in distributed
cognition show how peculiar external representations (including linguistic representations)
are, and how their work is cognitively crucial for the mind.
2) In order to be meaningful here and now, linguistic
productions obviously need to be used, understood or interpreted by agents. But there is an
alternative story for understanding how the mental acts by which agents achieve these
conceptual performances work without positing the existence of mental representations. It
consists in explaining how the conceptual dimensions of cognitive acts of meaning,
understanding or interpreting is gained from the embeddedness of linguistic agents in
institutional practices of interpretation (Brandom). On this matter, links between
conceptual externalism and distributed cognition can be advantageously established.

Philang 2009
William J. Sullivan
University of Wrocław / Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland
Order
Since the 18th century, research in linguistics has followed in the footsteps of other
scientific disciplines: Linnean classificatory biology leading to the discovery of Indo-
European, Darwinian evolutionary biology leading to the Neogrammarians, behavioral
psychology influencing Bloomfield and his school (cf. Robins 1968), mathematics with
Chomsky (1957) and his school, physics with Yngve (1996), and cognitive psychology
(Langacker 1990). (See also Hockett 1983 and Koerner 1979.) None of these approaches,
however, has answered the major question of where the linear order in speech arises. A pure
relational network theory that is compatible with what is known about neurology and
cognition is shown to solve this problem.
Every act of communication begins with a message that the speaker wishes to
communicate. The knowledge underlying that message is stored in the neurological
connections in the speaker’s brain, all of which exist simultaneously at the moment the
decision to speak is made. Yet what emerges from the speaker’s mouth is a linear chain of
syllables. It is a reasonable hypothesis that this linear order is imposed in the process of
encoding the message into sound. Using a logically-defined model of neurocognitive
stratificational theory I show how alternate linear orders are imposed on simultaneous
semantic inputs that differ minimally in meaning to produce Russian pjat’ rublej ‘5 rubles’
and rublej pjat’ ‘about 5 rubles’, where the difference in meaning is communicated by the
differing linearizations. By extension, this approach can be shown to account for all
linearization in language and, when combined with neurological considerations (cf. Dell
1986), to predict the common types of speech errors known as anticipation, perseveration, and
Spoonerisms (Dell & Reich 1977, Dell 1986).
References
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Dell, Gary S. 1986. A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production.
Psychological Review, 93(3):283-321.
Dell, Gary S., & Peter A. Reich. 1977. A model of slips of the tongue. LACUS Forum III:438-
47.
Hockett, Charles. 1983. The changing intellectual context of linguistic theory. LACUS Forum
IX: 9-42.
Koerner, E. F. K. 1979. Pilot and parasite disciplines in the development of linguistic
sciences. LACUS Forum V:525-34.
Langacker, R. W. 1990. Concept, Image and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Robins, R. H. 1968. A short history of linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Yngve, Victor H. 1996. From grammar to science: New
foundations for general linguistics. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
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Xymena Synak-Pskit
Uniwersytet Gdański, Poland
Philang 2009
Beyond Linguistics: Philosophy of Sign and Effacement of Metaphor.
Simon and Derrida.
In the second volume of Logische Untersuchungen Husserl distinguishes three meanings of
the content of linguistic expressions: 1. content as the intended sense or meaning. 2. content
as fulfilling sense, 3. content as object.
Expression – Husserl writes – has (…) a meaning if its intention is accompanied by a possible filling out, that
is, a possibility of uniform demonstration (visualization). This possibility, of course, is thought as ideal; it
does not concern accidental acts of expression and accidental acts of filling out, but it concern their ideal
content; meaning as an ideal unity (here it should be marked as intending meaning) and in a certain reference
as fulfilling sense adjusted directly to this ideal unity.
This possibility of filling out resides, in phenomenological examination, on the possibility of
reconciliating fragmentary meanings within the intended unity of fulfillment. For example,
redness present in certain objects consists of partial cases of red in specie – the redness exists
in reality neither in any objects no somewhere in the world. The ideality of meaning does not
possess normative sense but it is ideality of “unity in multiplity”, it is an ideal being in specie
considered existing within the act of self-presenting obviousness. Idea means abstractum in
logical sense, or – in other words – consciousness grasping a certain specific unity intuitively.
The question we ask is: what is the meaning of sign grounded in phenomenological
position and displaced by Derrida, and what is philosophy of sign being neither philosophy of
language nor philosophy of meaning? Adapting Simon’s view that philosophy of sign does
not transgress any sign and adapting Derrida’s opinion that language – as an effaced metaphor
– possess an ontological status, we are going to consider the statement made by Simon that
the interpretation of a sign ends in a conclusion merely from pragmatic point of view (always
conditioned by time). If sign is irreducibly a sign of time, is not the question about the genesis
of meaning the question about the temporality that conditions the synthesis of being and sense
within a dialectic relation?
If language means effaced metaphor, the facticity of metaphor also becomes a problem
explication of which Derrida undertakes by founding his analysis of time in Husserl’s
philosophy, only to initiate a polemic fight with him.

Philang 2009
Aleksander Szwedek
School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University
Poznań, Poland
The Ultimate Experiential Basis for Metaphors
One of the most fundamental problems of metaphorization that has not been solved yet is
the problem of experiential basis, i.e. the ultimate source domain, and its ontology.
Lakoff and Johnson’s whose typology of metaphors lacks a logical, uniform criterion,
admitted that they “do not know very much about the experiential bases of metaphors.”
(1980:19).
Grady, Taub and Morgan also confessed that “…there is no clear or consistent
understanding of what counts as experiential basis, …” (1996:179).
Despite a general consensus on the primacy of the ‘concrete to abstract metaphorization’,
the two domains commonly considered as prime candidates for the ultimate source domains –
structure and space – are not concrete but abstract.
Grady, Taub and Morgan proposed LOGICAL STRUCTURE IS PHYSICAL
STRUCTURE as a metaphoric primitive. However, (physical) structure cannot be the ultimate
source domain, because it is only an aspect of objects.
SPACE, the other domain, was described by Radden (2005:117) as “The most important
metaphorical source domain…” (emphasis A.S.) (cf. also Grady’s ACTIONS ARE
LOCATIONS).
Authors confusingly mistake space for physical objects, always describing space relative to
objects that occupy it (Rummelhart, Miller and Johnson-Laird). Space itself is conceptualized
as an object (Szwedek: in print). My typology of metaphors is based on a clear ontological
criterion, our experience of the concrete, physical world, as opposed to the abstract worlds.
The concrete – abstract ontological distinction allows for four source domain – target domain
combinations:
concrete to concrete – She is an iceberg;
concrete to abstract – THOUGHT IS AN OBJECT;
abstract to abstract – LIFE IS A JOURNEY;
abstract to concrete - He is a nuisance.
The typology reflects the phylogenetic development of metaphorization, eo ipso, development
of abstract thinking. Concrete to concrete metaphorization requires abstracting a property
from an existing source and transferring it to an existing target. In concrete to abstract
metaphorization the target must be created. It is created, i.e. acquires objecthood, in the
process of objectification, conceptualization in terms of an object (THOUGHT IS AN
OBJECT). The present paper focuses on this type as by far the most important stage of
development of abstract thinking.
