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31Structures and Categories for the Representation of MeaningPhilosophical Review 105 (2): 264. 1996.Review of Timothy Potts, *Structures and Categories for the Representation of Meaning* (CUP).
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65Making It Explicit (review)Philosophical Review 106 (3): 437-441. 1997.In developing his alternative, Brandom starts from a version of inferential-role semantics according to which an assertion's content is constituted by its place in a field of inferential relations. It is because we have "an independent theoretical grip on the notion of an inference", and of its goodness or badness, that we are able to attain a notion of content that is prior to any of the representational concepts. He stresses that the relevant assessment of inferences is not whether they are lo…Read more
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98Inference, Deduction, LogicIn John Bengson & Marc A. Moffett (eds.), Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 334. 2011.
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207Contingent existentsPhilosophy 78 (4): 461-481. 2003.Timothy Williamson has recently put forward a proof that every object exists necessarily. I show where the proof fails. My diagnosis also exposes the fallacy in A. N. Prior's argument in favour of his modal logic, Q.
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757Against HarmonyIn B. Hale & Crispin Wright (eds.), Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Blackwell. 1995.Many prominent writers on the philosophy of logic, including Michael Dummett, Dag Prawitz, Neil Tennant, have held that the introduction and elimination rules of a logical connective must be ‘in harmony ’ if the connective is to possess a sense. This Harmony Thesis has been used to justify the choice of logic: in particular, supposed violations of it by the classical rules for negation have been the basis for arguments for switching from classical to intuitionistic logic. The Thesis has also had…Read more
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197Plural terms : Another variety of reference?In José Luis Bermúdez (ed.), Thought, reference, and experience: themes from the philosophy of Gareth Evans, Clarendon Press. pp. 84--123. 2005.
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78Logic and existenceAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 73 (1). 1999.[Ian Rumfitt] Frege's logicism in the philosophy of arithmetic consisted, au fond, in the claim that in justifying basic arithmetical axioms a thinker need appeal only to methods and principles which he already needs to appeal in order to justify paradigmatically logical truths and paradigmatically logical forms of inference. Using ideas of Gentzen to spell out what these methods and principles might include, I sketch a strategy for vindicating this logicist claim for the special case of the ari…Read more
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199Yes and noMind 109 (436): 781-823. 2000.In what does the sense of a sentential connective consist? Like many others, I hold that its sense lies in rules that govern deductions. In the present paper, however, I argue that a classical logician should take the relevant deductions to be arguments involving affirmative or negative answers to yes-or-no questions that contain the connective. An intuitionistic logician will differ in concentrating exclusively upon affirmative answers. I conclude by arguing that a well known intuitionistic cri…Read more
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339Truth conditions and communicationMind 104 (416): 827-862. 1995.The paper addresses itself to the "Homeric struggle" in the theory of meaning between those (e.g., Grice) who try to analyze declarative meaning in terms of an intention to induce a belief and those (e.g., Davidson) for who declarative meaning consists in truth conditions. (The point of departure is Strawson's celebrated discussion of this issue, in his Inaugural Lecture.) I argue that neither style of analysis is satisfactory, and develop a "hybrid" that may be-although what I take from the Gri…Read more
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144Sense and EvidenceThe Monist 96 (2): 177-204. 2013.There are many theories which say how the truth-value (the Fregean reference) of a complete sentence depends on the references of its parts. The present paper proposes a theory of how the Fregean sense of a sentences depends on the senses of its parts. A sentence's sense is related to the evidence that would justify its assertion. The theory characterizes the senses of 'and', 'or', 'not', and 'if...then'.
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44Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (review)Philosophical Review 106 (3): 437. 1997.In developing his alternative, Brandom starts from a version of inferential-role semantics according to which an assertion's content is constituted by its place in a field of inferential relations. It is because we have "an independent theoretical grip on the notion of an inference", and of its goodness or badness, that we are able to attain a notion of content that is prior to any of the representational concepts. He stresses that the relevant assessment of inferences is not whether they are lo…Read more
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112The vagaries of paraphrase: A reply to Holton on the counting problemAnalysis 56 (4). 1996.In his 'paratactic' analysis of indirect speech reports, Davidson took the occurrence of 'that' in 'Galileo said that the Earth moves' to be a demonstrative expression which refers to the reporter's subsequent utterance of 'the Earth moves'. Ian McFetridge used his 'counting problem' to argue that we get a better version of the paratactic theory if we take the demonstrative 'that' to refer to the proposition expressed by the reporter's utterance, rather than to the utterance itself. In this note…Read more
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137Co-ordination principles: A replyMind 117 (468): 1059-1063. 2008.I explain why Fernando Ferreira's interesting formal result does not threaten the bilateralist account of the sense of the connectives.
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105Singular terms and arithmetical logicismPhilosophical Books 44 (3): 193--219. 2003.This article is a critical notice of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright's *The Reason's Proper Study* (OUP). It focuses particularly on their attempts (crucial to their neo-logicist project) to say what a singular term is. I identify problems for their account but include some constructive suggestions about how it might be improved.
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611Objects of ThoughtIn Gary Ostertag (ed.), Meanings and Other Things: Themes From the Work of Stephen Schiffer, Oxford University Press. 2016.In his book The Things We Mean, Stephen Schiffer advances a subtle defence of what he calls the ‘face-value’ analysis of attributions of belief and reports of speech. Under this analysis, ‘Harold believes that there is life on Venus’ expresses a relation between Harold and a certain abstract object, the proposition that there is life on Venus. The present essay first proposes an improvement to Schiffer’s ‘pleonastic’ theory of propositions. It then challenges the face-value analysis. There w…Read more
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3Plural terms: another variety of referring expression?In José Luis Bermúdez (ed.), Thought, reference, and experience: themes from the philosophy of Gareth Evans, Clarendon Press. 2005.
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159Logical NecessityIn Bob Hale & Aviv Hoffmann (eds.), Modality: metaphysics, logic, and epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2010.Book synopsis: The philosophy of modality investigates necessity and possibility, and related notions--are they objective features of mind-independent reality? If so, are they irreducible, or can modal facts be explained in other terms? This volume presents new work on modality by established leaders in the field and by up-and-coming philosophers. Between them, the papers address fundamental questions concerning realism and anti-realism about modality, the nature and basis of facts about what is…Read more
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46Concepts and CountingProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 102 (1): 41-68. 2002.Frege's analysis of Zahlangaben is expounded and evaluated.
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128The categoricity problem and truth-value gapsAnalysis 57 (4). 1997.In his article 'Rejection' (1996), Timothy Smiley had shown how a logical system allowing rules of rejection could provide a categorical axiomatization of the classical propositional calculus. This paper shows how rules of rejection, when placed in a multiple conclusion setting, can also provide categorical axiomatizations of a range of non-classical calculi which permit truth-value gaps, among them the calculus in Smiley's own 'Sense without denotation' (1960).
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125Savoir FaireJournal of Philosophy 100 (3): 158-166. 2003.This paper challenges the linguistic arguments Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson gave in support of their thesis that knowing how is a species of knowing that.
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109Old Adams BuriedAnalytic Philosophy 54 (2): 157-188. 2013.I present some counterexamples to Adams's Thesis and explain how they undermine arguments that indicative conditionals cannot be truth-evaluable propositions
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18The vagaries of paraphrase: a reply to Holton on the counting problemAnalysis 56 (4): 246-250. 1996.Peer Reviewed.
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47Donald Davidson and the Mirror of MeaningPhilosophical Quarterly 45 (178): 136. 1995.Review of J.E. Malpas, *Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning* (CUP)
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