James R. Shaw

I argue for two theses about semantically anomalous utterances (more commonly called "category mistakes") like "sequestered slaps reel evergreen rights". First, semantic anomaly generates a unique form of semantically enforced quantifier domain restriction. Second, the best explanation for why anomaly interacts with quantifiers in this way is that anomalous utterances are truth-valueless. After arguing for these points, I trace out two consequences these theses have in semantics and logic. First, I argue they motivate a trivalent semantics on which truth-valueless material has an unsual positive role to play in the compositional semantics of truth-evaluable utterances. Second, I argue that the interaction of anomaly with quantifiers generates a unique form of classical inference failure, and also provides special motivations for reconceptualizing our logical consequence relations.

Blackmail raises a pair of parallel legal and moral problems, sometimes referred to as the "paradox of blackmail". It is sometimes legal and morally permissible to ask someone for money, or to threaten to release harmful information about them, while it is illegal and morally impermissible to do these actions jointly. I address the moral version of this paradox by bringing instances of blackmail under a general account of wrongful coercion. According to this account, and contrary to the appearances which give rise to the paradox, threatening the release of harmful information to constrain another's actions is almost never morally impermissible unless it is likewise impermissible to carry out one's threat. To defend this claim I identify a special wrong that arises in the paradoxical cases of threatened information release. The account also resolves a number of other puzzles about blackmail—for example, why profiting from a threat in blackmail can sometimes be impermissible, even though accepting identical payment from an independent offer to retain the same information can be permissible.

I argue that on very weak assumptions about truth (in particular, that there are coherent norms governing the use of "true"), there is a proposition absolutely inexpressible with conventional language, or something very close. I argue for this claim "constructively": I use a variant of the Berry Paradox to reveal a particular thought for my readership to entertain that very strongly resists conventional expression. I gauge the severity of this expressive limitation within a taxonomy of expressive failures, and argue that despite its strength there is nothing incoherent about admitting its existence. The argument forms part of a project of clarifying precisely what trade-offs are required to secure the kinds of expressive power truth theorists typically want, in the process showing that the admission of very strong expressive limitations may ultimately prove to be the lesser of two evils.

The Sleeping Beauty puzzle has dramatized the divisive question of how de se beliefs should be integrated into formal theories of rational belief change. In this paper, I look ahead to a related question: how should de se beliefs be integrated into formal theories of rational choice? I argue that standard decision theoretic frameworks (e.g., Causal and Evidential Decision Theory) fail in special cases of de se uncertainty, like Sleeping Beauty. The nature of the failure reveals that sometimes rational choices are determined independently of one's credences in the kinds of "narrow" de se propositions that Sleepy Beauty has set in relief. Consequently, in addition to pinpointing a failure of standard decision theoretic frameworks, this result casts doubt on a large class of strategies for determining principles for the rational updating of de se beliefs in cases like Sleeping Beauty, and also calls into question the importance of making such a determination at all.

Cumming (2008) uses a puzzle about belief ascription to argue against a Millian semantics, and in favor of a semantics on which names are assigned denotations relative to a shiftable variable assignment. But a generalization of Cumming's puzzle involving definite descriptions shows that its solution shouldn't appeal to the influence of any shiftable parameters on overt referring expressions. As such the puzzle actually strengthens, rather than weakens, the Millian position. Instead, I argue, the force of the puzzle is to place special constraints on our accounts of de re belief ascription. To help bring out the nature of those constraints, I connect aspects of Cumming's puzzle to more familiar problems about belief ascription raised by Quine. I then defend three theses making up a skeletal account of de re belief ascription that promises to cope naturally with the variants of Cumming's puzzle, and integrate them into a broader theory of de re ascription.

I argue that a formal theory of truth, of the sort usually developed to cope with paradox, should also act as a compositional semantics for semantic vocabulary, and that providing such a theory faces an under-appreciated problem. Foundational programs in the philosophy of language, as well as some basic empirical data, require a special "benign" reflexivity in uses of semantic vocabulary that forces their compositional semantic values to be highly non-standard. In particular their semantic values cannot be modeled using extensions. This shows that standard model-theoretic semantics has an inadequate structure to capture the compositional behavior of a very important class of natural language predicates. In the process, this result also rules out a wide range of formal theories of truth (including Tarskian and Kripkean) as structurally inadequate. I explore how our compositional theories must be liberalized to accommodate the peculiarities of semantic terms and extract some important lessons from this liberalization.

This paper develops a particular formal implementation of truth-proceduralism: the view that the meanings of semantic terms like "true" are given by special kinds of rules for making stepwise assignments of semantic properties to utterances. The paper formulates and deploys new evolving semantic dependence relations making use of supervaluations that are specially tailored to the truth-proceduralist program, and integrates tools, such as generalized quantifiers, suited to capturing general semantic claims in a trivalent setting. The non-standard assignment of semantic properties embodied by the procedural conception of truth interacts with the characterization of semantic dependence to create the need for a special analog of a consistency result, which is proved. The paper then explores the extent to which the resulting system is adequately able to state particular and general facts about its own semantic structure, including its own logic.