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78Is verbal communication a purely preservative process?Philosophical Review 107 (2): 261-288. 1998.In a recent paper titled “Content Preservation”, Tyler Burge argues that certain psychological processes play a purely preservative role, and not a justificatory role. Burge’s claim is that the justificatory force of the beliefs sustained by these processes is independent of features of these processes, such as their reliability. The function of these psychological processes is merely to preserve the beliefs in order to “assure the proper working of other cognitive capacities over time”. In part…Read more
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35Demonstrative modes of presentationCommunication and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Journal. forthcoming.
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1Distinguishing Semantics and PragmaticsIn Joseph K. Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & David Shier (eds.), Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics., Seven Bridges Press. pp. 284--310. 2002.
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67The 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
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202Pragmatics, semantic undetermination and the referential/attributive distinctionMind 106 (423): 375-409. 1997.It has long ben recognised that there are referential uses of definite descriptions. It is not as widely recognised that there are atttributives uses of idexicals and other such paradigmatically singular terms. I offer an account of the referential/attributive distinction which is intended to give a unified treatment of both sorts of cases. I argue that the best way to account for the referential/attributive distinction is to treat is as semantically underdetermined which sort of propositions is…Read more
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21Holism: A Consumer UpdateGrazer Philosophische Studien 46 197-212. 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
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H7, l40, l45In Jaroslav Peregrin (ed.), Meaning: the dynamic turn, Elsevier Science. pp. 271. 2003.
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275Truth-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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65Language as internalIn Barry C. Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 127--139. 2006.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
Columbia, South Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |