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2Contextualism and Semantic MinimalismIn Yan Huang (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics, Oxford University Press Uk. 2016.The debate between contextualists and semantic minimalists about meaning/content is one that matters most to philosophers of language, even though the debate is not solely a philosophical one. There are at least three ways of casting the debate. Firstly, it can be cast as one about how and when semantic and pragmatic mental resources are used during ordinary conversational exchanges. This debate utilizes theories and methodologies from psychology. Secondly, it can be framed in terms of the logic…Read more
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32Literal meaning, minimal propositions, and pragmatic processingJournal of Pragmatics 34 (4): 433-456. 2002.
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49Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication (review)Mind 114 (455): 722-728. 2005.
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27An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (review)Review of Metaphysics 50 (2): 392-394. 1996.As the title suggests, this book is centered around a distinction between belief and acceptance. A parallel distinction is drawn between desire and intention. Cohen argues that acceptance and intention are voluntary states, whereas belief and desire are involuntary dispositions. Acceptance is active, whereas belief is passive. Acceptance is subjectively closed under deducibility, whereas belief is not. Acceptance is an all-or-nothing affair, whereas belief comes in degrees, ranging from having a…Read more
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H7, l40, l45In Jaroslav Peregrin (ed.), Meaning: the dynamic turn, Elsevier Science. pp. 271. 2003.
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213Truth-Conditional PragmaticsPhilosophical Perspectives 16 105-134. 2002.Introduction The mainstream view in philosophy of language is that sentence meaning determines truth-conditions. A corollary is that the truth or falsity of an utterance depends only on what words mean and how the world is arranged. Although several prominent philosophers (Searle, Travis, Recanati, Moravcsik) have challenged this view, it has proven hard to dislodge. The alternative view holds that meaning underdetermines truth-conditions. What is expressed by the utterance of a sentence in a co…Read more
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71Language as internalIn Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 127--139. 2005.According to internalist conceptions of language, languages are properties of the mind/brains of individuals and supervene entirely on the internal states of these mind/brains. Hence, languages are primarily to be studied by the mind and/or brain sciences — psychology, neuroscience, and the cognitive sciences more generally. This is not to deny that other sciences may contribute to our understanding too. The internalist conception of language is most associated with Chomsky, who has argued for i…Read more
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130The Gricean distinction between saying and implicating suggests a clear division of labour between semantics and pragmatics. The standard view that a semantic theory delivers truth-conditions for every well-formed sentence of a language has been grafted onto a Gricean view of the semantics-pragmatics divide. Consequently, many believe that truth-conditions can be specified in a way that is essentially free from pragmatic considerations. This view has been challenged, by those who argue for pragm…Read more
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27Contextualism and Information Structure: Towards a Science of PragmaticsIn Erich Rast & Luiz Carlos Baptista (eds.), Meaning and Context, Peter Lang. pp. 2--79. 2010.
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86The Philosophy of P. F. StrawsonPhilosophical Review 110 (3): 460. 2001.This is the twenty-sixth volume in the Library of Living Philosophers, a series founded by Paul A. Schilpp in 1939 and edited by him until 1981, when the editorship was taken over by Lewis E. Hahn. This volume follows the design of previous volumes. As Schilpp conceived this series, every volume would have the following elements: an intellectual autobiography of the philosopher, a series of expository and critical articles written by exponents and opponents of the philosopher's thought, replies …Read more
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47Resisting the step toward naturalismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (4): 743-770. 1996.
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94Metaphorical Singular Reference. The Role of Enriched Composition in Reference ResolutionThe Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 3. 2007.It is widely accepted that, in the course of interpreting a metaphorical utterance, both literal and metaphorical interpretations of the utterance are available to the interpreter, although there may be disagreement about the order in which these interpretations are accessed. I call this the dual availability assumption. I argue that it does not apply in cases of metaphorical singular reference. These are cases in which proper names, complex demonstratives or definite descriptions are used metap…Read more
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1„How context-dependent are attitude ascriptions?‟ In: D. Jutronic“In Dunja Jutronić (ed.), The Maribor papers in naturalized semantics, Pedagoška Fakulteta Maribor. 1997.
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12Centering Theory (CT) as articulated by Grosz et al. (1995) is a theory intended to model some of the factors that influence local coherence in a discourse. The idea is that at any one time there are a number of entities that are at the center of attention. Each utterance n that makes up a discourse potentially has two sorts of discourse ‘centers’, an ordered set of forward-looking centers, Cf(uttn), that provide potential links to upcoming utterances, and a single backward-looking center, Cb(ut…Read more
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70Pragmatics and Singular ReferenceMind and Language 11 (2): 133-159. 1996.:I present arguments in favour of the view that the propositions expressed by utterances containing singularly referring terms have modes of presentation of the objects referred to by those terms as constituents. I rely on recent work by Sperber and Wilson, Recanati and other pragmatists, and claim that a Fregean account of singular reference is supported by this work. This is in opposition to Recanati himself, who in his book Direct Reference has argued for a view which is closer to that of som…Read more
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62The Implicit Dimension of Meaning: Ways of “Filling In” and “Filling Out” ContentErkenntnis 80 (1): 89-109. 2015.I distinguish between the classical Gricean approach to conversational implicatures , which I call the action-theoretic approach, and the approach to CIs taken in contemporary cognitive science. Once we free ourselves from the AT account, and see implicating as a form of what I call “conversational tailoring”, we can more easily see the many different ways that CIs arise in conversation. I will show that they arise not only on the basis of a speaker’s utterance of complete sentences but also on …Read more
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122Procedural meaning and the semantics/pragmatics interfaceIn Claudia Bianchi (ed.), the semantics/pragmatics distinction, Csli. pp. 101--131. 2004.
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275Metaphor and what is said: A defense of a direct expression view of metaphorMidwest Studies in Philosophy 25 (1). 2001.According to one widely held view of metaphor, metaphors are cases in which the speaker (literally) says one thing but means something else instead. I wish to challenge this idea. I will argue that when one utters a sentence in some context intending it to be understood metaphorically, one directly expresses a proposition, which can potentially be evaluated as either true or false. This proposition is what is said by the utterance of the sentence in that context. We don’t convey metaphorical mea…Read more
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1Generalized Conversational Implicatures and Default Pragmatic InferencesIn Joseph Keim-Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & David Shier (eds.), Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics., Seven Bridges Press. pp. 257--283. 2002.
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31Contextualism and the role of contextual framesManuscrito 32 (1): 59-84. 2009.Some part of the debate between minimalists and contextualists can be construed as merely terminological and can be resolved by agreeing to a certain division of labor. Minimalist claims are to be understood as claims about what is needed for adequate formal compositional semantic models of language understood in abstraction from real conversational contexts. Contextualist claims are ones about how language users produce and understand utterances by manipulating features of the psychological and…Read more
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59Vp-ellipsis And The Case For Representationalism In SemanticsProtoSociology 22 140-168. 2006.The debate between representationalists and anti-representationalists as I construe it in this chapter is a debate about whether truth-conditions are or should be assigned directly to natural language sentences (NLSs) – the anti-representationalist view – or whether they are or should be assigned instead to mental representations (MRs) that are related in some appropriate way to these NLSs. On the representationalist view, these MRs are related to NLSs in virtue of the fact that the MRs are the …Read more
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11The Cognitive Constraints on Singular ThoughtDissertation, University of Michigan. 1990.An initial distinction is made between two ways of referring in thought to a particular object. One can think of an object in virtue of having a descriptive condition in mind which uniquely denotes that object. Alternatively, one can think about a particular in a more direct way. It is with the nature of this more direct sort of reference that the subsequent discussion is primarily concerned. ;It has been argued that the relation of direct reference is purely causal in nature. A number of diffic…Read more
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22Malapropisms and slips of tongue represent ways in which expression meaning can come apart from speaker meaning. Another way is when a speaker engages in some form of implicit communication, conveying a meaning other than the meaning of the words or sentences she utters. Such implicit meaning can be intended either in addition to or instead of the explicit meaning. Some regard utterance meaning as a species of speaker meaning; others regard it as a distinct level of meaning. According to the spe…Read more
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264Indexicals and perspectivalsFacta Philosophica 7 (1): 3-18. 2005.(1) Jenny is coming to visit me tonight. (2) I’m going to visit Jenny tonight. In these examples, it is where I am (my home, let us suppose) that is the center of the coming and going. This may suggest that the perspective point is always the perspective of the speaker, and that comings are always towards the speaker and that goings are away from the location of the speaker. But this isn’t necessarily so. For example, suppose that a colleague from work calls me at home to find out why I’m late f…Read more
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57Children's use of contextual cues to resolve referential ambiguity: An application of Relevance TheoryPragmatics and Cognition 6 (1-2): 265-299. 1998.Researchers interested in children's understanding of mind have claimed that the ability to ascribe beliefs and intentions is a late development, occurring well after children have learned to speak and comprehend the speech of others. On the other hand, there are convincing arguments to show that verbal communication requires the ability to attribute beliefs and intentions. Hence if one accepts the findings from research into children's understanding of mind, one should predict that young childr…Read more
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42The Truth-Conditional Relevance of De Re Modes of Presentation: A Reply to GrimbergMind and Language 11 (4): 427-432. 1996.Grimberg identifies four arguments which she alleges are used in my paper‘Pragmatics and Singular Reference’(Bezuidenhout, 1996a) in order to establish the truth-conditional relevance of de re modes of presentation. In fact, only one of these, properly understood, is an argument which I would endorse. However, I do plead guilty to having used examples with features which misleadingly suggest that I endorse these various arguments. It is an easy matter to construct examples free from these defect…Read more
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24The Impossibility of Punctate Mental RepresentationsGrazer Philosophische Studien 46 (1): 197-212. 1993.In Holism: A Shopper's Guide Fodor and LePore contend that there could be punctate minds; minds capable of being in only a single type of representational state. The Kantian idea that the construction of perceptual representations requires the synthesizing activity of the mind is invoked to argue against the possibility of punctate minds. Fodor's commitment to an inferential theory of perception is shown to share crucial assumptions with the Kantian view and hence to lead to the same conclusion.…Read more
Columbia, South Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |