Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía

Evaluating Panpsychism

Sergio Cermeño Aínsa — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, I evaluate which version of panpsychism is best suited to address the challenges faced by a theory of consciousness. I first argue that a panpsychist theory is more likely to be successful if it meets two conditions: (1) it must be compatible with the Integrated Information Theory (IIT), and (2) it must provide at least a preliminary indication of how to solve the combination problem. I consider three main versions of panpsychism: constitutive panpsychism micropanpsychism and cosmopanpsychism), emergent panpsychism (strong and weak), and panprotopsychism (panqualitivist and panexperientialist). I conclude that weak emergent panpsychism, together with the two variants of panprotopsychism (panqualitivism and panexperientialism), or a combination of these approaches, shows genuine potential for panpsychism to remain a coherent and viable position.

Nota del editor

Santiago Echeverri — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract

Dos formas de inhibición de la lectura referencial de los indéxicos puros

Shana Pardo — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article aims to explain the non-referential uses of referential expressions through the concept of inhibition. Taking functional referentialism as a starting point, I analyze how different inhibitors affect different types of pure indexicals. Based on this analysis, I characterize two forms of inhibition of the referential reading of pure indexicals: temporal inhibition, generated by temporal adverbs of frequency, and quantificational inhibition, produced by universal and existential quantifiers. I conclude that inhibition offers a systematic account of the non-referential uses of pure indexicals and allows for a better understanding of how certain linguistic constructions modify their interpretation.

Verdad a través de los contextos. Funcionalismo, pragmatismo y expresiones veritativas

José Andrés Forero-Mora — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This text presents a functionalist analysis of truth-expressions. In the first section, Ezcurdia’s functionalism is interpreted as a pragmatist position. The second section analyzes the function of truth ascriptions and the specific contribution of truth-expressions to them. These expressions enable truth ascriptions to serve as tools for asserting propositions and expressing certain features of the ongoing speech act. In the third section, it is argued that, because of their nature, truth ascriptions can express different contents in different contexts while maintaining a constant role across them.

Indexicals: A Problem for Chalmers' Two-Dimensional Semantics

Stefan Rinner — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As Chalmers himself notes, his two-dimensional semantics leads to the problem of how scenarios, i.e. epistemically possible worlds, can best represent the information who I am, where I am, and what time it is now. For Chalmers, the natural solution to this problem of indexicality is to identify scenarios with centered worlds: ordered tuples of (possible) worlds, individuals, times, and places. According to such a solution, two arbitrary tokens of ‘now’ and ‘here’ (respectively) have the same primary (or epistemic) intension, picking out the time/place marked at the center of any given scenario. Against this, I will object that there are a posteriori true, i.e. epistemically contingent, utterances of both ‘Now = now’ and ‘Here = here’. Since identifying scenarios with centered worlds seems to be the natural solution to the problem of indexicality, this will undermine Chalmers’ two-dimensional semantics.

A Criterion of Literality for Names

Nikhil Mahant — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years, several kinds of non-referential uses of names have received attention within semantics. However, the lack of a principled basis for drawing the distinction between uses that a semantic theory of names must account for (‘literal’ uses) and other uses that it need not explain by itself (‘non-literal uses’) represents an important deficiency in the debate. A prominent objection (the ‘Sceptic’s Challenge’) against semantic views that treat predicative uses as literal exemplifies the kind of problem that can result from this deficiency. This article proposes a general manner of drawing the line between literal and non-literal uses of names. Further, by providing a rationale for treating predicative uses as literal, it also provides a response to the Sceptic’s Challenge.

An Externalist and Contextualist Account of Copredication

Daniel Molto — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I maintain that polysemy is a contextual phenomenon, but that the nature of the context-dependence of polysemy has been misunderstood, a fact which is brought out by the especially difficult case of copredication. In this paper, I offer a truth-conditional semantics that can accommodate copredicative sentences, in which polysemous terms are being used in more than one sense, and thus have more than one extension simultaneously. I argue, further, that my account is compatible with externalism, which is significant because the existence of polysemy is often thought to pose a problem for externalism. Context is required to play an important role in this semantics, which, as I will show, is substantially different from accounts currently on the market.

Scenario-Building in Linguistic Understanding

Rayan Geha — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Navigating the impasse between rule-based literalism and radical contextualism, this article addresses a central challenge for both: explaining how speakers effortlessly understand deviant or novel utterances. It proposes a scenario-building model that treats understanding as a dynamic, collaborative process in which linguistic conventions function as scaffolding for the joint construction of plausible interpretive scenarios. By integrating insights from the epistemology of understanding, the model seeks to demonstrate that communicative success is a matter of degree, determined by the overlap between the scenarios constructed by speakers and hearers and by successful intention recognition. This provides a structured framework for modeling partial understanding and communicative alignment.