Ethan Nowak
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3597516 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Ethan Nowak |
| PRENOMES | Ethan |
| SOBRENOME | Nowak |
| ASSINATURA | NOWAK E |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Umeå University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5141-3134 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 8 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 5 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 8 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2021 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 1 |
Sociolinguistic Variation, Slurs, and Speech Acts
In this paper, I argue that the ‘social meanings’ associated with sociolinguistic variation put pressure on the standard philosophical conception of language, according to which the foremost thing we do with words is exchange information. Drawing on parallels with the explanatory challenge posed by slurs and pejoratives, I argue that the best way to understand social meanings is to think of them in speech act theoretic terms, and I develop a dist…
Contrastive signaling without counterparts
The explanatory challenge posed by slurs is often framed as the challenge of explaining what makes a slur offensive when an extensionally equivalent ‘neutral counterpart’ is not. Sometimes this framing is merely illustrative, but sometimes it is theoretically significant. Proponents of a class of theories I will call ‘contrastive signaling theories’ claim that slurs are offensive in virtue of a contrast with their neutral counterparts. The idea t…
Really Complex Demonstratives
I have two aims for the present paper, one narrow and one broad. The narrow aim is to show that a class of data originally described by Lynsey Wolter (That’s that; the semantics and pragmatics of demonstrative noun phrases, PhD thesis, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2006) empirically undermine the leading treatments of complex demonstratives that have been described in the literature. The broader aim of the paper is to show that Wolter d…
Sociolinguistic Variation, Speech Acts, and Discursive Injustice
Despite its status at the heart of a closely related field, philosophers have so far mostly overlooked a phenomenon sociolinguists call ‘social meaning’. My aim in this paper will be to show that by properly acknowledging the significance of social meanings, we can identify an important new set of forms that discursive injustice takes. I begin by surveying some data from variationist sociolinguistics that reveal how subtle differences in the way …
No context, no content, no problem
Recently, philosophers have offered compelling reasons to think that demonstratives are best represented as variables, sensitive not to the context of utterance, but to a variable assignment. Variablists typically explain familiar intuitions about demonstratives—intuitions that suggest that what is said by way of a demonstrative sentence varies systematically over contexts—by claiming that contexts initialize a particular assignment of values to …
Who’s Your Ideal Listener
It is increasingly common for philosophers to rely on the notion of an idealised listener when explaining how the semantic values of context-sensitive expressions are determined. Some have identified the semantic values of such expressions, as used on particular occasions, with whatever an appropriately idealised listener would take them to be. Others have argued that, for something to count as the semantic value, an appropriately idealised liste…
Complex demonstratives, hidden arguments, and presupposition
Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are. If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (in: Almog, Perry, Wettstein (eds) Themes from Kaplan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. The same prediction follows from ‘hidde…
Meta-Metasemantics, or the Quest for the One True Metasemantics
What determines the meaning of a context-sensitive expression in a context? It is standardly assumed that, for a given expression type, there will be a unitary answer to this question; most of the literature on the subject involves arguments designed to show that one particular metasemantic proposal is superior to a specific set of alternatives. The task of the present essay will be to explore whether this is a warranted assumption, or whether th…
Sociolinguistic Variation, Speech Acts, and Discursive Injustice
Despite its status at the heart of a closely related field, philosophers have so far mostly overlooked a phenomenon sociolinguists call ‘social meaning’. My aim in this paper will be to show that by properly acknowledging the significance of social meanings, we can identify an important new set of forms that discursive injustice takes. I begin by surveying some data from variationist sociolinguistics that reveal how subtle differences in the way …
Complex demonstratives, hidden arguments, and presupposition
Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are. If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (in: Almog, Perry, Wettstein (eds) Themes from Kaplan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. The same prediction follows from ‘hidde…
Meta-Metasemantics, or the Quest for the One True Metasemantics
What determines the meaning of a context-sensitive expression in a context? It is standardly assumed that, for a given expression type, there will be a unitary answer to this question; most of the literature on the subject involves arguments designed to show that one particular metasemantic proposal is superior to a specific set of alternatives. The task of the present essay will be to explore whether this is a warranted assumption, or whether th…
No context, no content, no problem
Recently, philosophers have offered compelling reasons to think that demonstratives are best represented as variables, sensitive not to the context of utterance, but to a variable assignment. Variablists typically explain familiar intuitions about demonstratives—intuitions that suggest that what is said by way of a demonstrative sentence varies systematically over contexts—by claiming that contexts initialize a particular assignment of values to …
Who’s Your Ideal Listener
It is increasingly common for philosophers to rely on the notion of an idealised listener when explaining how the semantic values of context-sensitive expressions are determined. Some have identified the semantic values of such expressions, as used on particular occasions, with whatever an appropriately idealised listener would take them to be. Others have argued that, for something to count as the semantic value, an appropriately idealised liste…
Complex demonstratives, hidden arguments, and presupposition
Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are. If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (in: Almog, Perry, Wettstein (eds) Themes from Kaplan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. The same prediction follows from ‘hidde…
Meta-Metasemantics, or the Quest for the One True Metasemantics
What determines the meaning of a context-sensitive expression in a context? It is standardly assumed that, for a given expression type, there will be a unitary answer to this question; most of the literature on the subject involves arguments designed to show that one particular metasemantic proposal is superior to a specific set of alternatives. The task of the present essay will be to explore whether this is a warranted assumption, or whether th…
Really Complex Demonstratives
I have two aims for the present paper, one narrow and one broad. The narrow aim is to show that a class of data originally described by Lynsey Wolter (That’s that; the semantics and pragmatics of demonstrative noun phrases, PhD thesis, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2006) empirically undermine the leading treatments of complex demonstratives that have been described in the literature. The broader aim of the paper is to show that Wolter d…
Sociolinguistic Variation, Speech Acts, and Discursive Injustice
Despite its status at the heart of a closely related field, philosophers have so far mostly overlooked a phenomenon sociolinguists call ‘social meaning’. My aim in this paper will be to show that by properly acknowledging the significance of social meanings, we can identify an important new set of forms that discursive injustice takes. I begin by surveying some data from variationist sociolinguistics that reveal how subtle differences in the way …
Sociolinguistic Variation, Slurs, and Speech Acts
In this paper, I argue that the ‘social meanings’ associated with sociolinguistic variation put pressure on the standard philosophical conception of language, according to which the foremost thing we do with words is exchange information. Drawing on parallels with the explanatory challenge posed by slurs and pejoratives, I argue that the best way to understand social meanings is to think of them in speech act theoretic terms, and I develop a dist…
Contrastive signaling without counterparts
The explanatory challenge posed by slurs is often framed as the challenge of explaining what makes a slur offensive when an extensionally equivalent ‘neutral counterpart’ is not. Sometimes this framing is merely illustrative, but sometimes it is theoretically significant. Proponents of a class of theories I will call ‘contrastive signaling theories’ claim that slurs are offensive in virtue of a contrast with their neutral counterparts. The idea t…
Computer Science (5 obras) · Epistemology (5 obras) · Philosophy (5 obras) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (4 obras) · Demonstrative (3 obras) · History (3 obras) · Linguistics (3 obras) · Psychology (3 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (3 obras) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (2 obras)