LANGUAGE, REALITY, INQUIRY

April 25 (Friday), 2025
BME campus • Building E • Room 704
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Budapest, Hungary

MORNING SESSIONS: LANGUAGE AND INQUIRY
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9.30 Beáta Gyuris: Remarks on the bias profiles of polar interrogatives in Hungarian
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10.40—11.00 coffee break
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11.00 Miklós Márton and Tibor Bárány: Exhaustiveness, Normativity, and Communicative Responsibilities
12.10 Hans-Martin Gärtner: Anti-Skepticism Frankfurt-Style: Performative Self-Defeat Revisited
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13.20—14.00 lunch reception

AFTERNOON SESSIONS: LANGUAGE AND REALITY
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14.00 Dustin Gooßens: (Non-)Existence Entailments and Easy Ontology
15.10 Zsófia Zvolenszky: Varieties of artifactualism and the process of making a fictional character
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16.20—16.40 coffee break
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16.40 Dolf Rami: Existence and existential import between Herbart and Frege
17.50 Zoltán Szabó: Are modals quantifiers?
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19.00 Heading out for an informal wrap-up and evening together at one of the Bartók Béla Street cafés

Hans-Martin Gärtner

HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Hungary
hans-martin.gaertner@nytud.mta.hu

Anti-Skepticism Frankfurt-Style: Performative Self-Defeat Revisited

Diagnosing opponents' performative self-defeat (PSD) has been a key tool of (more or less ambitious variants of)"communicative rationality" in the Apel/Habermas tradition. Goal of the present talk is to take stock among notionsand inventories of PSD with particular focus on the nature and relevance of contributions to the debate by linguistics.

Dustin Gooßens

Ruhr-Universität Bochum/Institut für Philosophie I, Germany
dustin.goossens@rub.de

(Non-)Existence Entailments and Easy Ontology

This paper explores an interesting tension in the works of Amie Thomasson. As Thomasson made clear in(Thomasson, 2023), she thinks about her ‘easy ontology’ as embedded in a bigger project of deflating metaphysicsmore generally. A major part of her project is to deflate modal metaphysics by providing a theory of metaphysical modality analyzed as claims about semantic rules rather than any language-independent modal reality (Thomasson,2020). However, a tension in this project is revealed if we focus on the semantic rules governing ascriptions of existence and non-existence in natural language. While Easy ontology assumes that any successful reference entail sexistence (Thomasson, 2008), Rami and Köpping (2024) have pointed out a variety of existence-, and importantly, non-existence entailments in natural language. According to these entailments, successful reference can lead to the ascription of non-existence of the given object if the reference is done by the predication of a non-existence entailing property. Thus, from “Sherlock Holmes is a merely fictional detective” it is valid to infer that Sherlock Holmes doesnot exist. It is proposed that easy ontologists should respect the semantic rules governing the terms “existence” and “non-existence” and cut the tie between reference and existence in favor of a framework that accounts for the (non-)existence entailments found in natural language. The outlines of such a framework will be sketched and it will be shown how it can model necessary as well as contingent claims of (non-)existence before the background of a modal metaphysics similar to Thomasson’s modal normativism as developed in (Thomasson, 2020). In this way, the tension between easy ontology and modal expressivism, as found in the works of Thomasson, will be resolved.

Beáta Gyuris

HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Hungary, and
Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Hungary
gyuris.beata@btk.elte.hu

Remarks on the bias profiles of polar interrogatives in Hungarian

The paper reviews the form types available for realizing polar questions in Hungarian, including the positive andnegative polar interrogatives marked by a rise-fall tune and by the -e interrogative particle, as well as declaratives pronounced with a multiple rise-fall tune, together with their bias profiles. Then it provides a discussion about thepossibility of applying some of the current approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of questions to account for the data.

Miklós Márton and Tibor Bárány

MM: Faculty of Law, Center for Theory of Law and Society, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Hungary
marton@ajk.elte.hu
TB: Department of Sociology and Communication, Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), Budapest, Hungary
barany.tibor@gmail.com

