•  23
    Direct Reference, Empty Names and Implicature
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (3): 419-447. 2007.
    Angle Grinder Man removes wheel locks from cars in London. He is something of a folk hero, saving drivers from enormous parking and towing fines, and has succeeded thus far in eluding the authorities. In spite of his cape and lamé tights, he is no fiction; he's a real person. By contrast, Pegasus, Zeus and the like are fictions. None of them is real. In fact, not only is each of them different from the others, all differ from Angle Grinder Man. After all, Zeus throws thunderbolts but doesn't rem…Read more
  •  166
    In Belief and the Will, van Fraassen employed a diachronic Dutch Book argument to support a counterintuitive principle called Reflection. There and subsequently van Fraassen has put forth Reflection as a linchpin for his views in epistemology and the philosophy of science, and for the voluntarism (first-person reports of subjective probability are undertakings of commitments) that he espouses as an alternative to descriptivism (first-person reports of subjective probability are merely self-descr…Read more
  •  34
    Origins of Analytical Philosophy (review)
    Philosophical Review 104 (4): 613-615. 1995.
    Frege was the grandfather of analytical philosophy, Husserl the founder of the phenomenological school, two radically different philosophical movements. In 1903, say, how would they have appeared to any German student of philosophy who knew the work of both? Not, certainly, as two deeply opposed thinkers: rather as remarkably close in orientation, despite some divergence of interests. They may be compared with the Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue …Read more
  •  129
    Illocutions, implicata, and what a conversation requires
    Pragmatics and Cognition 7 (1): 65-92. 1999.
    An approach is provided to the prediction and explanation of quantity implicata that, unlike the majority of approaches available, does not construe Quantity as requiring speakers to make the strongest claim that their evidence permits. Central to this treatment is an elaboration of the notion of what a conversation requires as appealed to in the Cooperative Principle and the Quantity maxim. What a conversation requires is construed as depending, at any given point, upon the aim of the conversat…Read more
  •  162
    How and what we can learn from fiction
    In Garry Hagberg & Walter Jost (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, Wiley-blackwell. 2007.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Literature, Fiction, and Truth Literary Cognitivism Thought Experiments Genres Learning by Supposing De se Suppositions.
  •  243
    Abstract: One oft-cited feature of speech acts is their expressive character: Assertion expresses belief, apology regret, promise intention. Yet expression, or at least sincere expression, is as I argue a form of showing: A sincere expression shows whatever is the state that is the sincerity condition of the expressive act. How, then, can a speech act show a speaker's state of thought or feeling? To answer this question I consider three varieties of showing, and argue that only one of them is su…Read more
  •  63
    Aesthetic creation • by N. Zangwill
    Analysis 69 (2): 399-401. 2009.
    Definitions of art tend to take the phenomenon at face value, with philosophers aspiring to accommodate their theories to the artistic facts no matter how bizarre. The result, as for instance in the work of Dickie, is a definition of art neutral on the questions whether any of it is any good, and why anyone would bother to produce it. Zangwill bucks this trend by insisting that the method of definition-and-counterexample that drives much of the field is out of date, and by contending that any go…Read more