Descriptions

Team: Wojciech Rostworowski, Natalia Pietrulewicz

Publications

• Wojciech Rostworowski, Natalia Pietrulewicz (2018). “Are Descriptions Really Descriptive? An Experimental Study on Misdescription and Reference”, Review of Philosophy and Psychology. [PDF]
• Wojciech Rostworowski (2018). “Descriptions and Non-doxastic Attitudes Ascriptions”, Philosophical Studies 175(6), 1311–1331. [PDF]
• Wojciech Rostworowski (2014). “Definite descriptions and the argument from inference”, Philosophia 42(4), 1099–1109.

Project

The philosophy of language project “The attributive use of definite descriptions” aimed to describe attributive uses of descriptions at the pragmatic and semantic levels. More specifically, it analysed the processes involved in producing and understanding utterances containing attributively used descriptions and developed a formal semantic theory of the relevant sentences. The project included experiments on attributively used descriptions, led by Natalia Pietrulewicz. These studies provided the empirical basis for the proposed observations and hypotheses and tested the adequacy of intuitions about basic semantic properties of descriptions, such as applicability and reference.