Neri Marsili
Biographic Data
| ID | 1148545 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Neri Marsili |
| GIVEN NAMES | Neri |
| FAMILY NAME | Marsili |
| SIGNATURE | MARSILI N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universitat de Barcelona |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7853-7359 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Counterevidentials
Moorean constructions are famously odd: it is infelicitous to deny that you believe what you claim to be true. But what about claiming that p, only to immediately put into question your evidence in support of p? In this paper, we identify and analyse a class of quasi-Moorean constructions, which we label counterevidentials. Although odd, counterevidentials can be accommodated as felicitous attempts to mitigate one’s claim right after making it. W…
Misplaced Trust in Expertise
The persistence of scientific misconceptions is often attributed to a decline in trust in experts. Against this simplistic picture, we emphasise that misplaced trust in expertise plays a crucial role in sustaining such misconceptions: even laypeople actively seeking expert guidance may nonetheless place their trust in unreliable sources. This paper identifies two main kinds of ’epistemic traps’ that are relevant to this phenomenon. In addition to…
The definition of assertion
According to an influential view, asserting a proposition involves undertaking some “commitment” to the truth of that proposition. But accounts of what it is for someone to be committed to the truth of a proposition are often vague or imprecise, and are rarely put to work to define assertion. This article aims to fill this gap. It offers a precise characterisation of assertoric commitment, and applies it to define assertion. On the proposed view,…
Fictions that don’t tell the truth
Can fictions lie? According to a classic conception, works of fiction can never contain lies, since their content is not presented as true, nor is it meant to deceive us. But this classic view can be challenged. Sometimes fictions appear to make claims about the actual world, and these claims can be designed to convey falsehoods, historical misconceptions, and even pernicious stereotypes. Should we conclude that some fictional statements are lies…
Lies, Common Ground and Performative Utterances
Fictions that Purport to Tell the Truth
Can fictions make genuine assertions about the actual world? Proponents of the 'Assertion View' answer the question affirmatively: they hold that authors can assert, by means of explicit statements that are part of the work of fiction, that something is actually the case in the real world. The 'Nonassertion' View firmly denies this possibility. In this paper, I defend a nuanced version of the Nonassertion View. I argue that even if fictions canno…
Lying
Saying, Commitment, and the Lying-Misleading Distinction
How can we capture the intuitive distinction between lying and misleading? According to a traditional view, the difference boils down to whether the speaker is saying (as opposed to implying) something that they believe to be false. This view is subject to known objections; to overcome them, an alternative view has emerged. For the alternative view, what matters is whether the speaker can consistently deny that they are committed to knowing the r…
Should I say that? An experimental investigation of the norm of assertion
Assertions are our standard communicative devices for sharing and acquiring information. Recent studies seemingly provide converging evidence that assertions are subject to a factive norm: you are entitled to make an assertion only if it is true. However, these studies assume that we can treat participants' judgements about what an agent 'should say' as evidence of their intuitions about assertability. This paper argues that this assumption is in…
Retweeting
Lying, speech acts, and commitment
Not every speech act can be a lie. A good definition of lying should be able to draw the right distinctions between speech acts (like promises, assertions, and oaths) that can be lies and speech acts (like commands, suggestions, or assumptions) that under no circumstances are lies. This paper shows that no extant account of lying is able to draw the required distinctions. It argues that a definition of lying based on the notion of ‘assertoric com…
Assertion
In a series of articles (Pagin 2004, 2009), Peter Pagin has argued that assertion is not a social speech act, introducing a method (which we baptize 'the P-test') designed to refute any account that defines assertion in terms of its social effects. This paper contends that Pagin's method fails to rebut the thesis that assertion is social. We show that the P-test is both unreliable (because it overgenerates counterexamples) and counterproductive (…
Lying, speech acts, and commitment
Not every speech act can be a lie. A good definition of lying should be able to draw the right distinctions between speech acts (like promises, assertions, and oaths) that can be lies and speech acts (like commands, suggestions, or assumptions) that under no circumstances are lies. This paper shows that no extant account of lying is able to draw the required distinctions. It argues that a definition of lying based on the notion of ‘assertoric com…
Retweeting
Assertion
In a series of articles (Pagin 2004, 2009), Peter Pagin has argued that assertion is not a social speech act, introducing a method (which we baptize 'the P-test') designed to refute any account that defines assertion in terms of its social effects. This paper contends that Pagin's method fails to rebut the thesis that assertion is social. We show that the P-test is both unreliable (because it overgenerates counterexamples) and counterproductive (…
Misplaced Trust in Expertise
The persistence of scientific misconceptions is often attributed to a decline in trust in experts. Against this simplistic picture, we emphasise that misplaced trust in expertise plays a crucial role in sustaining such misconceptions: even laypeople actively seeking expert guidance may nonetheless place their trust in unreliable sources. This paper identifies two main kinds of ’epistemic traps’ that are relevant to this phenomenon. In addition to…
Fictions that Purport to Tell the Truth
Can fictions make genuine assertions about the actual world? Proponents of the 'Assertion View' answer the question affirmatively: they hold that authors can assert, by means of explicit statements that are part of the work of fiction, that something is actually the case in the real world. The 'Nonassertion' View firmly denies this possibility. In this paper, I defend a nuanced version of the Nonassertion View. I argue that even if fictions canno…
Should I say that? An experimental investigation of the norm of assertion
Assertions are our standard communicative devices for sharing and acquiring information. Recent studies seemingly provide converging evidence that assertions are subject to a factive norm: you are entitled to make an assertion only if it is true. However, these studies assume that we can treat participants' judgements about what an agent 'should say' as evidence of their intuitions about assertability. This paper argues that this assumption is in…
Retweeting
Lying, speech acts, and commitment
Not every speech act can be a lie. A good definition of lying should be able to draw the right distinctions between speech acts (like promises, assertions, and oaths) that can be lies and speech acts (like commands, suggestions, or assumptions) that under no circumstances are lies. This paper shows that no extant account of lying is able to draw the required distinctions. It argues that a definition of lying based on the notion of ‘assertoric com…
Assertion
In a series of articles (Pagin 2004, 2009), Peter Pagin has argued that assertion is not a social speech act, introducing a method (which we baptize 'the P-test') designed to refute any account that defines assertion in terms of its social effects. This paper contends that Pagin's method fails to rebut the thesis that assertion is social. We show that the P-test is both unreliable (because it overgenerates counterexamples) and counterproductive (…
Lying
Saying, Commitment, and the Lying-Misleading Distinction
How can we capture the intuitive distinction between lying and misleading? According to a traditional view, the difference boils down to whether the speaker is saying (as opposed to implying) something that they believe to be false. This view is subject to known objections; to overcome them, an alternative view has emerged. For the alternative view, what matters is whether the speaker can consistently deny that they are committed to knowing the r…
Lies, Common Ground and Performative Utterances
Fictions that Purport to Tell the Truth
Can fictions make genuine assertions about the actual world? Proponents of the 'Assertion View' answer the question affirmatively: they hold that authors can assert, by means of explicit statements that are part of the work of fiction, that something is actually the case in the real world. The 'Nonassertion' View firmly denies this possibility. In this paper, I defend a nuanced version of the Nonassertion View. I argue that even if fictions canno…
The definition of assertion
According to an influential view, asserting a proposition involves undertaking some “commitment” to the truth of that proposition. But accounts of what it is for someone to be committed to the truth of a proposition are often vague or imprecise, and are rarely put to work to define assertion. This article aims to fill this gap. It offers a precise characterisation of assertoric commitment, and applies it to define assertion. On the proposed view,…
Fictions that don’t tell the truth
Can fictions lie? According to a classic conception, works of fiction can never contain lies, since their content is not presented as true, nor is it meant to deceive us. But this classic view can be challenged. Sometimes fictions appear to make claims about the actual world, and these claims can be designed to convey falsehoods, historical misconceptions, and even pernicious stereotypes. Should we conclude that some fictional statements are lies…
Counterevidentials
Moorean constructions are famously odd: it is infelicitous to deny that you believe what you claim to be true. But what about claiming that p, only to immediately put into question your evidence in support of p? In this paper, we identify and analyse a class of quasi-Moorean constructions, which we label counterevidentials. Although odd, counterevidentials can be accommodated as felicitous attempts to mitigate one’s claim right after making it. W…
Misplaced Trust in Expertise
The persistence of scientific misconceptions is often attributed to a decline in trust in experts. Against this simplistic picture, we emphasise that misplaced trust in expertise plays a crucial role in sustaining such misconceptions: even laypeople actively seeking expert guidance may nonetheless place their trust in unreliable sources. This paper identifies two main kinds of ’epistemic traps’ that are relevant to this phenomenon. In addition to…
Philosophy (12 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (10 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Linguistics (5 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Assertion (4 works) · Metaphysics (4 works)