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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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126Getting a Thing into a ThoughtIn Robin Jeshion (ed.), New Essays on Singular Thought, Oxford University Press. pp. 39. 2010.
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1231. Sentences have implicatures. (11, 14, 19)** 2. Implicatures are inferences. (12. 14) 3. Implicatures can’t be entailments. 4. Gricean maxims apply only to implicatures. (16, 17) 5. For what is implicated to be figured out, what is said must be determined first. (12, 13) 6. All pragmatic implications are implicatures. 7. Implicatures are not part of the truth-conditional contents of utterances. (20) 8. If something is meant but unsaid, it must be implicated. (20) 9. Scalar “implicatures” are i…Read more
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123Minimalism about truth-aptitude, if correct, would undercut expressivism about moral discourse. Indeed, it would undercut nonfactualism about any area of discourse. But it cannot be correct, for there are areas, about which people hold beliefs and make statements, to which nonfactualism uncontroversially applies. Or so I will argue. I will be thereby challenging John Divers and Alexander Miller’s [3] appeal to minimalism about truth-aptitude in defending a certain argument against expressivism a…Read more
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120Knowledge, wine, and taste: What good is knowledge (in enjoying wine)In Barry C. Smith (ed.), Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, Oxford University Press. pp. 21--40. 2007.
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119Terms of agreementEthics 105 (3): 604-612. 1995.Can two promises add up to an agreement? Not according to Margaret Gilbert. 1 She has forcefully challenged the orthodox view that an agreement is an exchange of promises. She works through an intricate series of examples of promise-exchanges and argues that none qualifies as an agreement. Assuming that she has not overlooked any plausible candidates, she concludes that agreements are essentially different. It seems, however, that her examples are all exchanges of promises only in an attenuated …Read more
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119Failed 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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118Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for RealismPhilosophy of Science 52 (3): 477-478. 1985.
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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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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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116Paradoxical though it may seem, there are certain things one can do just by saying what one is doing. This is possible if one uses a verb that names the very sort of act one is performing. Thus one can thank someone by saying 'Thank you', fire someone by saying 'You're fired', and apologize by saying 'I apologize'. These are examples of 'explicit performative utterances', statements in form but not in fact. Or so thought their discoverer, J. L. Austin, who contrasted them with 'constatives'. The…Read more
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114Descriptions: Points of ReferenceIn Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and beyond, Oxford University Press. pp. 189-229. 2004.
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114Nowadays 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
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113Conversational implicitureIn Maite Ezcurdia & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy, Broadview Press. pp. 284. 1994.
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110Searle against the world : how can experiences find their objects?In Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), John Searle's Philosophy of Language: Force, Meaning and Mind, Cambridge University Press. 2007.Here's an old question in the philosophy of perception: here I am, looking at this pen [I hold up a pen in my hand]. Presumably I really am seeing this pen. Even so, I could be having an experience just like the one I am having without anything being there. So how can the experience I am having really involve direct awareness of the pen? It seems as though the presence of the pen is inessential to the way the experience is.
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106Refraining, Omitting, and Negative ActsIn 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.
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102Newcomb’s ProblemCanadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (2): 409-425. 1987.The more you think about it, the more baffling Newcomb's Problem becomes. To most people, at first it is obvious which solution is correct, but their confidence can be eroded easily. Only a puzzled few are torn between the two right from the start, and for years so was I. But at last, thanks to a certain metaargument, one solution came to seem obvious to me. And yet, imagining myself actually faced with Newcomb's choice, I started to worry that I might experience just enough last-minute ambivale…Read more
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98Review of Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (review)Philosophical Review. 2000.As the dust jacket proclaims,
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96Thinking and believing in self-deceptionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1): 105-105. 1997.Mele views self-deception as belief sustained by motivationally biased treatment of evidence. This view overlooks something essential, for it does not reckon with the fact that in self-deception the truth is dangerously close at hand and must be repeatedly suppressed. Self-deception is not so much a matter of what one positively believes as what one manages not to think.
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94Sometimes a Great Notion: A Critical Notice of Mark Crimmins’Talk About BeliefsMind and Language 8 (3): 431-441. 1993.Anyone weary of endless philosophical debate on belief reports will find welcome relief in this book. Talking not just about belief talk but about belief itself, it offers much that is new, interesting, and subtle. The central thesis, though interestingly and subtly developed, is not exactly new. It is a version of the “hidden indexical theory” (HIT) of..
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84How 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
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79Review of Francois Recanati, Literal meaning (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2). 2007.
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