The Quietist’s Gambit

In this paper I develop a semantic theory of vagueness that is immune to worries regarding the use of precise mathematical tools. I call this view semantic quietism. This view has the advantage of being clearly compatible with the phenomenon of vagueness. The cost is that it cannot capture every robust semantic fact.

The Quietist’s Gambit

In this paper I develop a semantic theory of vagueness that is immune to worries regarding the use of precise mathematical tools. I call this view semantic quietism. This view has the advantage of being clearly compatible with the phenomenon of vagueness. The cost is that it cannot capture every robust semantic fact.

The Nature of Fiction/al Utterances

In this paper, first of all, I want to try a new defense of the utterance approach as to the relationship between fictional and nonfictional works on the one hand and between fictional and nonfictional utterances on the other hand, notably the idea that the distinction between fictional and nonfictional works is derivative on the distinction between fictional and nonfictional utterances of the sentences that constitute a text. Moreover, I want to account for the second distinction in minimally contextualist semantic terms. Finally, I want to hold that what makes a fictional utterance, hence a fictional work, properly fictional is the contextually pre-semantic fact that its utterer entertains an act of make-believe, where such an act is accounted for in metarepresentational terms. This ultimately means that the fiction/nonfiction distinction is not clarified in terms of the fictional works/nonfictional works distinction, for things rather go the other way around.

Atlas and Axis

Pease ad loc.: ‘Roman writers often use axis… in a figurative sense… for the caelum as a whole, and in our passage, while the force is applied by Atlas to the axis of the sphere, yet the whole sphere is apparently in mind, as the phrase stellis ardentibus aptum indicates.’ It is lexicographical commonplace that axis is used, especially in the poets, as a synonym for the sky, yet the oddity of the synecdoche by which a scientific, or pseudoscientific, term for the axis of the universe is transferred to mean the heavens in general has been little commented on; unanalytic recognition of the semantic fact is the norm (e.g. ‘aus einem bestimmten mathematischen Begriffe eine… allgemeine, unbestimmte Vorstellung’). I believe that a more precise account of this transference can be given, and in particular I will argue that Virgilian usage in the Aeneid is central to the history of this process.