Objectification is primarily revealed through an analysis of expressions we use when
talking about abstract concepts: THOUGHT, FEAR and RACE (contest) which are
objectified as OBJECTS, CONTAINERS (OBJECTS), MOVING OBJECTS, ANIMATE
BEINGS and HUMAN BEINGS, and are assigned object properties – weight, brilliance,
strength, etc.
Supporting evidence for objectification, current importance and primeval role of OBJECT
and OBJECT SCHEMA comes from the Great Chain of Being, Kotarbiński’s philosophy of
reism, and neuroembryology.
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The Great Chain model contains levels of physical objects only, which points to the
primacy of physical objects in human thought.
Kotarbiński (1929) reduced all Aristotelian categories to the category of THINGS (including
animate ‘things’), the position he called reism.
As neuroembryology shows, in the 8th week of pregnancy the fetus is sensitive to touch
which is a primeval experience of objecthood through density (the most fundamental feature
of physicality). This experience is programmed earliest, simultaneously with the formation of
the neural system. This earliest and deepest programming explains our total unawareness of
the fundamental level of objects – as Wittgenstein observed “The aspects of things that are
most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to
notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes.)” (1953:30).
References
Radden, G. (2005). The metaphor TIME AS SPACE across languages. In E. Górska & G. Radden
(Eds.), Metonymy – Metaphor – Collage (pp. 99-120). Warszawa: Warsaw University
Press.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago. University of Chicago
Press.
Grady, J., Taub, S. & Morgan, P. (1996). Primitive and Compound Metaphors. In A.
Goldberg (Ed.), Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language (pp. 177-187). Stanford,
CA: CSLI Publications.
Szwedek, A. (in print). Conceptualization of space and time. In P. Łobacz, P. Nowak & W.
Zabrocki, (Eds.), Language, Science and Culture. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe
UAM.
Kotarbiński, T. (1990 [1929]). Elementy teorii poznania, logiki formalnej i metodologii nauk.
[Elements of the theory of knowledge, formal logic and methodology of the sciences]
Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. (Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe).
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Ali Taheri
Islamic Azad University, Hamedan, Iran
Mehdi Damali Amiri
Islamic Azad University, Hamedan, Iran
Syntax and Logic
Philang 2009
This paper attempts to survey language, syntax and logic briefly. It also aims at clarifying the
interelationships between logic and language or logic and syntax. The position taken here is
specifically limited to the Abaseed period. The statements of different intellectuals of the
period :namely, Abusaeed Sirafi and Alsadgestani, the literary figures and logicians will
further be elaborated so that the historical significance of logic and linguistic controversies of
the Islamic studies can be elucidated. As is elaborated in the followings:
Human beings are interrelated since they have mutual concepts to express when they come
together. Hence the existence of the very bilateral understanding and shared views have made
all the ethnic groups think of designing and coining words so that they will easily be
conveying what goes in their minds to their own species. To create his certain mental chain of
events in the minds of the audience, man is obliged to develop his specific wording. Indeed,
one form of his wording system for the conceptualization is realized through the application
of Arabic, which tends to be utilized as a vehicle to communicate man’s intentions and wishes
to his kinds. Its syntactic devices have enabled the readership of the current period like the
primitive Arabic ethnic groups to use the Arabic versification and prose compositional system
very skillfully to meet their ends.
Arabic syntax, in fact, presents a cornerstone upon which Arabic academic studies are
based. Other fields of humanism benefit a lot from the Arabic syntax :accordingly, one
seldom locates a field of study which does not require Arabic syntactic awareness to cope
with its consequent developments. Generally speaking, the study of Arabic syntax became a
necessity within the domain of Islamic studies even after the passage a half a century from the
advent of Islam and the successive victories of Muslems over their enemies while the western
communities began to pay attention to Islamic belief more and more. When the Arabs
intermingled with the Syrianis, they embarked upon recognizing the Syriani literature
;likewise, they admired its syntax in particular. For them the beauty of Syriani style meant a
great deal, so they decided to imitate it in their own expressive rules. Abulasvad initiated the
enterprise and made the Arabic syntax a specialized field of academy. During the Abaseed
dynasty, it accomplished its perfection.
Logic has been regarded as an important field in the Islamic world since the Greek
knowledge was given a special heed in the scientific fields of Islam even though logic
received its own pros and cons among the scholars. Logic was used to substantiate and further
the classification of language and its syntax while it was purported to play an
implementational role during the process. This logical approach continued to influence all
aspects of syntax to the extent that it was claimed, ”Language is a perception of mental
concept which is logic-governed.” Consequently, Rommani, on the one hand, inferred the
logical propositions in terms of the syntactic grounds, on the other hand, he justified the
position of syntactic rules by means of the logical propositions. Other scholars maintained
that syntax was an Arabic logic and logic was a rational syntax. There were expressions on
agreements and disagreements among the community of intellectuals regarding the point that
whether logic influenced syntax or not; nevertheless, the scholars ultimately felt constrained
to comply with the logical syntax or a kind of syntax which was accompanied by logic. As an
instance it should be referred to Alsadgestani who believed that logic is perceptual whereas
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syntax is rational. The two collaborated with each other in order that a scientific society can
achieve its perfection. Therefore, the discussions and debates between Abusaeed Sirafi and
Abibashar Matta ibn Yunus demonstrated that Aristotle’s logic displays the Greek logic
which is in harmony with the Greek language. Accordingly, Arabic requires its own logic
which pertains to the Arabic wording system.

Yukio Takahashi
Morioka College, Japan
Philang 2009
Consilience in the Study of Language and Humanities
What is at stake in our effort in identifying the properly grounded research schemes in
humanities and linguistics is to discern (i) elements and (ii) the mutual relations among them,
e.g., parallel or hierarchical organizations of the elements within the general framework of
Game Theory. Marvin Minsky’s notion of “Society of Mind” gives us a key to our
understanding of the two points to discuss: our minds are constituted of sub-elements that
give mental processes. Thus with respect to the first point, the notion of meme as described by
Dawkins and Dennett may well be regarded as constituents of cultural sub-elements, or
strategies, of our mind, which can either be procedural or declarative. The dichotomy of
procedural and declarative strategies is applicable to human behaviors, including linguistic
communication. A brief conjecture of the second point, when it is examined from the gametheoretic
terms, would lead to a plausible assumption that the memes can be argued to be
either cooperative or non-cooperative and that they are either parallelly or hierarchically
aligned.
Our contention is that we are able to construct a theory of linguistics that is conceptually
and properly grounded and that the grammar is an aggregation of grammatical processing
gadgets, which can either be mutually cooperative or non-cooperative and which are either
parallelly or hierarchically aligned to give optimal outputs from the grammar of a language,
where the pay-offs of the each of the strategic pairings are given with respect to the default
and parametric settings of the whole system of language and cognition. The gadgets are by
definition capable of generating a significantly specified set of strategies, as exemplified
below:
Gadget B
(2nd
dimension)
A Game-Theoretic Pay-Off Matrix
Gadget A (1st dimension)
Strategy a Strategy b Strategy c
Strategy 1 1 a, 5 1 5 b, 1 1 3 c, 3 1
Strategy 2 1 a, 3 2 5 b, 4 2 ☜ 3 c, 2 2
In the table above, Gadget A gives three strategies that interact with the two strategies given
by Gadget B, where we have six outputs. The optimal output of the interaction of the two
gadgets is identified by the total sum of the pay-off, signalled by the index sign.
Within our framework of theory of language, the structure of the theory of linguistics can
be homologous with that of the theory of culture and consciousness, and the concept of
evolution of language is translated into a reinterpretation of (i) the optimal pairing of the
strategies of the gadgets that interact with each other and an identification of the pairings of
the strategies that give the optimal state that guarantees the “survival” of the fittest under a
certain linguistic environment. Thus our framework of language and linguistics is an
instantiation of the thesis of linguistic naturalism, as propounded by Noam Chomsky, Ray
Jackendoff and Steven Pinker, among others. The significant corollary of our contention is
that we may achieve consilience among several fields of scientific inquiry that are concerned
with language and humanities.
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Mieszko Tałasiewicz
University of Warsaw, Poland
Asymmetrical Semantics
Philang 2009
Contemporary philosophical semantics is burdened with many controversies to which – as
it appears – there is no end: all the sides eventually appeal to some foundational intuitions and
all the competing intuitions are natural and plausible. I think that we fail to see unity in our
semantics because we expect too much of it. The relation between words and objects just isn’t
uniform and no adequate semantic theory can uniformly deal with all its aspects. Thus, my
proposal is of the sort that all the main semantic approaches, usually competing and regarded
as mutually inconsistent, are roughly right – only in different “places” or “aspects”. They
picture correctly different modes of correspondence, or explain different semantic
phenomena. So far, this is not very distant from the so called “hybrid” view, recurring from
time to time among semanticists. The problem with hybrid views is that they usually don’t
specify the conditions of applicability of particular approaches that are supposed to be
reconciled in sufficiently general, principled way. The core of what I am going to offer is a
simple and general principle for telling who is right where and why, one that is applicable to a
remarkably wide range of problems and respective approaches.
The point is that semantic relations look completely different when we consider them
looking from the word to object than when we look the other way round. It is completely
different thing for us to find a right expression to represent a part of reality we have actually
just before our eyes – and different to find out what a given expression refers to, when given
only this expression. I would say, overstating perhaps this point a little, that natural language
is an entanglement of two distinct languages of entirely different semantic properties. Owing
much to the Russellian idea of knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description I
would call these virtual languages respectively A-languages and D-languages and their
semantics: A-semantics and D-semantics. They are different, so semantics as such is just
asymmetrical. It looks different depending on where is looked at from: word or object. I will
show that in most wide-discussed controversies one side exploits A-semantic intuitions
whereas the other - D-semantic ones. I will argue that the proposed principle allows for
setting a peace treaty between the sides in the following controversies among others (first
approach in the pair is A-semantic, second one – D-semantic):
proper names: Kripke vs. Searle
truth: deflationism (Horwich) vs. correspondence theory
syntax: contextuality vs compositionality
definite descriptions: referential use vs. attributive use
philosophy of science: bare fact vs. scientific fact
ambiguity resolution: “ways of being true” (Sainsbury) vs. semantic ambiguity
situation theory: actual situations vs. factual situations.
I will argue also that the most urgent task for us before we understand language sufficiently is
to reconstruct the emergence of the A-D distinction in the process of the first language
acquisition. I believe that such a quest would have much in common with cognitive approach
to logic.

Pius Ten-Hacken
Swansea University, UK
Philang 2009
The Search for a Science of Language: From historical linguistics to the
genetics of language
For more than a century, the field of linguistics has been attempting to establish itself as a
science. In doing so, different avenues were explored.
• Around 1900, most linguists were firmly convinced that the best way to study language
was by comparing different languages and establishing their historical relationship in order
to reconstruct earlier stages of the language. Herrmann Paul, for instance, could not
imagine another scientific approach to language.
• Around 1950, influenced by Saussure and Bloomfield, linguists such as Zellig Harris
believed that the most scientific way of studying language was to concentrate on the
synchronic system as found in a speech community.
• Around 2000, language is generally seen as a system of knowledge in the mind/brain of the
speaker. Although the idea of competence is associated first of all with Chomsky, it is
accepted by a much wider community of linguists than only the ones working in the
framework of Chomsky’s theory.
Summarized in these three sketches, the development of linguistics may seem somewhat
haphazard. In my paper, I will show how each stage constitutes an advance with respect to the
preceding ones and a necessary preparation for the following stages. I will use a parallel
between linguistics and planetary astronomy.
Until the 16th century, astronomers collected observations of the positions of planets and
interpreted them as reflecting orbits with respect to the observer, i.e. the earth. This stage is
comparable to historical linguistics of around 1900 in the sense that the immediate
observations were used to create a rather complex system of laws. In astronomy, the gradual
discovery of complications in the supposedly circular orbits led to a system of epicycles. In
linguistics, the reconstruction of proto-languages was subject to a complex systems of laws
governing language change.
Copernicus’s rejection of the geocentric model in favour of the heliocentric model was a
rather counterintuitive move which constituted a long-term investment in the simplification of
the model. However, it raised the problem of explaining the elliptic planetary orbits. The
change from a diachronic to a synchronic perspective in the study of language was a similarly
counterintuitive one. The focus of explanation of the earlier approach disappeared,
highlighting the uncertainty about the nature of language.
Newton’s theory of gravity proposed an immediate solution to the question of planetary
orbits, but raised the problem of how to account for action at a distance. Chomsky’s proposal
to consider language as competence raised similar objections, due to the invisibility of the
mental component. In both cases only indirect evidence could be used to map out the
underlying system that is not observable itself.
In current particle physics, a much deeper insight into the nature of gravity has been gained, at
the cost of revolutionary developments such as Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum
mechanics. In linguistics, the challenge this parallel suggests for our century is to establish a
link between genetic and neurological micro-structure and linguistic macro-structure of
sufficient detail such that language can be explained as gravity can.
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Luca Tranchini
Tübingen University (Germany) and Siena University (Italy),
The anti-realist notion of truth
The aim of the talk is that of showing that the notion of truth naturally finds its place in the
anti-realist proof-theoretic semantic approach.
We start from an analysis of the so-called paradox of deduction (see Dummett, “The paradox
of deduction” in Truth and Other Enigmas, 1978), namely the tension between two crucial
features of inference: validity and usefulness (or epistemic fruitfulness).
Anti-realists deny that inference validity is to be reduced to truth preservation. On the
contrary, they explain inference validity as follows.
