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10The Treatise on Univocation is an early work on the fallacy called univocation. This fallacy is a kind of ambiguity due to the shifted reference of words in a sentence when the ambiguity does not fall under the well-known Aristotelian kinds (equivocation, composition and division, . . .). Examples include the shift of reference of common terms due to tense and modality; e.g. the shift whereby the reference of 'giraffe' is extended to past or future giraffes when the tense of the sentence 'A gira…Read more
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12Meinong und die GegenstandstheorieGrazer Philosophische Studien 50 145-161. 1995.It is tempting to think that Meinong overlooked the "specific/nonspecific" distinction. For example, 'I am looking for a grey horse' may either mean that there is a specific horse I am looking for, or just that I am grey-horse-seeking. The former reading, and not the latter, requires for its truth that there be a grey horse. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether it is defensible to maintain Meinong's theory here: to take nonspecific reading of any verb concerning a possibly non-exi…Read more
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34Indeterminacy of Identity of Objects: An Exercise in Metaphysical AestheticsIn A. Orenstein & Petr Kotatko (eds.), Knowledge, Language and Logic: Questions for Quine, Kluwer Academic Print On Demand. pp. 213--224. 2000.
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147Events in the Semantics of English: A Study in Subatomic SemanticsMIT Press. 1990.This extended investigation of the semantics of event (and state) sentences in their various forms is a major contribution to the semantics of natural language, simultaneously encompassing important issues in linguistics, philosophy, and logic. It develops the view that the logical forms of simple English sentences typically contain quantification over events or states and shows how this view can account for a wide variety of semantic phenomena. Focusing on the structure of meaning in English se…Read more
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101Anaphoric pronouns in very late medieval supposition theoryLinguistics and Philosophy 17 (5). 1994.This paper arose from an attempt to determine how the very late medieval1 supposition theorists treated anaphoric pronouns, pronouns whose significance is derivative from their antecedents. Modern researches into pronouns were stimulated in part by the problem of "donkey sentences" discussed by Geach 1962 in a section explaining what is wrong with medieval supposition theory. So there is some interest in seeing exactly what the medieval account comes to, especially if it turns out, as I suspect,…Read more
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138The progressive in English: Events, states and processes (review)Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (2). 1989.This paper has two goals. The first is to formulate an adequate account of the semantics of the progressive aspect in English: the semantics of Agatha is making a cake, as opposed to Agatha makes a cake. This account presupposes a version of the so-called Aristotelian classification of verbs in English into EVENT, PROCESS and STATE verbs. The second goal of this paper is to refine this classification so as to account for the infamous category switch problem, the problem of how it is that modific…Read more
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157Supposition as Quantification versus Supposition as Global Quantificational EffectTopoi 16 (1): 41-63. 1997.This paper follows up a suggestion by Paul Vincent Spade that there were two Medieval theories of the modes of personal supposition. I suggest that early work by Sherwood and others was a study of quantifiers: their semantics and the effects of context on inferences that can be made from quantified terms. Later, in the hands of Burley and others, it changed into a study of something else, a study of what I call global quantificational effect. For example, although the quantifier in ‘¬∀xPx’ is un…Read more
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11Modifiers and Quantifiers in Natural LanguageCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 6 (n/a): 29-60. 1980.This paper has two parts. In part I, I review two older accounts of the logical forms of modifiers, and suggest that they may be combined with each other so as to yield a theory that is better than either of its parts taken singly. Part of this theory involves the idea that certain sentences refer to events, states, or processes; Part II of this paper shows how to use this idea to account for tenses and temporal adverbials, and offers a new account of ordinary language quantification.
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48The doctrine of distributionHistory and Philosophy of Logic 27 (1): 59-74. 2006.Peter Geach describes the 'doctrine of distribution' as the view that a term is distributed if it refers to everything that it denotes, and undistributed if it refers to only some of the things that it denotes. He argues that the notion, so explained, is incoherent. He claims that the doctrine of distribution originates from a degenerate use of the notion of ?distributive supposition? in medieval supposition theory sometime in the 16th century. This paper proposes instead that the doctrine of di…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |