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Une solution médiévale du paradoxe du menteur et son intérêt pour la sémantique contemporaineIn Lucie Brind'Amour & Eugene Vance (eds.), Archeologie Du Signe: Colloque : Papers, Pims. pp. 251-264. 1983.
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13Putnam is known for having demonstated the existence of a new form of context-dependence, namely that which characterizes natural kind terms. Terms like ‘tiger' and ‘water' are indexical, Putnam says, since their conditions of application varies with the context of use — in a suitably broad sense of ‘context'. In this talk I focus on the relation between Putnam's semantics and a body of views I call ‘contextualism'. Contextualism generalizes context-sensitivity : it claims that sentences carry c…Read more
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499Contextual Dependence and Definite DescriptionsProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 87 57-73. 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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170Embedded implicaturesPhilosophical Perspectives 17 (1). 2003.Conversational implicatures do not normally fall within the scope of operators because they arise at the speech act level, not at the level of sub-locutionary constituents. Yet in some cases they do, or so it seems. My aim in this paper is to compare different approaches to the problem raised by what I call 'embedded implicatures': seeming implicatures that arise locally, at a sub-locutionary level, without resulting from an inference in the narrow sense.
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73The communication of first person thoughtsIn Petr Kotatko & John Biro (eds.), Frege: Sense and Reference One Hundred Years Later, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 95-102. 1995.A discussion of Frege's views concerning the meaning of 'I' and his distinction between the 'I' of soliloquy and the 'I' of conversation.
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Le paradoxe de la première personneIn Robert Vion (ed.), Les sujets et leurs discours: énonciation et interaction, Presses De L'université De Provence. pp. 7-17. 1998.
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"La sémantique des noms propres: remarques sur la notion de "désignateur rigideLangue Française 57 106-118. 1983.
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290Does linguistic communication rest on inference?Mind and Language 17 (1-2). 2002.It is often claimed that, because of semantic underdetermination, one can determine the content of an utterance only by appealing to pragmatic considerations concerning what the speaker means, what his intentions are. This supports ‘inferentialism' : the view that, in contrast to perceptual content, communicational content is accessed indirectly, via an inference. As against this view, I argue that primary pragmatic processes (the pragmatic processes that are involved in the determination of tru…Read more
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12Response to Voltolini's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop
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5Response to Fernandez-Moreno's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop
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82Pragmatics and Logical FormIn Esther Romero & Belen Soria (eds.), Explicit Communication: Robyn Carston's Pragmatics, Palgrave. pp. 25-41. 2007.Robyn Carston and I share a general methodological position which I call ‘Truth-Conditional Pragmatics' (TCP). TCP is the view that the effects of context on truth-conditional content need not be traceable to the linguistic material in the uttered sentence. Some effects of context on truth-conditional content are due to the linguistic material (e.g. to context-sensitive words or morphemes which trigger the search for contextual values), but others result from ‘free' pragmatic processes. Free pra…Read more
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69Deixis and AnaphoraIn Zoltan Gendler Szabo (ed.), Semantics Versus Pragmatics, Clarendon Press. pp. 286--316. 2002.A defence of the 'pragmatic' theory of anaphora (which stresses the analogy between anaphora and deixis) against an argument put forward by Gareth Evans.
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14Response to Carston's paper, 'How Many Pragmatic Systems Are There'?
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21My contribution to the 'MIMESIS, METAPHYSICS AND MAKE-BELIEVE' conference held in honour of Kendall Walton in the University of Leeds
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77Moderate relativismIn Manuel Garcia-Carpintero & Max Koelbel (eds.), Relative Truth, Oxford University Press. pp. 41-62. 2006.In modal logic, propositions are evaluated relative to possible worlds. A proposition may be true relative to a world w, and false relative to another world w'. Relativism is the view that the relativization idea extends beyond possible worlds and modalities. Thus, in tense logic, propositions are evaluated relative to times. A proposition (e.g. the proposition that Socrates is sitting) may be true relative to a time t, and false relative to another time t'. In this paper I discuss, and attempt …Read more
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265Content, Mood, and ForcePhilosophy Compass 8 (7): 622-632. 2013.In this survey paper, I start from two classical theses of speech act theory: that speech act content is uniformly propositional and that sentence mood encodes illocutionary force. These theses have been questioned in recent work, both in philosophy and linguistics. The force/content distinction itself – a cornerstone of 20‐century philosophy of language – has come to be rejected by some theorists, unmoved by the famous ‘Frege–Geach’ argument. The paper reviews some of these debates.
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57Réponse a mes critiquesPhilosophiques 33 (1): 275-288. 2006.Réponse à trois études critiques de mon livre Literal Meaning à paraître dans la revue Philosophiques (Montréal).
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163Force cancellationSynthese 196 (4): 1403-1424. 2019.Peter Hanks and Scott Soames both defend pragmatic solutions to the problem of the unity of the proposition. According to them, what ties together Tim and baldness in the singular proposition expressed by ‘Tim is bald’ is an act of the speaker : the act of predicating baldness of Tim. But Soames construes that act as force neutral and noncommittal while, for Hanks, it is inherently assertive and committal. Hanks answers the Frege–Geach challenge by arguing that, in complex sentences, the force i…Read more
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16The limits of expressibilityIn Barry Smith (ed.), John Searle, Cambridge University Press. pp. 189-213. 2002.
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49Local pragmatics: reply to Mandy SimonsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (5): 493-508. 2017.In response to Mandy Simons’ defence of a classical Gricean approach to pragmatic enrichment in terms of conversational implicature, I emphasize the following contrast. Conversational implicatures are generated by a global inference which uses as a premise the fact that the speaker has said that p, but only the triggering inference is global in cases of pragmatic enrichment. What generates the correct interpretation is a process of reconstrual, which locally maps the literal meaning of a constit…Read more
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Contextualism and CompositionalityIn Luisa Mora-Millan (ed.), Cognicion & Lenguaje, . pp. 201-217. 2008.
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395De re and De seDialectica 63 (3): 249-269. 2009.For Perry and many authors, de se thoughts are a species of de re thought. In this paper, I argue that de se thoughts come in two varieties: explicit and implicit. While explicit de se thoughts can be construed as a variety of de re thought, implicit de se thoughts cannot: their content is thetic, while the content of de re thoughts is categoric. The notion of an implicit de se thought is claimed to play a central role in accounting for the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentificati…Read more
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115Singular Thought: In Defense of AcquaintanceIn Robin Jeshion (ed.), New Essays on Singular Thought, Oxford University Press. pp. 141. 2009.This paper is about the Descriptivism/Singularism debate, which has loomed large in 20-century philosophy of language and mind. My aim is to defend Singularism by showing, first, that it is a better and more promising view than even the most sophisticated versions of Descriptivism, and second, that the recent objections to Singularism (based on a dismissal of the acquaintance constraint on singular thought) miss their target.
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712Quasi-Singular Propositions: The Semantics of Belief ReportsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 69 (1). 1995.