Some inferences are taken to be valid by definition. That is, they are taken to fix the meaning
of (at least one of) the terms figuring in the inference.1 It is crucial to realize that meaningfixing
inferences, even though they do not require justification for their validity, are not useful
(in the salient sense). For, if they found the meaning of the terms involved, the speaker will
accept them only in virtue of his knowledge of the meaning of the lexical items involved. That
is, if the speakers is competent, he will acknowledge the meaning-fixing inferences as trivial.
As a consequence, if we want to account for both validity and usefulness of deduction we
must claim that not all valid inferences are meaning-fixing. But how then a non-meaningfixing
inference can be said to be valid? The idea is that it is valid if it is faithful to the
specification of meaning provided by the meaning-fixing inferences.
We now reconsider the principle according to which an inference is valid if and only if it
preserve the truth from the premises to the conclusion. In the light of the independent account
of the notion of validity just presented, the principle can be taken as an explication of the
notion of truth in the proof-theoretic framework. So truth is what is preserved in a valid
inference in passing from the premises to the conclusion. When Dummett presents the
paradox of deduction, he refers to the usefulness of inferences by claiming that for [the
inference] to be useful, a recognition of its truth need not actually have been accorded to the
conclusion when it was accorded to the premises.
This suggests the idea that all valid inferences preserve truth but that the meaning-fixing ones
preserve something stronger than just truth. We will say that meaning-fixing inferences
preserve not only truth, but also truth recognition. It is important to note that, by introducing
such a terminology, we do not want to add anything to the semantic framework. The terms
`truth' and `truth recognition' are labels that are applied to phenomena for which an
independent account is available. As we will show, the notion of truth so defined has a
structural resemblance with the model-theoretic one. We take this as a reason for the
terminological choice and, hence, we show that, under an opportune reading, it makes sense
to claim that also the anti-realist perspective has its own notion of truth.
As expected, the anti-realist notion of truth results much lighter than the heavy realist notion.

Giacomo Turbanti
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy
Philang 2009
Belief Reports: Defaults, Intentions and Scorekeeping
Propositional attitudes and belief reports are a well worn topic in the philosophy of
language. Puzzles as those put forward by Quine and Kripke show that, if we are not willing
to accept the Fregean thesis that referents are univocally identifiable, outwardly unavoidable
contradictions will emerge in our practices of attributing beliefs. And, what is worse, these
contradictions cannot be identified by those to whom they are attributed, no matter how much
logical introspection we require them to have. So where do these contradictions come from?
One of the first step to answer this question is to improve our representation of the problem
itself. In this sense dynamic semantics approaches seem particularly promising, because they
deal with identification of referents inside contexts of communication and provide tools to
manage anaphoric links among expressions.
But analysis of Discourse Representation Theory, for example, shows that it shares most of
the problems compositionality causes to any first order logical analysis of propositional
attitudes: even if anchors allow to distinguish the different ways in which the reporter and the
believer individuate referents, the necessity to identify extensionally the interpretations of
discourse referents still remains unavoidable, for the DRSs to be meaningful.
Kasia Jaszczolt's Default Semantics prevents this issue of compositionality from raising. I
remark that Jaszczolt not only highlights, but accounts for the shift, in the process of
interpretation of linguistic content, from the original intention of the speaker to refer to
something in the world to the interpreted, possibly mistaken, referent of the speaker's act of
communication. The key device of this account is the notion of default.
However these results do not come for free: Default Semantics takes for granted an
account of intentionality. The risk thus is the use of referential intentions just as semantic
intermediaries, more reliable than old objective Fregean senses. Talking about defaults
requires an explanation of the rules those defaults are defaults of.
I propose to apply in this context the account of normativity that Robert Brandom develops
in Making it Explicit. He offers an explanation both of the perspectival character of the
interpretation of linguistic content and of the way in which singular terms acquire an objective
representational meaning through substitutional and anaphoric inferential relations.
In the conclusion I try to evaluate, with respect to these questions about referents and
defaults, the results of this contamination of the themes of dynamic semantics with
Brandomian insights and see if Brandom's offers are worthy to be completely accepted.
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Sławomir Wacewicz
Nicolas Copernicus University, Poland
Philang 2009
Concepts as Correlates of Lexical Items
The content of this talk amounts to a somewhat controversial terminological proposal: the
term ‘concept’ is most fruitfully construed as ‘a mental representations having a lexical
correlate’. Such a definition makes it possible to treat ‘concept’ as a technical term across the
cognitive sciences, but also preserving most intuitions from a looser use of this word in the
literature. It should also be noted that it does not imply the so called ‘linguistic conception of
thought’, in which thinking is taken to rely exclusively on wordlike mental representations.
The mentalistic commitment, whereby concepts are understood as some kinds of mental
(psychological, system-internal rather than logical, system-external) beings, follows naturally
from the general perspective of Cognitive Science, which aims at providing explanations
based on the internal states of organisms or artificial agents. While sometimes questioned on
philosophical grounds, within CS mentalism does not require any further substantiation. What
is much more controversial, however, is the linking of concepts to lexical items; these are
understood as entries in the idealised mental lexicon, including compounds and longer
idiomatic expressions.
The above is not a standard position is Cognitive Science; in fact numerous authors openly
assume that “there are many other concepts for which we probably do not have words” (Green
et al. 2000 [1996]: 302). A common solution is to distinguish between semantic-lexical
concepts and ‘other concepts’ but in the course of my talk I argue that such a strategy is less
natural and less sound than the one proposed here.
In the second part of my talk, I address the most common objections against the view of
concepts as necessarily correlated with lexical items. One such reservation rests on the
appreciation of advanced cognitive abilities displayed by small children and nonhuman
animals, that is creatures that are denied having fully fledged concepts on the present account.
Another objection, of roughly ‘Whorfian’ nature, concerns the possibility of speakers of
different natural languages to use ‘the same’ concepts despite having different words.
Finally, I demonstrate how the definitional link between lexical entries and concepts can be
useful in accounting for the important property of shareability of concepts. Shareability – the
fact that concepts (concept types, as opposed to concept tokens) are shared by many
individual cognitive agents – is normally difficult to reconcile with mentalistic assumptions
but arises as a natural consequence of the view presented in this talk.

Bartosz Więckowski
Wilhelm-Schickard-Institut
Arbeitsbereich Logik und Sprachtheorie
Universität Tübingen, Germany
On Truth in Time
Philang 2009
Denotational model-theoretic semantics is intimately tied to a referential picture of the
relation between language and the world according to which language is about the world (see,
e.g., [3] 401, [2] 5). This semantics is philosophically problematic in cases in which one
wants to analyse true sentences which contain terms that are, or are taken to be,
denotationless. Understanding ‘denotationless’ stricto sensu , the analysis of such sentences
calls, as I shall argue, for an alternative notion of truth, one on which a sentence can be true
even though it is not about anything whatsoever. I shall propose an aboutness-free conception
of truth according to which the truth of an elementary (or atomic) sentence is explained,
roughly, in terms of the mutual matching of a certain kind of data which is associated with the
terms from which that sentence is composed. These data perform the function of nondenotational
semantic values. The aboutness-free conception of truth is made formally precise
in terms of a substitutional model-theoretic semantics which employs substitution classes
rather than objectual domains.
