We have two aims in this paper: (1) to taxonimise the literature on machine speech, (2) to evaluate whether the question of machine speech is worth asking.
Firstly, we suggest that responses fall into two camps: superficialists and deepists.
Superficialists think that we can discern whether a machine speaks by considering its outward properties. Any system rightly viewed under the intentional stance (Dennett 1989), or 'meets all the a priori constraints' on the concept of speaking (Chalmers 2023) thereby counts as speaking.
Conversely, deepists think we should look “under the hood” to details like algorithms and computational processes. Deepists may think that speaking requires intentionality, which requires 'internal causal powers equivalent to those of brains' (Seale 1980), or that current LLM-based systems are mere stochastic parrots (Bender and Koller 2020).
We then argue that the question of machine speech is not worth asking. Our guide is Turing, who thinks that the question of machine intelligence is "too meaningless to deserve discussion" (1950:442). We concur: despite progress in our understanding of meaning and communication, these key notions are still too undetermined. What we should ask, instead, is how to go on using ‘speaks’.
Izydora Dąmbska and Maria Kokoszyńska may be listed among the most accomplished philosophers of twentieth century philosophy. Despite this, their work has been largely underappreciated, especially by truth-theorists working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. I seek to rectify this injustice by showing how their ideas represent an important innovation in truth-theory. Izydora Dąmbska has argued that the concept of truth does not boil down to a choice between different theories of truth, i.e., correspondence, coherence, or pragmatic. Her reason for holding this position is that linguistic concepts, such as truth, cannot escape the confines of language. For Dąmbska, the concept of truth cannot be primitive since it is inextricable from language. We must, she says, return to the “epistemological issue of the definition of truth” (2015, p. 146). Maria Kokoszyńska’s two-fold attack against truth relativism, which is an amplification and formalisation of Twardowski’s argument in “On So-Called Relative Truth” (1901), serves as an epistemological foundation for a theory of truth. Using Kokoszyńska’s argument from illusion and argument for a principle of charity, I show how Dąmbska and Kokoszyńska’s work suggest a way forward for functionalism about truth.
I am Assistant Vice-Chancellor Sustainability, as well as Senior Lecturer and Graduate Advisor in the Philosophy Programme at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand. I am also Director of the Waikato University Experimental Philosophy Research... Read More →
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
According to Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP) and maxim of Quality, it is rational to presume our interlocutors are being truthful, or at least, are trying to be truthful during conversation. However, I argue that presuming the truthfulness of an interlocutor, i.e the maxim of Quality holds, is not necessary for the CP to be operative. More generally, I argue that the CP and Grice’s conversational maxims come apart; a common misunderstanding is to take the conversational maxims as part of what it means to be cooperative, but Grice’s maxims are only generated by specifying the goal of conversation as the maximal exchange of information in conjunction with the CP. The second aim of my paper is to analyse a conversational context where the goal is not the maximal exchange of information: the British comedy panel show Would I Lie to You?, where panellists are "cross-examined" and tasked to deceive each other. I argue that it is rational to presume that one’s interlocutor is both trying to deceive and trying to be truthful in the show’s context, as part of what it means to uphold cooperativity.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Traditional conceptual analysis aims at reaching reductive definitions of properties or relations (e.g. goodness) by investigating the conceptual meanings of natural language terms (e.g. 'good'). This project stands largely in disrepute today following the development of semantic externalism ("meaning ain't in the head") and the popular appeal of the Millian view that the meaning of a referring term is just its reference. I propose a way of reconciling traditional (non-Canberra) conceptual analysis with Millianism specifically for property-predicating terms like 'good', drawing on the ideology that the mark of the mental is intentionality (Brentano). Our concept of a thing (or its cognitive significance) just is an individuating property of that thing. In the case of entity- or substance-referring terms like 'Aristotle' and 'water', our concept must be distinct from the meaning or reference. But in the case of property-predicating terms like 'good' there is another, direct option: our concept may just be the property itself. In this case, conceptual analysis is metaphysical reduction.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Abstract from our paper published in Synthese (2025): Recently, non-realist cognitivism has been charged with failing to meet various semantic challenges. According to one such challenge, the non-realist cognitivist must provide a non-trivial account of the meaning and truth conditions of moral claims. In this paper, we discuss the various strategies proposed to overcome this challenge. Our aim is to propose a new semantics, a Meinongian referential semantics that is based on truthmaker theory. The consequences of our proposal are two-fold. First, it alleviates objections raised against previous Meinongian semantic approaches. Second, adopting the novel semantics highlights the great theoretical flexibility of non-realist cognitivism.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 9:30pm - 10:25pm AEST ONLINE ONLY
Some have argued that "believes that p" is a vague predicate; others have denied it. However, none have applied the standard diagnostics to test this claim. I intend to do just that.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST Steele-206
