- University of Oxford
- Fulford Clarendon Associate Professor
- Affiliation During NDIAS Fellowship: Princeton University
- Residential Fellow (2010-2011)
- “Semantics and Pragmatics in Cognitive Science: The Open Instruction Theory of Attitude Report Sentences, Descriptions and the Necker Cube”
Philipp Koralus specializes on the intersection of the philosophy of language and mind, linguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. His current research focuses on the development of an approach to the philosophy of language that connects with cognitive science more substantively than traditional approaches. He is working on a new theory of the semantics and pragmatics of proper names, descriptions,and mental state verbs that is integrated with syntactic theory and the psychology of reasoning. He is also working on a new neural network model of the perceptual mechanisms recruited by the Necker cube, motivated by an application of the methods of semantic analysis to vision. The broader aim of Koralus’ research is to investigate the following bold hypothesis: beyond the contributions of domain-specific “semantic features,” both vision and language are based on the same principles of “inference to the best interpretation,” centered on the idea that we treat perceptual input as answers to our background questions.
Professor Koralus is collaborating with researchers at Dartmouth and Duke on a neuroimaging project that is providing evidence that the brain systems underlying moral judgments about different types of transgressions are less unified than has been thought. He also maintains an interest in political philosophy, specifically concepts of political freedom
Publications
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The Open Instruction Theory of Attitude Reports and the Pragmatics of Answers
Philosophers' Imprint, 2012
Reports on beliefs, desires, and other attitudes continue to raise foundational questions about linguistic meaning and the pragmatics of utterance interpretation. There is a strong intuition that an attitude report like ‘John believes that Mary smokes’ can simply convey the singular proposition that the individual Mary is believed by John to have the property of smoking. Yet, there is also a strong intuition that ‘Lois believes that Superman can fly’ can additionally convey how an individual is represented (viz. as a superhero not as a reporter). Cases of this sort can be generated with any name in a suitable context (Kripke 1979). It is far from settled how this should be explained. I propose the Open Instruction Theory (OIT), according to which the linguistic meaning of attitude report sentences consists in instructions to create mental models, where those instructions leave open, depending on the state of the discourse, the possibility of singular interpretations as well as of complex interpretations including information about ways of representing. The account makes precise the idea that attitude report sentences with proper names are semantically nonspecific (Soames 2004), rather than indexical (Schiffer 2000), yielding predictions about syntactic constraints on interpretation. On this view, linguistic meaning itself does not provide determinate propositions. Since Gricean pragmatics requires determinate propositions as input, I propose new principles of pragmatics for literal utterance interpretation that do not require them but remain strongly constrained by linguistic meaning. The core principle is “inference to the most responsive interpretation.” Roughly, among the range of literal interpretations allowed by linguistic meaning, the listener generates the one that most fully answers the background question she seeks to answer by engaging in discourse. The pragmatics of literal utterance interpretation is the pragmatics of interpreting potential answers, even if communicative intention may be more important for conversational implicature. The account predicts cases in which our interpretations differ from what we would take the speaker to have had in mind. Singular interpretations of attitude reports have a special status as default interpretations. I suggest some advantages of OIT over indexicalist, DRT, and free enrichment theories. I argue that to the extent that we have to go beyond a strict principle of linguistic constraint (Stanley 2005), we should aim toward a principle of psychological constraint.