conceptual

  Maps with big red dots saying "You are there" make no sense. They can only say “You are here”. Why? You are here! Niseko Station, Hokkaido David McKelvey (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 2010) According to Casati (forthcoming), it is because of the way the map is drawn, you can only understand the map (and read the sign that says “you are here”) if you are close enough, and if you are that close the truth of the claim that “you are here” is warranted. That is how you KNOW that that part of the map represents your current location. But, Casati adds, situation is not the only way to achieve epistemic segregation. Consider a map on a huge billboard on top of a distant building or, even farther away, drawn on the surface of the moon in such a way that it can be seen from many different places with a huge red dot saying “you are here” such that it can be seen both from places corresponding to the red dot in the map (which is actually pretty far from where the map is actually located) and pla...

  In “presupposition and conversational implicature”, Grice is interested in the question of whether what Strawson called “presupposition” was something that could be accounted for in terms of conversational implicature or some similar   (what we would now call) pragmatic mechanism. He considers several examples, but cares mostly about the existential presupposition of (utterances of sentences containing) definite descriptions, factives and what Robert Stainton and myself have called “Quasi-factives”, i.e., sentences like: Peter does not regret inviting Joanna to the party. which, when asserted, defeasibly but strongly imply the truth of their complement (in this case, that Peter invited Joanna to the party). According to Grice, the existential presupposition of definite descriptions can be easily accounted for by appealing to a norm of manner according to which it is bad manners to hide the main point of your assertion (my phrasing, not his). This is what he calls the princip...