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40Natural Meaning and the Foundations of Human Communication: A Comparison Between Marty and GriceIn Giuliano Bacigalupo & Hélène Leblanc (eds.), Anton Marty and Contemporary Philosophy, Palgrave. pp. 13-31. 2019.Several authors have noted the proximity of Marty’s and Grice’s ideas. Both Marty and Grice distinguish natural meaning and the sort of meaning involved in human communication; and they both attempt to provide a characterization of human communication that does not essentially appeal to the conventional nature of its linguistic devices. In this contribution, I single out what I take to be a main difference between Marty and Grice. Marty views linguistic communication as continuous with natural m…Read more
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About the Lekton: Response to KölbelIn Raphael Salkie & Ilse Depraetere (eds.), Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line, Springer Verlag. 2016.
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40Context Dependence, Perspective and Relativity (edited book)Mouton de Gruyter. 2010.Aims and Scope This volume brings together original papers by linguists and philosophers on the role of context and perspective in language and thought. Several contributions are concerned with the contextualism/relativism debate, which has loomed large in recent philosophical discussions. In a substantial introduction, the editors survey the field and map out the relevant issues and positions.
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66Transparent CoreferenceTopoi 40 (1): 107-115. 2019.Because reference is not transparent, coreference is not transparent either: it is possible for the subject to refer to the same individual twice without knowing that the two acts of reference target the same individual. That happens whenever the subject associates two distinct yet coreferential files with two token singular terms. The subject may not know that the two files corefer, so her ascribing contradictory properties to the same object does not threaten her rationality. But if the subjec…Read more
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131Immunity to error through misidentification (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2012.In this collection of newly commissioned essays, the contributors present a variety of approaches to it, engaging with historical and empirical aspects of the subject as well as contemporary philosophical work.
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54From Meaning to ContentIn Derek Ball & Brian Rabern (eds.), The Science of Meaning: Essays on the Metatheory of Natural Language Semantics, Oxford University Press. 2018.According to a widespread picture due to Kaplan, there are two levels of semantic value: character and content. Character is determined by the grammar, and it determines content with respect to context. In this chapter Recanati criticizes that picture on several grounds. He shows that we need more than two levels, and rejects the determination thesis: that linguistic meaning as determined by grammar determines content. Grammatical meaning does not determine assertoric content, he argues, but mer…Read more
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224Fictional, Metafictional, ParafictionalProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 118 (1): 25-54. 2018.
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77Contextualism and PolysemyDialectica 71 (3): 379-397. 2017.In this paper, I argue that that polysemy is a two-sided phenomenon. It can be reduced neither to pragmatic modulation nor to ambiguity, for it is a mixture of both. The senses of a polysemous expression result from pragmatic modulation but they are stored in memory, as the senses of an ambiguous expression are. The difference with straightforward ambiguity is that the modulation relations between the senses are transparent to the language users: the senses are felt as related – they form a fami…Read more
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26IV*—Contextual Dependence and Definite DescriptionsProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 87 (1): 57-74. 1987.François Recanati; IV*—Contextual Dependence and Definite Descriptions, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 87, Issue 1, 1 June 1987, Pages 57–74, h.
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La Transparence et l'énonciation. Pour introduire a la pragmatiqueRevue de Métaphysique et de Morale 85 (4): 529-533. 1980.
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16How Narrow is Narrow Content?Dialectica 48 (3-4): 209-229. 1994.SummaryIn this paper I discuss two influential views in the philosophy of mind: the two‐component picture draws a distinction between ‘narrow content’ and ‘broad content’, while radical externalism denies that there is such a thing as narrow content. I argue that ‘narrow content’ is ambiguous, and that the two views can be reconciled. Instead of considering that there is only one question and three possible answers corresponding to Cartesian internalism, the two‐component picture, and radical ex…Read more
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135Millikan’s Theory of Signs (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3). 2007.Review of Millikan's book Varieties of Meaning (MIT Press/Bradford Books, 2004).
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30Pragmatic ParadoxesGraduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 17 (1-2): 289-298. 1994.As several philosophers have noticed, the meaning of an utterance is twofold: besides what it says, there is what it shows—or rather what the uttering of the utterance shows. In certain cases, a contradiction may arise between what is said and what is is shown. Contradictions of this type, called ‘pragmatic contradictions’, must be carefully distinguished from ordinary contradictions, i.e., from contradictions internal to what is said.
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85Précis of *Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta: an Essay on MetarepresentationDialectica 58 (2): 237-247. 2004.A summary of my book *Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta*, published by MIT Press in 2000 ('Representation and Mind' series).
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202Domains of discourseLinguistics and Philosophy 19 (5). 1996.In the first part of this paper I present a defence of the Austinian semantic approach to incomplete quantifiers and similar phenomena (section 2-4). It is part of my defence of Austinian semantics that it incorporates a cognitive dimension (section 4). This cognitive dimension makes it possible to connect Austinian semantics to various cognitive theories of discourse interpretation. In the second part of the paper (sections 5-7), I establish connections between Austinian semantics and four part…Read more
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28Some Remarks on Explicit Performatives, Indirect Speech Acts, Locutionary Meaning and Truth-valueIn John Searle, F. Kiefer & Manfred Berwisch (eds.), Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics, Dordrecht. pp. 205-220. 1980.
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4Literalism and Contextualism: Some VarietiesIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in philosophy: knowledge, meaning, and truth, Oxford University Press. pp. 171--196. 2005.Both Literalism and Contextualism come in many varieties. There are radical, and less radical, versions of both Literalism and Contextualism. Some intermediate positions are mixtures of Literalism and Contextualism. In this paper I describe several literalist positions, several contextualist positions, and a couple of intermediate positions. My aim is to convince the reader that the Literalism/Contextualism controversy is far from being settled. In the first section, I look at the historical dev…Read more
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La logique des noms propresRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 172 (3): 542-545. 1982.
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53Précis de Literal MeaningPhilosophiques 33 (1): 231-236. 2006.Résumé de mon livre Literal Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2004), à paraître dans la rubrique DISPUTATIO la revue canadienne Philosophiques, suivi de comptes rendus critiques par Steven Davis, Brendan Gillon, et Michel Seymour et de mes réponses.
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107Reference through Mental Files : Indexicals and Definite DescriptionsIn Carlo Penco & Filippo Domaneschi (eds.), What Is Said and What Is Not: The Semantics/pragmatics Interface, Chicago University Press. pp. 159-173. 2013.Accounts for referential communication (and especially communication by means of definite descriptions and indexicals) in the mental file framework.
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200Open quotationMind 110 (439): 637-687. 2001.The issues addressed in philosophical papers on quotation generally concern only a particular type of quotation, which I call ‘closed quotation’. The other main type, ‘open quotation’, is ignored, and this neglect leads to bad theorizing. Not only is a general theory of quotation out of reach: the specific phenomenon of closed quotation itself cannot be properly understood if it is not appropriately situated within the kind to which it belongs. Once the distinction between open and closed quotat…Read more
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168Compositionality, Flexibility, and Context-DependenceIn Markus Werning, Wolfram Hinzen & Edouard Machery (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality, Oxford University Press. pp. 175-191. 2012.It has often been observed that the meaning of a word may be affected by the other words which occur in the same sentence. How are we to account for this phenomenon of 'semantic flexibility'? It is argued that semantic flexibility reduces to context-sensitivity and does not raise unsurmountable problems for standard compositional accounts. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to assume too simple a view of context-sensitivity. Two basic forms of context-sensitivity are distinguished in the p…Read more
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20Response to Dokic's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop