Eliot Michaelson
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 951538 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Eliot Michaelson |
| PRENOMES | Eliot |
| SOBRENOME | Michaelson |
| ASSINATURA | MICHAELSON E |
| AFILIAÇÕES | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2181-5423 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 17 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 12 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 16 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2016 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 1 |
Online Communication
For billions of people, the internet has become a second home. It is where we meet friends and strangers, where we organise and learn, debate, deceive, and do business. In some respects, it is like the town square it was once claimed to be, while in others, it provides a strange new mode of interaction whose influence on us we are yet to understand. This collection of papers aims to give a short indication of some of the exciting philosophical wo…
What is the proper function of language
It doesn't have (just) one, and this matters for how we ought to pursue a theory of meaning and communication
Talking About
Journal Article Talking About: An Intentionalist Theory of Reference Get access Talking About: An Intentionalist Theory of Reference. By Elmar Unnsteinsson. (Oxford: OUP, 2022. Pp. xii + 202. Price £64.00.) Eliot Michaelson Eliot Michaelson King’s College London, UK https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2181-5423 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, pqad089, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqad089…
The Vagaries of References
Evans (1973)’s Madagascar case and other cases like it have long been taken to represent a serious challenge for the Causal Theory of Names. The present essay answers this challenge on behalf of the causal theorist. The key is to treat acts of uttering names as events. Like other events, utterances of names sometimes turn out to have features which only become clear in retrospect
Should moral intuitionism go social
In recent work, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau (2020) develop a new social version of moral intuitionism that promises to explain why our moral intuitions are trustworthy. In this paper, we raise several worries for their account and present some general challenges for the broader class of views we call Social Moral Intuitionism . We close by reflecting on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau's comparison between what they call the “perceptual pr…
Tolerating Sense Variation
Frege famously claimed that variations in the sense of a proper name can sometimes be ‘tolerated’. In this paper, we offer a novel explanation of this puzzling claim. Frege, we argue, follows Trendelenburg in holding that we think in language—sometimes individually and sometimes together. Variations in sense can be tolerated in just those cases where we are using language to coordinate our actions but are not engaged in thinking together about an…
Unspeakable names
There are some names which cannot be spoken and others which cannot be written, at least on certain very natural ways of conceiving of them. Interestingly, this observation proves to be in tension with a wide range of views about what names are. Prima facie , this looks like a problem for predicativists. Ultima facie , it turns out to be equally problematic for Millians. For either sort of theorist, resolving this tension requires embracing a rev…
Speaker's reference, semantic reference, sneaky reference
According to what is perhaps the dominant picture of reference, what a referential term refers to in a context is determined by what the speaker intends for her audience to identify as the referent. I argue that this sort of broadly Gricean view entails, counterintuitively, that it is impossible to knowingly use referential terms in ways that one expects or intends to be misunderstood. Then I sketch an alternative which can better account for suc…
Daylight savings
Significant variations in the way objects appear across different viewing conditions pose a challenge to the view that they have some true, determinate color. This view would seem to require that we break the symmetry between multiple appearances in favor of a single variant. A wide range of philosophical and non-philosophical writers have held that the symmetry can be broken by appealing to daylight viewing conditions—that the appearances of obj…
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…
How to Count Animals, More or Less
You’ve just been named to your university’s animal research committee. Keen to prove to your colleagues from around the university that philosophy isn’t just an idle wheel, you decide to brush up on the latest thinking on questions like: when, if ever, should we be willing to trade off animal welfare against expected future human welfare? Or perhaps you don’t like thinking in terms of welfare. In that case: when, if ever, is it permissible for us…
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…
The big shill
Shills are people who endorse products and companies for pay, while pretending that their endorsements are ingenuous. Here we argue that there is something objectionable about shilling that is not reducible to its bad consequences, the lack of epistemic conscientiousness it often relies upon, or to the shill's insincerity. Indeed, we take it as a premise of our inquiry that shilling can sometimes be sincere, and that its wrongfulness is not mitig…
What's New About Fake News
The term "fake news" ascended rapidly to prominence in 2016 and has become a fixture in academic and public discussions, as well as in political mud-slinging. In the flurry of discussion, the term has been applied so broadly as to threaten to render it meaningless. In an effort to rescue our ability to discuss—and combat—the underlying phenomenon that triggered the present use of the term, some philosophers have tried to characterize it more prec…
Lying
Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics is the first dedicated collection of philosophical essays on the emerging topic of lying. While philosophers have been thinking about lying for several thousand years, only recently has this topic emerged as a sustained locus of inquiry, one which has proved equally of interest to philosophers of language, epistemologists, ethicists, and political philosophers. The essays in this volume embrace the…
Negligent Falsehood, White Ignorance, and False News
There has been considerable attention in philosophy to the deliberate propagation of falsehoods, either through their assertion (as in lying); or through implicating them by way of true assertions (as in misleading). But there are other important ways that falsehoods are propagated. This chapter focuses on ways that falsehoods may be negligently propagated by true utterances, with a particular focus on what happens when this occurs in communities…
