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490Slingshots and boomerangsMind 106 (421): 143-168. 1997.A “slingshot” proof suggested by Kurt Gödel (1944) has been recast by Stephen Neale (1995) as a deductive argument showing that no non-truthfunctional sentence connective can permit the combined use, within its scope, of two truth-functionally valid inference principles involving defi- nite descriptions. According to Neale, this result provides indirect support for Russell’s Theory of Descriptions and has broader philosophical repercussions because descriptions occur in non-truth-functional const…Read more
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151Semantic ValueIn The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Elsevier. 2005.A total theory of linguistic understanding is often taken to require three subtheories: a syntactic theory, a semantic theory, and a pragmatic theory. The semantic theory occupies an intermediary role – it takes as input structures generated by the syntax, assigns to those structures meanings, and then passes those meanings on to the pragmatics, which characterizes the conversational 1 impact of those meanings. Semantic theories thus seek to explain phenomena such as truth conditions of and infe…Read more
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110Eternalism, Temporalism, NeutralismInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (6): 608-618. 2015.In her Transient Truths, Berit Brogaard defends temporalism about proposition content from the more traditional eternalist views. I argue that both temporalism and eternalism are equally capable of accommodating all the data, and thus suggest that we should adopt a neutralism that holds there is no serious or resolvable dispute. Contra Brogaard, I argue that neither disagreement patterns nor belief dynamics favor temporalism over eternalism. I also suggest that Brogaard's defense of operator ove…Read more
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250The Counterexample FallacyMind 120 (480): 1143-1158. 2011.Manley and Wasserman (2008) join the chorus of opposition to the possibility of conditional analysis of dispositions. But that score cannot be settled without more careful attention to the implicit philosophical methodology. Some of the opposition to such an analysis badly overestimates the effect of counterexamples, as if the Gettier example were sufficient to refute the possibility of conjunctive analysis of knowledge. A general objection to a form of analysis must satisfy a number of constrai…Read more
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99The revenge of the semantics‐pragmatics distinctionPhilosophical Perspectives 27 (1): 104-144. 2013.
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133Sententialism: An adequate semantic theory for a language assigns semantic values to complex expressions (typically on the basis of the semantic values of the syntactic parts of those complex expressions), with the assignment process culminating in the assignment of appropriate semantic values (typically propositions or truth conditions) to entire sentences. Sententialism is so-called because it takes the task of semantic theory proper to be exhausted once semantic values have been assigned to f…Read more
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158The disunity of truthIn Robert Stainton & Christopher Viger (eds.), Compositionality, Context and Semantic Values: Essays in Honour of Ernie Lepore, . pp. 174-191. 2009.§§3-4 of the Begriffsschrift present Frege’s objections to a dominant if murky nineteenth-century semantic picture. I sketch a minimalist variant of the pre-Fregean picture which escapes Frege’s criticisms by positing a thin notion of semantic content which then interacts with a multiplicity of kinds of truth to account for phenomena such as modality. After exploring several ways in which we can understand the existence of multiple truth properties, I discuss the roles of pointwise and setwise t…Read more
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2Formal SemanticsIn Manuel García-Carpintero & Max Kölbel (eds.), The Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Continuum International. 2012.
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21802 ACKNOWLEDGMENT Aaron Broadwell Miriam Butt Alex ByrneLinguistics and Philosophy 25 801-802. 2002.
Austin, Texas, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |