-
81Moderate 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
-
271Content, 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.
-
58Réponse 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).
-
170Force 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
-
16The limits of expressibilityIn Barry Smith (ed.), John Searle, Cambridge University Press. pp. 189-213. 2002.
-
52Local 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
-
Contextualism and CompositionalityIn Luisa Mora-Millan (ed.), Cognicion & Lenguaje, . pp. 201-217. 2008.
-
401De 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
-
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.
-
726Quasi-Singular Propositions: The Semantics of Belief ReportsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 69 (1). 1995.
-
Primary Pragmatic ProcessesIn Asa Kasher (ed.), Pragmatics: Critical Concepts, Routledge. pp. 512-531. 1998.