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224The top 10 minconceptions about implicatureIn Festchrift for Larry Horn, John Benjamins. 2005.I’ve known about conversational implicature a lot longer than I’ve known Larry. In 1967 I read Grice’s “Logical and Conversation” in mimeograph, shortly after his William James lectures, and I read its precursor “(Implication),” section III of “The Causal Theory of Perception”, well before that. And I’ve thought, read, and written about implicature off and on ever since. Nevertheless, I know a lot less about it than Larry does, and that’s not even taking into account everything he has uncovered …Read more
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117Puzzles about sentences containing expressions of certain sorts, such as predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, and ‘know’, have spawned families of views that go by the names of Contextualism and Relativism. In the case of predicates of personal taste, which I will be focusing on, contextualist views say that the contents of sentences like “Uni is delicious” and “The Aristocrats is hilarious” vary somehow with the context of utterance. Such a sentence semantically expresses different p…Read more
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172Context ex MachinaIn Zoltan Gendler Szabo (ed.), Semantics Versus Pragmatics, Oxford University Press. pp. 15--44. 2005.Once upon a time it was assumed that speaking literally and directly is the norm and that speaking nonliterally or indirectly is the exception. The assumption was that normally what a speaker means can be read off of the meaning of the sentence he utters, and that departures from this, if not uncommon, are at least easily distinguished from normal utterances and explainable along Gricean lines. The departures were thought to be limited to obvious cases like figurative speech and conversational i…Read more
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659The myth of conventional implicatureLinguistics 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..
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141Reflections on reference and reflexivityIn Michael O'Rourke Corey Washington (ed.), Situating Semantics: Essays on the Philosophy of John Perry, . pp. 395--424. 2007.In Reference and Reflexivity, John Perry tries to reconcile referentialism with a Fregean concern for cognitive significance. His trick is to supplement referential content with what he calls ‘‘reflexive’’ content. Actually, there are several levels of reflexive content, all to be distinguished from the ‘‘official,’’ referential content of an utterance. Perry is convinced by two arguments for referentialism, the ‘‘counterfactual truth-conditions’’ and the ‘‘same-saying’’ arguments, but he also a…Read more
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126Burge's new thought experiment: Back to the drawing roomJournal of Philosophy 85 (February): 88-97. 1988.
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137The emperor's new 'knows'In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth, Oxford University Press. pp. 51--89. 2005.When I examine contextualism there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a cogent theory that I examining, and not a cleverly stated piece of whacks. I can doubt whether there is any real theory there at all. Perhaps what I took to be a theory was really some reflections; perhaps I am even the victim of some cognitive hallucination. One thing however I cannot doubt: that there exists a widely read pitch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape.
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219Perspectives on possibilities: contextualism, relativism, or what?In Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press. 2009.Epistemic possibilities are relative to bodies of information, or perspectives. To claim that something is epistemically possible is typically to claim that it is possible relative one’s own current perspective. We generally do this by using bare, unqualified epistemic possibility (EP) sentences, ones that don’t mention our perspective. The fact that epistemic possibilities are relative to perspectives suggests that these bare EP sentences fall short of fully expressing propositions, contrary to…Read more
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194A puzzle about belief reportsIn K. Jaszczolt (ed.), The Pragmatics of Propositional Attitude Reports, Elsevier. 2000.I'd like to present a puzzle about belief reports that's been nagging at me for several years. I've subjected many friends and audiences to various abortive attempts at solving it. Now it's time to get it off my chest and let others try their hand at it.<1>
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186Engineering the mind (review of Dretske 1995, Naturalizing the Mind) (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (2): 459-468. 1997.No contemporary philosopher has tried harder to demystify the mind than Fred Dretske. But how to demystify it without eviscerating it? Can consciousness be explained? Many philosophers think that no matter how detailed and systematic our knowledge becomes of how the brain works and how it subserves mental functions, there will always remain an "explanatory gap." Call it a brute fact or call it a mystery, trying to explain consciousness, they think, is as futile as trying to explain why there is …Read more
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53More on self-deception: Reply to HellmanPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (June): 611-614. 1985.
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162Saying, meaning, and implicatingIn Keith Allan & Kasia Jaszczolt (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press. 2012.
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487Do belief reports report beliefs?Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78 (3): 215-241. 1997.The traditional puzzles about belief reports puzzles rest on a certain seemingly innocuous assumption, that 'that'-clauses specify belief contents. The main theories of belief reports also rest on this "Specification Assumption", that for a belief report of the form 'A believes that p' to be true,' the proposition that p must be among the things A believes. I use Kripke's Paderewski case to call the Specification Assumption into question. Giving up that assumption offers prospects for an intuiti…Read more
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21When to ask, "what if everyone did that?"Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 37 (4): 464-481. 1977.
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79Review of Francois Recanati, Literal meaning (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2). 2007.
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117Russell was right (almost)Synthese 54 (2). 1983.I defend russell's main views on names and descriptions against recent objections. Ordinary names are not logically proper names (or rigid designators) but really are disguised descriptions (of the form "the bearer of "n""). And russell's theory of descriptions really works. The common objections to russell all suffer from a confusion of use with meaning. However, Russell was wrong to think that there are or need to be any logically proper names (at least for particulars). That is because, So I …Read more
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13"Change in View: Principles of Reasoning" by Gilbert Harman (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48 (4): 761. 1988.
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152What Does it Take to Refer?In Ernest Lepore & Barry Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 516--554. 2006.This article makes a number of points about reference, both speaker reference and linguistic reference. The bottom line is simple: reference ain't easy — at least not nearly as easy as commonly supposed. Much of what speakers do that passes for reference is really something else, and much of what passes for linguistic reference is really nothing more than speaker reference. Referring is one of the basic things we do with words, and it would be a good idea to understand what that involves and req…Read more
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30Review of Robert Fiengo, Asking Questions: Using Meaningful Structures to Imply Ignorance (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (11). 2007.
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1Barry Taylor, ed., Michael Dummett: Contributions to Philosophy Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 10 (4): 160-162. 1990.
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144The Lure of LinguistificationIn Carlo Penco & Filippo Domaneschi (eds.), What Is Said and What Is Not: The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Csli. 2013.Think of linguistification by analogy with personification: attributing linguistic properties to nonlinguistic phenomena. For my purposes, it also includes attributing nonlinguistic properties to linguistic items, i.e., treating nonlinguistic properties as linguistic. Linguistification is widespread. It has reached epidemic proportions. It needs to be eradicated. That’s important because the process of communication is not simply a matter of one person putting a thought into words and another de…Read more
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206How performatives really work: A reply to Searle (review)Linguistics and Philosophy 15 (1). 1992.
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49Analytic social philosophy—basic conceptsJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 5 (2). 1975.
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6Failed Reference and Feigned ReferenceGrazer Philosophische Studien 25 (1): 359-374. 1985.Nothing can be said about a nonexistent object, but something can be said about the act of (unsuccessfully) attempting to refer to one or, as in fiction, of pretending to refer to one. Unsuccessful reference, whether by expressions or by speakers, can be explained straightforwardly within the context of the theory of speech acts and communication. As for fiction, there is nothing special semantically, as to either meaning or reference, about its language. And fictional discourse is just a distin…Read more
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