Austin, Texas, United States of America
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    Sententialism: 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
  •  136
    Compositionality as methodology
    Linguistics and Philosophy 22 (3): 311-326. 1999.
  •  165
    The disunity of truth
    In Robert Stainton & Christopher Viger (eds.), Compositionality, Context, and Semantic Values: Essays in Honor of Ernie Lepore, Springer. pp. 174-191. 2008.
    §§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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    Formal Semantics
    In Manuel García-Carpintero & Max Kölbel (eds.), The Continuum companion to the philosophy of language, Continuum International. 2012.
  •  21
    802 ACKNOWLEDGMENT Aaron Broadwell Miriam Butt Alex Byrne
    with Greg Carlson, Lisa Cheng, Gennaro Chierchia, Östen Dahl, Mary Dalrymple, Veneeta Dayal, Paul Dekker, Markus Egg, and Martina Faller
    Linguistics and Philosophy 25 801-802. 2002.
  •  123
    Conditionality is a modal feature (in only the trivial sense, in the case of the material conditional). For φ to be conditioned on ψ is for the appearance of φ and ψ to be connected in some way over some region of modal space.
  •  92
    Problems of Compositionality
    Philosophical Review 112 (2): 254-258. 2003.
    Problems of Compositionality is a revised version of Zoltán Szabó’s 1995 doctoral dissertation. Of its five chapters, three have appeared in print independently, so I will concentrate most of my remarks on the second and third chapters, which remain unpublished outside the book. As it happens, I find these two chapters to be the most philosophically rewarding of the book.
  •  183
    Vague predicates are subject to forced-march sorites reasoning. Given a vague predicate Π, it is thus at least possible that there be a sequence of objects each of which is potentially predicable with Π meeting the following two conditions.
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    Supervaluations debugged
    with Nicholas Asher and Chris Pappas
    Mind 118 (472): 901-933. 2009.
    Supervaluational accounts of vagueness have come under assault from Timothy Williamson for failing to provide either a sufficiently classical logic or a disquotational notion of truth, and from Crispin Wright and others for incorporating a notion of higher-order vagueness, via the determinacy operator, which leads to contradiction when combined with intuitively appealing ‘gap principles’. We argue that these criticisms of supervaluation theory depend on giving supertruth an unnecessarily central…Read more