Browsing by Subject "Assertion"
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Item Assertion and belief without knowledge(2010-12) McGlynn, Aidan Neil; Sainsbury, R. M. (Richard Mark)Recent epistemology has been dominated by the knowledge first approach championed by Timothy Williamson and others, and its influence continues to grow, spreading into the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and beyond. Proponents of the knowledge first approach have argued for the centrality and importance of knowledge in these areas of philosophy by arguing that there is something wrong with asserting or believing something that one doesn’t know, that assertion and belief are to be understood in terms of knowledge, and that a knowledge‐maximizing principle of charity is constitutive of the contents of one’s assertions and beliefs. I attack the knowledge first approach by developing more plausible accounts of assertion, belief, and the determination of content that break these supposed ties with knowledge.Item Information structure and mood selection in Spanish complement clauses(2010-12) Lascurain, Paxti; Koike, Dale April; Luj�n, Marta; Mej�as-Bikandi, Errapel; Salaberry, Rafael; Nishida, ChiyoThe general goal of this dissertation is to highlight the role of discourse pragmatics in the explanation of the use of the indicative and subjunctive moods in Spanish sentential complements. This dissertation examines mood selection in Spanish complements in order to illustrate the shortcomings of the traditional semantic/syntactic approach (Terrell & Hooper (1974), Hooper (1975), P. Klein (1974), Fukushima (1978-79), Bell (1980), and Takagaki (1984)) and to provide within the Information Structure framework (Lambrecht 1994; 2001) a detailed analysis of mood selection in Spanish complement clauses. Considering some existing pragmatic approaches to Spanish mood selection (e.g., Lavandera 1983, Guitart 1991, Mejías-Bikandi 1994, 1998), they are found to be inadequate because they are based on decontextualized sentences. This dissertation considers the context where sentences take place and contributes to our understanding of mood selection in Spanish complements as a formal reflection of the pragmatic properties and relations of the discourse referents that are denoted by noun complements, considering pragmatic notions of presupposition and assertion of propositional referents, their activation, and the pragmatic relations of topic/focus of these referents in the utterances. The notion of pragmatic assertion used in this dissertation is based on the notion of speaker intent, and it is equated with the notion of inactive discourse referents, which are in turn linked to the use of indicative mood in complements of assertive matrices. The notion of pragmatic presupposition is equated with the notion of active referents in the discourse, which are in turn linked to the use of subjunctive mood in complements of doubt/negation and comment matrices. However, this thesis argues that not all uses of subjunctive are motivated by the active status of propositional referents. Volitional and possibility uses of subjunctive are analyzed, similarly to assertive matrices, as activating a discourse referent. Yet, contrary to assertive matrices, and following Fauconnier’s (1985) theory of mental spaces, the referent activated belongs to the domain that represents an individual’s view of reality. This account of mood distribution in complement clauses is eventually extended to adjectival and adverbial subordinates and provides an explanation of mood distribution in all subordinate contexts in Spanish.