I shall explore to what extent this aboutness-free conception and its underlying semantic
framework can help to explain the truth of constructions which involve: (i) tenses (other than
the present tense), (ii) tense operators (e.g., ‘since/until’, ‘after/before’), (iii) phrases which
seem to explicitly quantify over instants of time (e.g., ‘at some time’, ‘at all subsequent
times’) or to refer to instants of time (e.g., dates like ‘September 11, 2001’), (iv) time
adverbials (e.g., ‘yesterday’, ‘on February 23, 2009, 11 a.m.’) and (v) presently empty
denoting terms (i.e., denoting singular terms which do no longer (or not yet) refer to presently
existing referents, e.g., ‘Abraham Lincoln’, and elementary predicates which do no longer (or
not yet) have present individuals in their extension, e.g., ‘is an ancient Greek philosopher’) in
a way which is in agreement with assumptions (A1) and (A2):
(A1) Only present individuals exist.
(A2) Only the present instant of time exists.
These assumptions can be taken to express the ontological thesis called presentism (see, e.g.,
[1] and the references therein). I shall first suggest an intuitive picture of the aboutness-free
perspective on language and the world and present a substitutional model-theoretic semantics
for the fragment of English which can be captured in terms of a first-order tense logical
language L. I shall then provide analyses of several problem cases. These will be both in
agreement with (A1) and (A2) and free of the difficulties which beset the presentist analyses
given hitherto. Finally, I shall suggest a method for dispensing with quantification over nonpresent
times in the meta-language for L.
References:
[1] Bourne, C. (2006). A Future for Presentism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
[2] Dowty, D. R., Wall, R. E. & Peters, S. (1981). Introduction to Montague Semantics.
Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
[3] Tarski, A. (1983). The establishment of scientific semantics. In Logic, Semantics,
Metamathematics, second edition, J. Corcoran (ed.), pp. 401-408, Indianapolis (Ind.):
Hackett.
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Philang 2009
Piotr Wilkin
Institute of Philosophy, Institute of Informatics
University of Warsaw, Poland
Proper names via causal descriptions and anchoring
The problem of how proper names refer to objects has been a key one in philosophy of
language. While Kripke’s criticism of descriptivism did seem to shift the balance in favor of
causal theories of proper names, there are still problems with certain borderline cases that
appear to be unresolved. I wish to propose a bridge between the causal and descriptive
theories of reference using a newly introduced concept of anchoring. The main idea behind
this concept is that we can have a special way of using descriptions referentially where the
referent is not an object, but instead a link in a causal chain. This link, called the anchor, is
what allows us to backtrack over causal chains to identify certain objects, however, the link
itself may be established by a description, thus leading to a potentially hybrid theory of
reference. Armed with this concept, we can explain away various difficulties that a purely
causal theory of reference is faced with, such as the problem of reference change. I believe
that the notion of “anchoring descriptions” also allows one to view key aspects of the causal
theory of reference, such as initial baptism, in more detail and account for atypical cases.
Another important topic that is connected with such a theory of causal descriptions is the
intentional content of such descriptions. If our beliefs about the causal structure of the world
are included in the semantics of causal descriptions, we can account for phenomena such as
broken causal links encountered when using names or mistakes when using proper names,
which can be attributed to incorrect decisions regarding choosing the proper causal chain.
This theory also separates descriptions into causal and non-causal, which I believe mirrors
a more fundamental division in types of meaning: between factual (anchored) meanings and
operational meanings, the former being related to the external world, the latter – to our actions
and perceptions. I will try to restate Donnellan’s distinction between attributive and referential
uses of descriptions within this division, showing how it merges with the topic of proper
names.

Justyna Winiarska
Faculty of Polish Studies
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Philang 2009
Methodological and ontological assumptions in linguistic theories.
Methodological, metascientific and ontological theses appear in science together with theses
on the subject of the research. Science contains metascience (despite all logical differences)
just like language contains metalanguage. At the same time the process of construction of a
theory is not a simple verbalisation of earlier ontological (and methodological) assumptions.
Rather they may be found between the lines of the theory. (And in case of linguistics so called
theory is often just an internally integrated direction of thinking). The assumptions
(sometimes stated explicitly but sometimes just implicit) may concern different aspects of
studied phenomenon, and as an example I will consider problem of categorisation. Every
science deals with classification of entities. Linguistics is interested in categorising also in a
different way – language elements may be understood as categories. The background of
categorisation consists of assumptions that in the area of research it is possible to find discrete
and distinctive elements; the assumptions on the nature of the elements (their features or
attributes) and the assumptions on the nature of a category. Language phenomenon must be
first captured as an entity and then it is put into a category – (classic) structuralism chooses
classical category (and I call that a methodological decision), cognitive linguistics fits
language elements into categories based on prototypes (and the decision is more “ontological”
in a way that it results from proposed model of human mind, our conceptual system and even
structure of the reality).
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102
Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka
University of Łódź, Poland
Philang 2009
Speech acts and the demarcation of pragmatics
This paper comments on selected problems of the definition of linguistic pragmatics with
focus on notions associated with the theory of speech acts. It discusses the (ir)relevance of the
Austinian categorisation into locution, illocution, and perlocution, especially the distinction
between the locutionary act and the illocutionary act and its implications for the definition of
pragmatics and separation of pragmatics from the semantic theory.
The relation between form and meaning is further reviewed against dichotomies including
the Gricean and neo-Gricean ‘what is said’ versus ‘what is implicated’ or meant, between
what can be ‘locuted’, but not said, and what can be said, but not asserted. These dichotomies
are related to the theoretically accepted operative forces in speech acts, primarily convention
and intention. It is suggested that roughly the development of the speech act theory can be
viewed as a process by which the theory moves away from its originally sociolinguistic
orientation towards a more psychologistic account, which in turn leads towards diminishing
the role of semantics and the subsequent juxtaposition of pragmatics and syntax rather than
pragmatics and semantics.
The paper also includes comments on the role and understanding of speech acts in the
ongoing debate between contextualists and (semantic) minimalists, as well as externalist and
internalist orientations.
The definition of pragmatics is relative to theoretical commitments concerning the nature
of context and the role and amount of inference in processing linguistic data. The approaches
are both numerous and often mutually incompatible; as a result we are confronted with a
variety of pragmatic theories, of the “near-side”, “far-side” or “heavy-handed” type. It is
evident that the attempts to define the nature and formulate an adequate theory of speech acts
are not only parallel, but focal to the definition of linguistic pragmatics itself.
Selected bibliography
Austin, John L. 1962/1975 2 nd ed. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Bach, Kent and Robert M. Harnish 1979: Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts.
Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press.
Borg, Emma 2004: Minimal Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cappelen, Herman & Lepore, Ernie. (2005a). Insensitive semantics. A defense of semantic
minimalism and speech act pluralism. (Oxford: Blackwell)
Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and utterances. The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Carston, Robyn. 2008. “Linguistic Communication and the semantics/pragmatics distinction”
Synthese. Vol. 165/3; 321-346. DOI 10.1007/s11229-007-9191-8.
Gauker, Christopher. 2008. “Zero tolerance for pragmatics” Synthese, vol. 165, No.3, pp.
359-371. DOI 10.1007/s11229-007-9189-2
Kasher, Asa 1998: Pragmatics and the modularity of mind. In Asa Kasher (Ed.) Pragmatics
critical concepts: Vol. VI. Pragmatics: grammar, psychology and sociology, 230-252.
London: Routledge.

Philang 2009
Korta, Kepa and John Perry. 2007. “How to say things with words”. In: Savas L. Tsohatzidis
(ed.) John Searle's Philosophy of Language: Force, Meaning and Mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 169-189.
Korta, Kepa and John Perry. 2008. “The pragmatic circle”. Synthese, vol. 165, No.3, pp. 347–
357.
Millikan, Ruth. 2005: Language: A Biological Model. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Neale, Stephen. 2007 “Heavy Hands, Magic, and Scene-Reading Traps” EUJAP, Vol. 3, No.
2, 77-132.
Recanati, François 1987: Meaning and force: The pragmatics of performative utterances.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sbisá, Marina (in print, 2009) “How to read Austin”. Pragmatics
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Strawson, Peter. 1964: “Intention and convention in speech acts”. Philosophical Review 73,
39-460.
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Philang 2009
Lucian Zagan
ILLC, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands
Vagueness, Context-Dependence, and Perspective
Many natural language predicates are vague in the sense that their use is tolerant.
Arguably, the evaluation of vague predicates is essentially context-dependent. But how is the
context-dependence involved with vagueness to be understood? Do vague predicates behave
in any way similarly to indexicals? According to the semantic framework made famous by
Kaplan (1989), the meanings of natural language sentences determine characters, and these
are functions from contexts of use to contents. Contents in turn are functions from
circumstances of evaluation to truth-values. Stanley (2003) seems to believe that
contextualists about vagueness claim that vague predicates are indexicals. On his
understanding of contextualism, the contextualist holds that a vague predicate has a character
that determines different properties in different contexts. And he goes on to argue that
contextualist views are simply wrong, because vague predicates seem to behave differently
compared with indexicals in a specific construction, namely Verb Phrase ellipsis. I do agree
with Stanley that vague expressions are not indexicals. Where I do not agree with him is in
holding that contextualists (maybe one exception would be Scott Soames, 1999) claim that
they are.
Indexicality is not the only form of context-dependence. We should distinguish two types
of context-dependence: dependence of content on context and dependence of extension of
context (see, e.g., MacFarlane, 2009). According to Kaplan, indexicals are expressions whose
content at a context depends on features of the context. In contrast, there are expressions
which are context-dependent without being indexicals, in the sense that their extension at a
context depends on features of the context. I will call this nonindexical context-dependence.
Arguably, the meanings of vague predicates fail to determine precise extensions. So
vagueness is to be characterized by extensional indeterminacy. As I have already mentioned, I
do not think that vague predicates are indexicals. It is not the content that varies with context
of use. This would have untenable consequences, making communication impossible in the
end. On my preferred view, it is the extension of a vague predicate that varies with the context
of use. Such a view is recommended by the fact that we can characterize the very same person
as tall in some circumstances of language use and as not tall in some other circumstances
without incoherence. The same about a vague sentence: we can hold it true at some context of
use and false at other without contradiction. And this is so because vague expressions are
perspectival. Perspectival expressions encode a perspective point from which matters should
be construed (see Bezuidenhout, 2005).
There are a number of benefits in holding such a view. First, we can make sense of the fact
that there is a real disagreement between us when I hold that John is rich and you hold the
opposite. On my preferred view, this is explained simply as a disagreement on whether John
is in the extension of “rich” or not, and this is perspective-dependent. If you want to put it that
way, the dispute is on the perspective point we should consider in evaluating whether John is
rich and not on the content of “rich”. Second, as Fara (2000) argues, vague predicates are
interest-relative. Predicates like “tall” or “rich” do not only describe the objects to which they
apply, they often also contain some sort of evaluation. A contextualist view as the one I
defend here can easily accommodate that by taking the interests involved as being part of the
perspective which is provided by the pragmatic context. More, the evaluation of vague
predicates is not only context-dependent, but also context-changing (see Barker, 2002 or
Kyburg and Morreau, 2000). This fact is also easy to accommodate within the framework I

Philang 2009
propose, by holding that a context update as the one envisaged actually involves a change in
perspective.
References:
Barker, Chris (2002): “The Dynamics of Vagueness”, Linguistics and Philosophy 25, pp. 1-
36.
Bezuidenhout, Anne (2005): “Indexicals and Perspectivals”, Facta Philosophica 7, pp. 3-18.
Bezuidenhout, Anne (2002): “Truth-Conditional Pragmatics”, Philosophical Perspectives 16:
Language and Mind, pp. 105-34.
Fara, Delia Graff (2000): “Shifting Sands: An Interest-Relative Theory of Vagueness”,
Philosophical Topics 28: Vagueness, pp. 45-81. (Originally published under the name
Delia Graff.)
Fara, Delia Graff (2008): “Profiling Interest Relativity”, Analysis 68, pp. 326-35.
Ellis, Jonathan (2004): “Context, Indexicals and the Sorites”, Analysis 64, pp. 362-4.
Kamp, Hans (1981): “The Paradox of the Heap”, in Uwe Mönnich (ed.), Aspects of
Philosophical Logic, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 225-77.
Kaplan, David (1989): “Demonstratives. An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics, and
Epistemology of Demonstratives and Other Indexicals”, in Joseph Almog, John Perry
and Howard Wettstein (eds.), Themes from Kaplan, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 481-563.
Keefe, Rosanna (2007): “Vagueness without Context Change”, Mind 116, pp. 275-92.
Kölbel, Max (forthcoming): “Vagueness as Semantic”, in Sebastiano Moruzzi and Richard
Dietz (eds.) Cuts and Clouds: Essays on the Nature and Logic of Vagueness, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Kyburg, Alice and Michael Morreau (2000): “Fitting Words: Vague Language in Context”,
Linguistics and Philosophy 23, pp. 577-97.
Lasersohn, Peter (2005): “Context Dependence, Disagreement, and Predicates of Personal
Taste”, Linguistics and Philosophy 28, pp. 643-86.
Ludlow, Peter (1989): “Implicit Comparison Classes”, Linguistics and Philosophy 12, pp.
519-33.
MacFarlane, John (2009): “Nonindexical Contextualism”, Synthese 166, pp. 231-50.
Raffman, Diana (1994): “Vagueness without Paradox”, Philosophical Review 103, pp. 41-74.
Raffman, Diana (1996): “Vagueness and Context-Relativity”, Philosophical Studies 81, pp.
175-92.
Raffman, Diana (2005): “How to Understand Contextualism about Vagueness: Reply to
Stanley”, Analysis 65, pp. 244-8.
Recanati, François (2007): Perspectival Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Rooij, Robert (forthcoming): “Vagueness and Linguistics”, in Giuseppina Ronzitti (ed.),
The Vagueness Handbook, Berlin: Springer.
Sainsbury, R.M. (1991): “Concepts without Boundaries” (Inaugural Lecture, 6 November
1990), London: Department of Philosophy, King’s College London. Partially reprinted
in Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith (eds.), Vagueness: A Reader, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1997, pp. 251-64.
Shapiro Stewart (2003): “Vagueness and Conversation”, in J.C. Beall (ed.), Liars and Heaps:
New Essays on Paradox, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 39-72.
Shapiro, Stewart (2006): Vagueness in Context, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Soames, Scott (1999): Understanding Truth, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stanley, Jason (2003): “Context, Interest Relativity and the Sorites”, Analysis 63, pp.
269-80.
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106
Dan Zeman
LOGOS - University of Barcelona, Spain
Philang 2009
Meteorological Sentences, Unarticulated Constituents and Relativism
In this paper I focus on the particular case of meteorological sentences such as “It is
raining”, as they are highly representative for the debate between literalism (the thesis that the
linguistic meaning of a sentence is enough to determine the truth conditions of that sentence
as used in a certain context) and contextualism (the thesis that besides the linguistic meaning
of a sentence there are pragmatic factors that contribute to the truth-conditions of that
sentence as used in a certain context). The first part of the paper is dedicated to a close look
on the exchange pertaining to that debate between Jason Stanley and Francois Recanati. I start
by considering some distinctions made in the literature, the most important of which being
that between metaphysical and communicational unarticulateness. I then analyze Recanati’s
criterion for unarticulateness (“the Optionality Criterion”) and Stanley’s own proposal (“the
Binding Criterion”), and I show that both criteria are liable to overgeneralize, thus yielding
wrong results. However, the main challenge that Stanley has raised for the contextualist is to
account for the so-called “bound readings”: in a sentence like “Every time John lights a
cigarette, it is raining”, the location of rain is bound by a second-order quantifier. From this,
Stanley concludes that also the unembedded sentence must comprise a variable for the
location of rain, whose value is provided by context. Recanati’s way to answer this argument
(known as the binding argument) is to employ variadic functions (functions from n-place
properties to n-1 or n+1-place properties) which allow him to avoid the conclusion of the
binding argument. I take this result to provide a dialectical advantage for Recanati over
Stanley, even granting that the Optionality Criterion is flawed.
In the second part of the paper I try to show how the employment of variadic functions
could be useful for relativism about a series of discourses. Relativism is the view that the
truth-value of a sentence varies with the circumstances of evaluation against which the
sentence is to be evaluated without a corresponding variation in the proposition expressed by
utterances of the sentence in different contexts. Focusing on predicates of personal taste, one
straightforward advantage of employing variadic functions is that the relativist has a ready
answer to any attempt to apply the binding argument to such expressions, for example in
sentences like “Every animal got something tasty”. Following Recanati, the relativist can treat
the quantifier “every animal” as a variadic operator that both increases the adicity of the
predicate “tasty” and provides a range of values for the newly created argument. This
treatment would avoid postulating an argument place for subjects in the logical form of
simple sentences as “Avocado is tasty”. This result clearly supports relativism by allowing the
relativist to take context as providing a circumstance rather than an element in the content of a
sentence – which, in turn, allows her to safely appeal to the data that initially motivated the
view.

Philang 2009
Lei Zhu
Institute of Linguistic Studies
Shanghai International Studies University, P. R. of China
Sound, Body and Writing: A Phenomenological View of Linguistics as
Representation of Speech
Philosophy of linguistics (as a branch of philosophy of science) has been heavily influenced
by philosophy of language and linguistic methodology in its scope and approach ever since it
arose from the reflections on language science following, especially, the Chomskyan
revolution. As a result, questions about the nature of linguistics are often confused with those
about the nature of language and how it should be studied — though these questions are
certainly related at different levels. In this paper, we intend to show that a closer
understanding of such fundamental questions as what linguistics is and how it is related to
language and other branches of human knowledge can be achieved by taking a
phenomenological approach to philosophy of linguistics. According to the basic principle of
phenomenology, no linguistic concept about language can be taken for granted in answering
questions about linguistics itself. Rather, they should be suspended as ‘representations’ of
pure phenomena and deduced to their origins. Following this principle, we find that speech in
the form of sound (not analysed in any way) is actually the only unsuspensible and irreducible
phenomenon that all linguistic representations — including divisions, groupings and
generalisations at all levels — are ultimately confronted with. Moreover, drawing on the
phenomenological distinction between Leib (body) and Körper (corpse), we find that the first
and most important step in the establishment of modern linguistic discourse is the Körperization
of the speech sound — a process started in phonetics and phonology by means of their
arithmetic (in phonetics) and algebraic (in phonology) processing. It is in this way that speech
as the original Leib of language is gradually analysed into the duality of ‘sound’ and
‘concept’. This also explains the seemingly dubious position (to some) of phonetics in modern
linguistics, as no difference in conceptualised meaning can be analysed in pure and
decontextualised phonetic contrasts. Like phonetics and phonology, linguistic analyses at
higher levels, as part of the Körper-ization process of the speech sound, unanimously follow
the ‘sound/concept’ duality — though it takes different forms in different theories. This, to
use Derrida’s language, is how speech sounds are ‘written’ in modern linguistics. In other
words, linguistics by nature is one of many ways of ‘writing’ about speech sounds, and that
explains the incongruence between modern linguistics and some scripts like Chinese
characters in that both are writings of speech sounds and that neither conforms to the other so
long as it attempts to preserve the way it writes.
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108
Philang 2009
Przemysław śywiczyński
Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland
Language and Meaning in Classical Indian Philosophy
The classical Indian philosophy of language has received minimal attention from the
Western academia. The aim of this paper proposal is to bring this ancient scholarly tradition
closer to the Western recipient.
One of the major problems encountered by a student of Indian philosophy is its
commentatorial style. In India, philosophical activities used to be carried out within the
framework of reflection delimited by the Vedic revelation. During the classical period of
Indian history (until the Islamic raids of XI and XII century), five schools of the Vedic
orthodoxy were founded – Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Yoga, Mīmāṁsā and Vedānta – while
Buddhists, Jains, and hedonistic cārvākas enunciated the most influential heterodox positions.
Fierce inter-sectarian rivalry between these schools was an important factor in creating a rich,
deeply polemical intellectual tradition characteristic of the pre-Islamic India.
Such was the context in which problems pertaining to language and meaning came to be
discussed. Given the exegetical character of Indian intellectual tradition, it seems that the
optimal strategy for presenting Indian philosophy of language is to show how particular
positions and theories are implicated into the larger philosophico-religious concerns.
The philosophical reflection on language and meaning is rooted in the Indian grammatical
tradition, the most illustrious representative of which is Pāṇini. The transition to more
theoretical problems took place with two monumental treatises – Kātyāyana’s Varttika and
Pataňjali’s Mahābhāsya. A question occasioned by the philosophical transformation of
grammar was expressly posed by Pataňjali: “What is the object of the word?”. Traditionally,
there were two answers given to this question. One is associated with the grammarian Vyadi,
whose position is often referred to as denotationism. The denotationist view is based on the
assumption that the basic function of words is referential, in the sense that words serve the
speaker to single out individual, real-world objects. The competing position, connotationism,
was put forward by the philosopher Vajapyayana, who believes that words primarily apply to
universal properties, reference being secondary and derivative from the process of
signification.
