Retraction Matters: New Developments in the Philosophy of Language (Synthese Library, 488)

This book offers the first sustained investigation of the phenomenon of retraction - the “taking back” of the conventional or deontic effects of a previous speech act - bringing together issues and solutions from the semantics of perspectival expressions and from the framework of Speech Act theory. It addresses questions that have been at the center of lively debates in philosophy of language and linguistics, but also draws out some of the ramifications these questions have for certain debates in the logic of discourse, philosophy of mind or experimental philosophy.

Many times, what we say on a certain occasion proves to be wrong. When we realize this, we sometimes react by retracting what was previously said – formally or informally, explicitly or not. The essays in this volume tackle issues such as what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for successfully performing a retraction, whether there is a solid empirical basis for retraction, whether the phenomenon can be used in favor or against certain semantics views, whether there is a type of retraction that is merely verbal, or what are the ethical implications of retraction. The volume brings together and puts in dialogue renowned researchers on these topics, serving both as a fixture for specialists and as an introduction into the topic of retraction.

Dan Zeman received his Ph.D. from the University of Barcelona in 2011. He was awarded post-doctoral grants at Institut Jean Nicod (2011-2013), Pompeu Fabra University (2013-2014), University of the Basque Country (2014-2017), University of Vienna (2017-2019), Slovak Academy of Sciences (2019-2020), University of Warsaw (2020-2024). He is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences. His main research area is the philosophy of language, in particular the semantics of various natural language expressions such as predicates of taste, aesthetic terms, indexicals, slurs, expressives and gender terms. He has published in Dialectica, Thought, Linguistics & Philosophy, Philosophia, Inquiry, Theoria, Analysis and has contributed to collective volumes such as Context-Dependence, Perspective, and Relativity (de Gruyter, 2010), Subjective Meaning: Alternatives to Relativism (de Gruyter, 2016), Meaning, Context, and Methodology (de Gruyter, 2017), The Architecture of Context and Context-Sensitivity (Springer, 2020), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism (Routledge, 2020). He is also a co-editor of the several special issues of journals, as well as of the volume Perspectives on Taste. Aesthetics, Language, Metaphysics, and Experimental Philosophy (Routledge 2022).

Mihai Hîncu received his B.A. from the University of Paris XII (2005), and his M.A. (2006) and Ph.D. (2012) from the University of Bucharest, with a thesis on the two-dimensional modal semantics of phenomenal concepts and a dissertation on the philosophical aspects and formal semantics of the intensionality effects induced by doxastic attitude ascriptions. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Romanian Academy, Iași Branch (2014-2015), and he is currently an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences, Letters and Communication, Valahia University, Romania. His main areas of specialization are the philosophy of language, formal semantics, and logic, while his areas of competence encompass formal epistemology, decision theory, and game theory. His research articles have appeared in venues such as Theoria, Logos & Episteme, Elsevier Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, and he is the co-editor (with Dan Zeman) of the Synthese Topical Collection "New Work on Disagreement" (Springer, 2021).