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10What is said and the Semantics/Pragmatics DistinctionIn Claudia Bianchi (ed.), The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction, Csli Stanford. pp. 45-64. 2002.A critique of pragmatic Minimalism.
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62Mental Files and IdentityIn Anne Reboul (ed.), Philosophical Papers Dedicated to Kevin Mulligan, . 2011.Mental files serve as individual or singular concepts. Like singular terms in the language, they refer, or are supposed to refer. What they refer to is not determined by properties which the subject takes the referent to have (i.e. by the information stored in the file), but through relations to various entities in the environment in which the file fulfills its function. Files are based on acquaintance relations, and the function of the file is to store whatever information is made available thr…Read more
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215Crazy minimalismMind and Language 21 (1). 2006.Review of Insensitive Semantics, by H. Cappelen and E. Lepore.
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70Empty Thoughts and Vicarious Thoughts in the Mental File FrameworkCroatian Journal of Philosophy 14 (1): 1-11. 2014.Mental files have a referential role—they serve to think about objects in the world—but they also have a meta-representational role: when ‘indexed’, they serve to represent how other subjects think about objects in the world. This additional, meta-representational function of files is invoked to shed light on the uses of empty singular terms in negative existentials and pseudo-singular attitude ascriptions. -/- For a longer version see "Empty Singular Terms in the Mental-File Framework" In Manue…Read more
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476The Fodorian fallacyAnalysis 62 (4): 285-89. 2002.In recent years Fodor has repeatedly argued that nothing epistemic can be essential to, or constitutive of, any concept. This holds in virtue of a constraint which Fodor dubs the Compositionality Constraint. I show that Fodor's argument is fallacious because it rests on an ambiguity.
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Le potentiel illocutionnaire des phrases déclarativesCahiers de Linguistique Française 2 23-39. 1981.
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84Contextualism and anti-contextualism in the philosophy of languageIn Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives, Routledge. pp. 156-166. 1994.A historical overview, with an attempt to rebut Grice's argument against Contextualism.
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70Anti-Descriptivism, Mental Files, And The Communication Of Singular ThoughtsManuscrito 32 (1): 7-32. 2009.In this paper, I argue that singular thought about an object involves nondescriptive or de re ways of thinking of that object, that is, modes of presentation resting on contextual relations of ‘acquaintance’ to the object. Such modes of presentation I analyse as mental files in which the subject can store information gained through the acquaintance relations in question. I show that the mental -file approach provides a solution to a vexing problem regarding the communication of singular thoughts…Read more
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40Situations and the Structure of ContentIn Kumiko Murasugi & Robert Stainton (eds.), Philosophy and Linguistics, Westview Press. pp. 113--165. 1999.An investigation into 'Austinian semantics'. Every utterance is said to express an 'Austinian proposition' consisting of a situation and a fact the situation is presented as supporting. A more recent statement of the theory is to be found in *Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta: an Essay on Metarepresentation* (MIT Press/Bradford Books, 2000).
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Le langage et la penséeIn Alain Berthoz (ed.), Sciences de la Cognition: Actes du grand colloque de prospective, . pp. 137-141. 1991.
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Processing models for non-literal discourseIn Roberto Casati, Barry Smith & Graham Whiteca (eds.), Philosophy and the Cognitive Sciences, Proceedings of the 16th International Wittgenstein Symposium, . pp. 277-290. 1994.
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10Response to Iglesias' contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop
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26Meaning and Force: The Pragmatics of Performative UtterancesPhilosophical Review 100 (2): 297. 1991.
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297Perceptual concepts: in defence of the indexical modelSynthese 190 (10): 1841-1855. 2013.Francois Recanati presents the basic features of the *indexical model* of mental files, and defends it against several interrelated objections. According to this model, mental files refer to objects in a way that is analogous to that of indexicals in language: a file refers to an object in virtue of a contextual relation between them. For instance, perception and attention provide the basis for demonstrative files. Several objections, some of them from David Papineau, concern the possibility of …Read more
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19Descriptions and SituationsIn Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and beyond, Oxford University Press. pp. 15-40. 2004.forthcoming.
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45Reply to De BrabanterTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 32 (2): 149-156. 2013.Response to two papers by Philippe De Brabanter in the symposium on *Truth-Conditional Pragmatics* (OUP 2010).
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241It is raining (somewhere)Linguistics and Philosophy 30 (1): 123-146. 2005.The received view about meteorological predicates like ‘rain’ is that they carry an argument slot for a location which can be filled explicitly or implicitly. The view assumes that ‘rain’, in the absence of an explicit location, demands that the context provide a specific location. In an earlier article in this journal, I provided a counter-example, viz. a context in which ‘it is raining’ receives a location-indefinite interpretation. On the basis of that example, I argued that when there is tac…Read more
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30On Kripke on DonnellanIn Herman Parret, Marina Sbisa & Jef Verschueren (eds.), Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics, John Benjamins. pp. 593-660. 1981.
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Contenu sémantique et contenu cognitif des énoncésIn Daniel Laurier & Francois Lepage (eds.), Essais sur le langage et l'intentionnalité, . pp. 201-226. 1992.
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85Precis of *Truth-Conditional Pragmatics*Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 32 (2): 49-63. 2013.Precis of "Truth-Conditional Pragmatics" (Oxford University Press, 2010).
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484How narrow is narrow content?Dialectica 48 (3-4): 209-29. 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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201Truth-Conditional PragmaticsOxford University Press. 2010.This book argues against the traditional understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide and puts forward a radical alternative. Through half a dozen case studies, it shows that what an utterance says cannot be neatly separated from what the speaker means. In particular, the speaker's meaning endows words with senses that are tailored to the situation of utterance and depart from the conventional meanings carried by the words in isolation. This phenomenon of ‘pragmatic modulation’ must be taken…Read more
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417Unarticulated constituentsLinguistics and Philosophy 25 (3): 299-345. 2002.In a recent paper (Linguistics and Philosophy 23, 4, June 2000), Jason Stanley argues that there are no `unarticulated constituents', contrary to what advocates of Truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP) have claimed. All truth-conditional effects of context can be traced to logical form, he says. In this paper I maintain that there are unarticulated constituents, and I defend TCP. Stanley's argument exploits the fact that the alleged unarticulated constituents can be `bound', that is, they can be ma…Read more
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Meaning and Force: An IntroductionIn Asa Kasher (ed.), Pragmatics: Critical Concepts, Routledge. pp. 126-143. 1998.
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Contextual DomainsIn Xabier Arrazola (ed.), Discourse, Interaction, and Communication, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 25-36. 1997.