Conrad Friedrich

This thesis asks a simple question. Why is it that communication between two people succeeds? In other words, what makes it so that one person can signify whatever thought they are entertaining to another person, and that person will understand what the first wanted to say? Consequently, what are the conditions for success, and when does communication fail? This thesis takes a stance on these questions, and develops a framework for systematically explaining communicative success. I discuss relevant accounts of communication in the history of philosophy and contemporary accounts, and their contribution to what amounts to the Classical Model. The Classical Model answers the central questions of the thesis convincingly for many cases. But it faces serious challenges from a range of cases in which it seems difficult to impossible to determine a single proposition communicated. I look at, and critically discuss, a variety of current accounts intended to determine the content of such utterances, all of which give up some aspect of the Classical Model. This discussion calls for a solution, and I develop such a solution in detail. The model developed extends the Classical Model and makes it possible to determine a single proposition for the utterance’s content in all problematic cases. The thesis is maximally conservative w.r.t. the Classical Model. It explains communication with an explicit articulation of the Classical Model extended with a pragmatic way of determining truth conditions for utterances.

[This paper summarizes and utilizes some results of my thesis]. Successful literal communication has a standard explanation in analytic philosophy, which requires some determinate proposition expressed by the speaker to be taken up by the audience. In this paper, I extend the standard explanation of communication to account for cases of indeterminacy. Unlike other proposals, the extension does not give up that a unique proposition is communicated. What the audience takes up is a coarse-grained proposition—a good enough” answer to the question under discussion. I motivate this Coarse-Grained Model of communication from the central Gricean maxims.

In recent years, the semantics and epistemology of questions have become a topic of increased interest. See, for example, the literature on inquisitive semantics (see, e.g. Ciardelli et al., 2013, 2018), the central role played by questions in the so-called zetetic turn (see, e.g. Falbo, 2023; Friedman, n.d.; Thorstad, n.d.), and a variety of accounts employing a question under discussion (see, e.g. Beaver et al., 2017; Bowker, 2022; Hoek, 2018; Pollock, 2023; Schaffer and Knobe, 2012; Schoubye and Stokke, 2016; Simons et al., 2010; Skordos et al., 2022; Velleman and Beaver, 2016, with critical assessment by Buchanan and Ian Schiller, 2022; Picazo, 2022; van Elswyk, 2020). The standard account of what counts as an answer to a question is given by Roberts (2012). On the standard account, the denotation of a question is a potentially context-restricted set of propositions, the so-called question-alternatives. If a proposition entails the truth or falsity of such an alternative, it’s a partial answer to the question. If a proposition entails the truth or falsity of all question-alternatives, it’s a complete answer. However, relying on the standard account, as is commonly done, proves problematic. In this paper, I argue that the standard account both over-generates and under-generates as a characterization of an intuitive notion of what counts as an answer to a question. It over- generates, i.e. it is not sufficient, since there are plausible situations in which we would not count a proposition as an answer to a question, yet the proposition is an answer on the standard account. It also under-generates, i.e. it is not necessary, as there are quite quotidian situations in which we would count a proposition as an answer, but the proposition is neither a partial nor a complete answer under the standard account. I propose to fix the standard account to address these issues in two steps: (i) I extend the standard account by distinguishing not just partial and complete, but also weak answers. Weak answers do not entail the truth or falsity of a question-alternative, yet still provide some information w.r.t. the question. Additionally, answers can be just about the question (in the sense of Yablo, 2014). These are precise (weak, partial, or complete) answers. I study the relationship between these types of answers in detail. (ii) I observe that there seems to be some feature of the context of conversation that influences which responses to a question count as an answer. This feature requires a certain degree of informativeness of the response. The degree of informativeness is usefully represented in the hierarchy of types of answers studied in the first step (i). The upshot of the paper is thus two-fold: First, the extended standard account can adequately deal with the counter-examples of over-generation and under-generation presented. Second, what counts as an answer to a question is shown to be context-dependent in at least one novel way.

We probabilify the scenario approach to legal proof. The scenario approach searches for the scenario that strikes the best balance in explaining the available evidence, in fitting to general background beliefs, and in its degree of internal coherence. Our account provides a unified measure of the three dimensions in terms of probabilities, and so is proof that the scenario approach can be probabilified. Indeed, our account can be summarized by a version of Bayes Theorem: the most likely scenario in light of the evidence is the best. We thereby provide a Bayesian justification for the scenario approach.