Doing without believing
Doing without believing
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…
Doing without believing
Lying
Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics is the first dedicated collection of philosophical essays on the emerging topic of lying. While philosophers have been thinking about lying for several thousand years, only recently has this topic emerged as a sustained locus of inquiry, one which has proved equally of interest to philosophers of language, epistemologists, ethicists, and political philosophers. The essays in this volume embrace the…
Negligent Falsehood, White Ignorance, and False News
There has been considerable attention in philosophy to the deliberate propagation of falsehoods, either through their assertion (as in lying); or through implicating them by way of true assertions (as in misleading). But there are other important ways that falsehoods are propagated. This chapter focuses on ways that falsehoods may be negligently propagated by true utterances, with a particular focus on what happens when this occurs in communities…
What's New About Fake News
The term "fake news" ascended rapidly to prominence in 2016 and has become a fixture in academic and public discussions, as well as in political mud-slinging. In the flurry of discussion, the term has been applied so broadly as to threaten to render it meaningless. In an effort to rescue our ability to discuss—and combat—the underlying phenomenon that triggered the present use of the term, some philosophers have tried to characterize it more prec…
The big shill
Shills are people who endorse products and companies for pay, while pretending that their endorsements are ingenuous. Here we argue that there is something objectionable about shilling that is not reducible to its bad consequences, the lack of epistemic conscientiousness it often relies upon, or to the shill's insincerity. Indeed, we take it as a premise of our inquiry that shilling can sometimes be sincere, and that its wrongfulness is not mitig…
Daylight savings
Significant variations in the way objects appear across different viewing conditions pose a challenge to the view that they have some true, determinate color. This view would seem to require that we break the symmetry between multiple appearances in favor of a single variant. A wide range of philosophical and non-philosophical writers have held that the symmetry can be broken by appealing to daylight viewing conditions—that the appearances of obj…
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…
How to Count Animals, More or Less
You’ve just been named to your university’s animal research committee. Keen to prove to your colleagues from around the university that philosophy isn’t just an idle wheel, you decide to brush up on the latest thinking on questions like: when, if ever, should we be willing to trade off animal welfare against expected future human welfare? Or perhaps you don’t like thinking in terms of welfare. In that case: when, if ever, is it permissible for us…
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…
Speaker's reference, semantic reference, sneaky reference
According to what is perhaps the dominant picture of reference, what a referential term refers to in a context is determined by what the speaker intends for her audience to identify as the referent. I argue that this sort of broadly Gricean view entails, counterintuitively, that it is impossible to knowingly use referential terms in ways that one expects or intends to be misunderstood. Then I sketch an alternative which can better account for suc…
The Vagaries of References
Evans (1973)’s Madagascar case and other cases like it have long been taken to represent a serious challenge for the Causal Theory of Names. The present essay answers this challenge on behalf of the causal theorist. The key is to treat acts of uttering names as events. Like other events, utterances of names sometimes turn out to have features which only become clear in retrospect
Should moral intuitionism go social
In recent work, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau (2020) develop a new social version of moral intuitionism that promises to explain why our moral intuitions are trustworthy. In this paper, we raise several worries for their account and present some general challenges for the broader class of views we call Social Moral Intuitionism . We close by reflecting on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau's comparison between what they call the “perceptual pr…
Tolerating Sense Variation
Frege famously claimed that variations in the sense of a proper name can sometimes be ‘tolerated’. In this paper, we offer a novel explanation of this puzzling claim. Frege, we argue, follows Trendelenburg in holding that we think in language—sometimes individually and sometimes together. Variations in sense can be tolerated in just those cases where we are using language to coordinate our actions but are not engaged in thinking together about an…
Unspeakable names
There are some names which cannot be spoken and others which cannot be written, at least on certain very natural ways of conceiving of them. Interestingly, this observation proves to be in tension with a wide range of views about what names are. Prima facie , this looks like a problem for predicativists. Ultima facie , it turns out to be equally problematic for Millians. For either sort of theorist, resolving this tension requires embracing a rev…
Online Communication
For billions of people, the internet has become a second home. It is where we meet friends and strangers, where we organise and learn, debate, deceive, and do business. In some respects, it is like the town square it was once claimed to be, while in others, it provides a strange new mode of interaction whose influence on us we are yet to understand. This collection of papers aims to give a short indication of some of the exciting philosophical wo…
What is the proper function of language
It doesn't have (just) one, and this matters for how we ought to pursue a theory of meaning and communication
Talking About
Journal Article Talking About: An Intentionalist Theory of Reference Get access Talking About: An Intentionalist Theory of Reference. By Elmar Unnsteinsson. (Oxford: OUP, 2022. Pp. xii + 202. Price £64.00.) Eliot Michaelson Eliot Michaelson King’s College London, UK https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2181-5423 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, pqad089, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqad089…
Epistemology (16 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Computer Science (11 obras) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (8 obras) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (7 obras) · Psychology (6 obras) · Sociology (6 obras) · History (5 obras) · Linguistics (5 obras) · Law (3 obras)