•  114
    Descriptions: Points of Reference
    In Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and beyond, Oxford University Press. pp. 189-229. 2004.
  •  150
    Meaning and Communication
    In Gillian Russell & Delia Graff Fara (eds.), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 79--90. 2013.
    Words mean things, speakers mean things in using words, and these need not be the same. For example, if you say to someone who has just finished eating a super giant burrito at the Taqueria Guadalajara, “You are what you eat,” you probably do not mean that the person is a super giant burrito. So we need to distinguish the meaning of a linguistic expression – a word, phrase, or sentence – from what a person means in using it. To simplify matters, let us pretend that an utterance is always of a se…Read more
  •  29
    Subject and name index
    In Rita Finkbeiner, Jörg Meibauer & Petra B. Schumacher (eds.), What is a Context?: Linguistic Approaches and Challenges, John Benjamins. pp. 196--251. 2012.
  •  929
    Conversational Impliciture
    Mind and Language 9 (2): 124-162. 1994.
    Confusion in terms inspires confusion in concepts. When a relevant distinction is not clearly marked or not marked at all, it is apt to be blurred or even missed altogether in our thinking. This is true in any area of inquiry, pragmatics in particular. No one disputes that there are various ways in which what is communicated in an utterance can go beyond sentence meaning. The problem is to catalog the ways. It is generally recognized that linguistic meaning underdetermines speaker meaning becaus…Read more
  •  163
    Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts
    with Warren Ingber and Robert M. Harnish
    Philosophical Review 91 (1): 134. 1982.
  •  41
    Replies to My Critics
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 13 (2): 217-249. 2013.
    I thank my critics for time, thought, and effort put into their commentaries. Since obviously I can’t respond to everything, I will try to address what strike me as the most important questions they ask and objections they raise. I think I have decent answers to some questions and decent responses to some objections, in other cases it seems enough to clarify the relevant view, and in still others I need to modify the view in question. One complication, which I won’t elaborate on, is that the vie…Read more
  •  114
    Nowadays the traditional quest for certainty seems not only futile but pointless. Resisting skepticism no longer seems to require meeting the Cartesian demand for an unshakable foundation for knowledge. True beliefs can be less than maximally justified and still be justified enough to qualify as knowledge, even though some beliefs that are justified to the same extent are false. Yet a few philosophers suggest that there is a special sort of justification that only true beliefs can have. Call it …Read more
  •  248
    What's in a name
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 59 (4). 1981.
  •  88
    Katz as Katz can
    with Robert M. Harnish
    Journal of Philosophy 79 (3): 168-171. 1982.
  •  175
    Refraining, Omitting, and Negative Acts
    In Timothy O'Connor & Constantine Sandis (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Wiley-blackwell. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Ways of Failing to Do Something Refraining Omitting Negative Acts: Inaction as Action? References.
  •  315
    An analysis of self-deception
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 41 (March): 351-370. 1981.
  •  794
    The myth of conventional implicature
    Linguistics and Philosophy 22 (4): 327-366. 1999.
    Grice’s distinction between what is said and what is implicated has greatly clarified our understanding of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. Although border disputes still arise and there are certain difficulties with the distinction itself (see the end of §1), it is generally understood that what is said falls on the semantic side and what is implicated on the pragmatic side. But this applies only to what is..
  •  126
    Getting a Thing into a Thought
    In Robin Jeshion (ed.), New Essays on Singular Thought, Oxford University Press. pp. 39. 2010.
  •  210
    Part of what a picture is
    British Journal of Aesthetics 10 (2): 119-137. 1970.
  •  152
    Paul Grice warned that ‘the nature of conventional implicature needs to be examined before any free use of it, for explanatory purposes, can be indulged in’ (1978/1989: 46). Christopher Potts heeds this warning, brilliantly and boldly. Starting with a definition drawn from Grice’s few brief remarks on the subject, he distinguishes conventional implicature from other phenomena with which it might be confused, identifies a variety of common but little-studied kinds of expressions that give rise to…Read more
  •  145
    Emotional disorder and attention
    In George Graham & G. Lynn Stephens (eds.), Philosophical Psychopathology, Mit Press. 1994.
    Some would say that philosophy can contribute more to the occurrence of mental disorder than to the study of it. Thinking too much does have its risks, but so do willful ignorance and selective inattention. Well, what can philosophy contribute? It is not equipped to enumerate the symptoms and varieties of disorder or to identify their diverse causes, much less offer cures (maybe it can do that-personal philosophical therapy is now available in the Netherlands). On the other hand, the scientific …Read more
  •  119
    Minimal Semantics
    Philosophical Review 116 (2): 303-306. 2007.
  •  84
    How to delimit semantics is an ongoing problem in linguistics and philosophy of language. Like syntax, semantics is concerned only with information that competent speakers can glean from linguistic items apart from particular contexts of utterance. Anything a hearer infers from collateral information about the context of a particular utterance thus counts as nonsemantic information. Even so, it is a semantic fact about certain linguistic items, notably indexicals (such as 'she', 'here', and 'the…Read more
  •  170
    Consulting The Reference Book
    Mind and Language 29 (4): 455-474. 2014.