Friday, November 4: Patrick Muñoz

Please join us this Friday as Patrick Muñoz from the Linguistics Department presents work on experience and assertion.

Date and time: Friday, November 4, 10:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m.

Location: Stuart 209 (Philosophy seminar room)

Title: Experiential evidence and norms of assertion

Abstract:

Predications with experiential adjectives, whether evaluative (tasty) or not (salty), and with sensory verbs (taste), give rise to implications that the speaker has had the relevant experiential contact with the target of predication (e.g., tasting it). These implications resist the profile of conversational implicatures, being overtly indefeasible, and presuppositions, not projecting out of classic presupposition-holes, unlike similar experience implications that result from grammatical markers, like subjective attitude verbs (find the soup tasty) and experiencer PPs (tasty to me), which exhibit classic presuppositional behavior. Following recent work by Dilip Ninan, I cast these implications as the result of Moorean epistemic constraints on assertion. In particular, I appeal to von Fintel & Gilles’ recent account of epistemic modality, and their division of knowledge into (i) a privileged, directly known set of propositions determined by an epistemic ‘kernel,’ and (ii) the logical consequences of these, which include indirect knowledge. I propose an epistemic norm of assertion to the effect that speakers can only assert what is determined by this former privileged class. This, combined with a semantics for experiential verbs and adjectives that has them denote sensory qualities only knowable directly from the relevant sort of experience, explains why use of them commits the speaker to having had such experience unless an evidential marker of indirectness is used. It also explains via a Gricean Q-implicature why only the relevant sort of experience degrades indirectness markers (?the soup must be tasty, when one has already tasted the soup). I demonstrate that the revised norm of assertion makes independently desirable predictions, and that the sorts of lexical items that participate in these implications are just those that take experiencer PPs, giving us a new diagnostic for experiencer semantics.

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