Exhaustiveness, Normativity, and Communicative Responsibilities

In this paper we analyze and discuss Jennifer Saul’s account of the famous Gricean notions of ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’ and the alleged conflict between them and the so-called Speaker-Meaning Exhaustiveness Thesis (SMET), which is standardly attributed to Grice in the literature. SMET declares that speaker-meaning divides exhaustively into what is said and what is (conventionally or nonconventionally) implicated by the speaker. After a detailed interpretation of Saul’s position, we argue that her analysis partly misconstrues the relation between Grice’s theory of speaker-meaning and his normative account of conversational implicature. First of all, because SMET is nota genuine part of the Gricean theory of language and meaning – Grice was never committed to it. Secondly, Saul’s interpretation of the Gricean account of conversational implicature does not reflect accurately his original ideas. Although we agree with Saul that conversational implicature has an essential normative aspect, her account cannot capture well the real nature of this normativity, since it does not identify its source and does not delineate its scope. Finally, we present an alternative, speaker-oriented normative interpretation of Grice’s account of conversational implicatures, and argue that it fits better with the Gricean picture of communication and handles better the various problematic cases of conversational implicature than Saul’s mainly audience- oriented interpretation.

Dolf Rami

Ruhr-Universität Bochum/Institut für Philosophie I, Germany
Dolf.Rami@ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Existence and existential import between Herbart and Frege

In this paper, I will, firstly, systematically distinguish three different types of existential import: (a) existential entailments, (b) existential presuppositions, (c) implicit existential (co-)assertions. Secondly, I will argue that the best way to formulate the contents of existential import of all three types makes use of the existence predicate “exist” andnot of the existential “is”, the prefix “There is” or quantifiers expressions like “some” or “something”. Thirdly, I will briefly lay out different options how to conceive of the three distinguished types of existential import. Fourthly, I will reconstruct on the basis of the drawn distinctions and elucidations the views on this topic by Herbart, Drobisch,Ueberweg, Lotze, Sigwart and Frege.

Zoltán Szabó

Yale University, U.S.
zoltan.szabo@yale.edu

Are modals quantifiers?

Whether modals are quantifiers depends on two things: whether modal sentences have instances and whether they express generalizations over those instances. I will argue that the answer to the first question is positive, assuming we can deictically identify possibilities. But the answer to the second is negative. Modal sentences usually express comparisons among their instances, and as such, they are not mere generalizations over them.

Zsófia Zvolenszky

Department of Logic, Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Hungary zvolenszky.zsofia@btk.elte.hu

Varieties of artifactualism and the process of making a fictional character

What if you want to get to a certain local train stop and are told that no local service is running to thatdestination; meanwhile the express trains you could board take you way further than you had planned? It’swell to choose the train ride only if you are in a position to embrace the express stop available. This is thesituation that has recurringly been confronting philosophers over the past half century with respect to oneform of realism about fictional characters (FCs): artifactualism, according to which FCs are non-concretehuman-made objects, that is, non-concrete artifacts. Various influential arguments suggest that FC-artifactualism is an unavailable local stop on the artifactualism train which offers express service only. Onceon board that train, it inescapably wizzes one to a further-away express stop: artifactualism about the positsof failed scientific hypotheses like Babinet’s and LeVerrier’s hypothetical planet Vulcan. Some philosophers,among them Nathan Salmón and David Braun, have embraced that destination point. Others cautioned tostay off the artifactualism train altogether.
Can we instead find the elusive local train and disembark at FC-artifactualism without taking a stanceon artifactualism about the likes of Vulcan? I and others have been arguing that we can. Though the task isespecially challenging in the light of a phenomenon I had discussed in prior papers: I envisioned a (contrary to fact) scenario T in which Tolstoy, while writing War and Peace, “was under the mistaken impression thatthe protagonist, Prince Bolkonsky, like Napoleon (also featured in the novel), was a real person. Introducingthe name ‘Andrei Bolkonksy’, Tolstoy intended to refer to a historical figure he thought existed quiteindependently of his novel” (Zvolenszky 2016, “Fictional characters, mythical objects, and the phenomenon of in advertent creation”). If one is an artifactualist about FCs then in T, due to Tolstoy’s error, his novel-writing activity launched an FC-making process whose outcome was a new FC, Andrei Bolkonsky. Crucially, in T, Tolstoy’s process-launching was unintended, inadvertent. I had argued that such inadvertent authorial launchings are unmysterious and even expected given Saul Kripke’s general arguments about name-users’potential error that can, on occasion, afflict authors as well.
What exactly is the challenge for local-stop artifactualists in accommodating inadvertent launchings like Tolstoy of T’s? How can local-stop artifactualists respond to a Nathan-Salmón-inspired line that the artifactualism train runs express service only, and someone (like an author) inadvertently launching themaking of an artifact is a mold applicable to both Tolstoy of T and to Le Verrier’s mistaken theorizing about Vulcan? What’s at stake in locating that local stop on the artifactualism train?