This rather technical controversy soon caught the attention of adherents of both orthodox
and heterodox schools of tenets (vide above). The followers of Nyāya adopted denotationism
because it seemed better suited to articulate the realistic ontology, on which their doctrine was
founded. Mīmāṁsikas and Buddhists opted for connotationism but did so for very different
reasons. The former saw it as a means of solidifying their most cherished doctrine of the selfsufficient
status of the Vedas, while Buddhists used it as an argument for the “ineffability
view” (which has it that words necessarily distort the reality described by means of them). In
the ensuing phase of philosophising about language, scholars did not only attempt to develop
the denotationist and connotationist conceptions but also to anchor them firmer in sectarian
commitments; in this way, Nyāyikas elaborated the word-plus-syntax conception of language,
Mīmāṁsā connotationists put forward the sphoṭa theory of meaning and Buddhists, the apoha
doctrine of definition via negation.

Philang 2009
LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
PLENARY SPEAKERS:
Eros Corazza (eros_corazza@carleton.ca),
K. M. Jaszczolt (kmj21@cam.ac.uk)
Kepa Korta (kepa.korta@ehu.es),
Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (blt@uni.lodz.pl),
Michael Morris (m.r.morris@sussex.ac.uk)
Jaroslav Peregrin (jarda@peregrin.cz)
Eduardo Abrantes (eduardoabrantes@gmail.com)
Yousef Abu Addous (Adous_yousuf@yahoo.com)
Victoria Akulicheva (victoria.akulicheva81@gmail.com)
Mehdi Damali Amiri (mehdiamiri2000@yahoo.com)
Janusz Badio (jbadio@uni.lodz.pl)
Christian Bassac (Christian.Bassac@univ-lyon2.fr)
Khadija Belfarhi (khadija_belfarhi@yahoo.com)
Jan Brejcha (jan.brejcha@ff.cuni.cz)
Eugene H. Casad (gdn51ang902@gmail.com)
Zuzana Čengerová (zuceng@gmail.com)
ElŜbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska (e.kluczewska@chello.pl)
Tadeusz Ciecierski (taci@uw.edu.pl)
Andrzej Cieśluk (a.ciesluk.umcs@gmail.com)
Marzenna Cyzman (marzennacyzman@poczta.onet.pl)
Olena Dobrovolska (dobrovolska@gmail.com)
Marie Duží (Marie.duzi@vsb.cz)
Ingrid Lossius Falkum (i.falkum@ucl.ac.uk)
Chris Fox (foxcj@essex.ac.uk)
Olga Garmash
Brendan S. Gillon (brendan.gillon@mcgill.ca)
Justyna Grudzińska (j.grudzinska@uw.edu.pl)
Andrea Guardo (andrea.guardo.26@gmail.com)
Arkadiusz Gut (kupisa@kul.lublin.pl)
Housam Hashim (h.hashim@ucl.ac.uk)
Lars Hertzberg (lhertzbe@abo.fi)
Carl Humphries (humgin4@yahoo.co.uk)
Bjørn Jespersen (B.T.F.Jespersen@tudelft.nl)
Maria Jodłowiec (maria.jodlowiec@uj.edu.pl)
Andrew Jorgensen (andrew.jorgensen@ucd.ie)
Henryk Kardela (henkar@poczta.umcs.lublin.pl)
Filip Kawczyński (filkaw@gmail.com)
Witold Kieraś (w.kieras@uw.edu.pl)
Guilherme F. Rennó Kisteumacher(guilhermerennok@gmail.com,
guilhermerennok@yahoo.com.br)
Georg Kjøll (georgak@hf.uio.no)
Joanna Klimczyk (jklimczyk@ifispan.waw.pl)
Krzysztof Kosecki (kosecki@uni.lodz.pl)
Karolina Krawczak (karolina@ifa.amu.edu.pl)
Agnieszka Kułacka (a.kulacka@googlemail.com)
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Alina Kwiatkowska (akwiat@uni.lodz.pl)
Agnieszka Libura
Maria Libura (imagery@onet.eu)
Jakub Mácha (3662@mail.muni.cz)
Wojciech Majka (wojciech-majka@wp.pl)
Pavel Materna (maternapavel@seznam.cz)
Luis Fernández Moreno (luis.fernandez@filos.ucm.es)
Alessio Moretti (alemore@club-internet.fr)
Yrsa Neuman (yneuman@abo.fi)
Joanna OdrowąŜ-Sypniewska (j.odrowaz@uw.edu.pl)
Ratikanta Panda (ratikanta@iitb.ac.in)
Andrzej Pawelec (apa@vela.filg.uj.edu.pl)
Wit Pietrzak (witpietrzak@wp.pl)
Salvatore Pistoia Reda (pistoia.reda@unisi.it)
Wiktor Pskit (pskit@vp.pl)
Małgorzata Pytlas (littlego@o2.pl)
Jiří Raclavský (raclavsk@phil.muni.cz)
J. Randolph Radney (radney@mac.com)
Ewa Rosiak (rosiak.e.b@gmail.com)
Monika Rymaszewska-Chwist (amonik@wp.pl)
Joanna Sadowska (joasiasad@yahoo.com)
Fabien Schang (schang.fabien@voila.fr)
Andrew Schumann (Andrew.Schumann@gmail.com)
Barbara Sonnenhauser (basonne@lmu.de)
Piotr Stalmaszczyk (piotrst@uni.lodz.pl)
Pierre Steiner (Pierre.Steiner@utc.fr)
William J. Sullivan (wjsiii@uni.wroc.pl)
Xymena Synak-Pskit (xsynak@poczta.onet.pl)
Aleksander Szwedek (szwedek@ifa.amu.edu.pl)
Ali Taheri (Taheri321@yahoo.com)
Yukio Takahashi (takahashi_yukio_ling@msn.com)
Mieszko Tałasiewicz (m.talasiewicz@uw.edu.pl)
Pius Ten-Hacken (P.Ten-Hacken@swansea.ac.uk)
Luca Tranchini (luca.tranchini@gmail.com)
Giacomo Turbanti (giacomo.turbanti@sns.it)
Sławomir Wacewicz (swacewicz@wp.pl)
Bartosz Więckowski (bartosz.wieckowski@uni-tuebingen.de)
Piotr Wilkin (pwl@mimuw.edu.pl)
Justyna Winiarska (justyna.winiarska@uj.edu.pl)
Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka (wipiw@uni.lodz.pl)
Lucian Zagan (lucian.zagan@uva.nl)
Dan Zeman (dan_zeman@yahoo.com)
Lei Zhu (zhuleisisu@yahoo.com)
Przemysław śywiczyński (gurgyn@wp.pl)

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