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37Williamson on Our Ignorance in Borderline CasesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (4). 1997.
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70Pleonastic PropositionsIn J. C. Beall & B. Armour-Garb (eds.), Deflationary Truth, Open Court. pp. 353--81. 2005.Pleonastic entities are entities whose existence is secured by something-from-nothing transformations, these being conceptually valid inferences that take one from a statement in which no reference is made to a thing of a certain kind to a statement—often a pleonastic equivalent of the first statement—in which there is a reference to a thing of that kind. The possibility of pleonastic entities is further explained in terms of the notion of one theory being a conservative extension of another. Pr…Read more
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78A central claim of Paul Horwich’s 1998 book Meaning was that meaning properties reduce to acceptance properties, where a meaning property is a property of the form e means m for x, e being “a word or phrase—whether it be spoken, written, signed, or merely thought (i.e. an item of ‘mentalese’)” (44); an acceptance property for an expression e relative to a person x is a relation of the form x is disposed to accept an e-containing sentence of kind … in circumstances of kind …
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93Two Issues of VaguenessThe Monist 81 (2): 193--214. 1998.Two issues of vagueness, which may together exhaust its philosophical interest, are, first, to solve the sorites paradox and, second, to explain the notion of a borderline case. I’ll try to make a little headway on both issues.
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320A problem for a direct-reference theory of belief reportsNoûs 40 (2): 361-368. 2006.(1) The propositions we believe and say are _Russellian_ _propositions_: structured propositions whose basic components are the objects and properties our thoughts and speech acts are about. (2) Many singular terms
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20Replies to García-Carpintero, Horwich, Valdivia, Marqueze, BarnettPhilosophical Issues 10 (1). 2000.
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1Extensionalist Semantics and Sententialist Theories of BeliefIn Ernest Lepore (ed.), New Directions in Semantics, Academic Press. 1987.
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33Replies (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1). 2006.There are important differences among those philosophers who would call themselves nominalists and thus claim to disbelieve in the existence of numbers, properties, propositions, and their ilk. Some are non-concessive, and would deny that sentences such as following can be true
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156Vague propertiesIn Richard Dietz & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Cuts and Clouds: Vagueness, its Nature, and its Logic, Oxford University Press. pp. 109--130. 2010.I. Vague Properties and the Problem of Vagueness The philosophical problem of vagueness is to say what vagueness is in a way that helps to resolve the sorites paradox. Saying what vagueness is requires saying what kinds of things can be vague and in what the vagueness of each kind consists. Philosophers dispute whether things of this, that, or the other kind can be vague, but no one disputes that there are vague linguistic expressions. Among vague expressions, predicates hold a special place in …Read more
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12Correspondence & Disquotation (review)International Studies in Philosophy 28 (4): 112-113. 1996.
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84Pleonastic FregeanismThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 6 1-15. 2000.Fregeans hold that propositional attitudes are relations to structured propositions whose basic constituents are concepts, or modes of presentation, of the objects and properties our beliefs are about. It is widely thought that there are compelling objections to the Fregean theory of mental and linguistic content. However, as I try to show, these objections are met by the version of Frege’s theory which I call Pleonastic Fregeanism.
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48A little help from your friends?Legal Theory 7 (4): 421-431. 2001.When I was invited to participate in this symposium, I welcomed what I thought would be the opportunity to apply my views about the semantics and logic of vague language to the real-life problems of vagueness legal theorists worry about. I confess to having formed my ambition without a very clear sense of what jurisprudential problems might be illuminated by general theories of vagueness. To be sure, I was able to guess that a symposium on Vagueness and Law must have something to do with the dil…Read more
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211David’s epistemic understanding of two-dimensional semantics has these two features. First, although he considers at least two construals of epistemically possible worlds, on one of them they are centered metaphysically possible worlds. Second, David intends epistemic two-dimensional semantics to yield a theory of propositional-attitude content, as well as having application to the semantics of natural language expressions. These two features come together in David’s “The Components of Conten…Read more
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186Evidence= Knowledge: Williamson's Solution to Skepticism?In Patrick Greenough, Duncan Pritchard & Timothy Williamson (eds.), Williamson on Knowledge, Oxford University Press. pp. 183--202. 2009.A single argument template---the EPH template---can be used to generate versions of the best known and most challenging skeptical problems. In his brilliantly groundbreaking book Knowledge and Its Limits, Timothy Williamson presents a theory of knowledge and evidence which he clearly intends to provide a response to skepticism in its most important forms. After laying out EPH skepticism and reviewing possible ways of responding to it, I show how elements of Williamson’s theory motivate a hithert…Read more
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113Remnants of MeaningMIT Press. 1987.In this foundational work on the theory of linguistic and mental representation, Stephen Schiffer surveys all the leading theories of meaning and content in the philosophy of language and finds them lacking. He concludes that there can be no correct, positive philosophical theory or linguistic or mental representation and, accordingly advocates the deflationary "no-theory theory of meaning and content." Along the way he takes up functionalism, the nature of propositions and their suitability as …Read more
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218Yes, a reply to Brian Loar's "can we confirm supervenient properties?"Philosophical Issues 4 93-100. 1993.
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231Descriptions, indexicals, and belief reports: Some dilemmas (but not the ones you expect)Mind 104 (413): 107-131. 1995.