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Hilary Putnam's "Meaning and the Moral Sciences" (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40 (1): 137. 1979.
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48Review of Krista Lawlor, New Thoughts About Old Things: Cognitive Policies As the Ground of Singular Concepts (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2002 (2). 2002.
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163Thought and referenceClarendon Press. 1987.Presenting a novel account of singular thought, a systematic application of recent work in the theory of speech acts, and a partial revival of Russell's analysis of singular terms, this book takes an original approach to the perennial problems of reference and singular terms by separating the underlying issues into different levels of analysis.
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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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169Quantification, qualification and context a reply to Stanley and SzabóMind and Language 15 (2-3). 2000.We hardly ever mean exactly what we say. I don’t mean that we generally speak figuratively or that we’re generally insincere. Rather, I mean that we generally speak loosely, omitting words that could have made what we meant more explicit and letting our audience fill in the gaps. Language works far more efficiently when we do that. Literalism can have its virtues, as when we’re drawing up a contract, programming a computer, or writing a philosophy paper, but we generally opt for efficiency over …Read more
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246Seemingly Semantic IntuitionsIn Joseph K. Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & David Shier (eds.), Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics., Seven Bridges Press. pp. 21--33. 2002.From ethics to epistemology to metaphysics, it is common for philosophers to appeal to “intuitions” about cases to identify counterexamples to one view and to find support for another. It would be interesting to examine the evidential status of such intuitions, snap judgments, gut reactions, or whatever you want to call them, but in this paper I will not be talking about moral, epistemological, or metaphysical intuitions. I’ll be focusing on semantic ones. In fact, I’ll be focusing on semantic i…Read more
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1Distinguishing Semantics and PragmaticsIn Joseph K. Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & David Shier (eds.), Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics., Seven Bridges Press. pp. 284--310. 2002.
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224Influenced by the Wittgensteinian slogan “Don’t look for the meaning, look for the use,” ordinary language philosophers aimed to defuse various philosophical problems by analyzing key words in terms of what they are used to do or the conditions for appropriately using them. Although Moore, Grice and Searle exposed this error – mixing pragmatics with semantics – it still gets committed, now to a different end. Nowadays the aim is to reckon with the fact that the meanings of a great many sentences…Read more
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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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177A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The word 'light', for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark. Words like 'light', 'note', 'bear' and 'over' are lexically ambiguous. They induce ambiguity in phrases or sentences in which they occur, such as 'light suit' and 'The duchess can't bear children'. However, phrases and sentences can be ambiguous even if none of their constituents is. The phrase 'porcelain egg container' is structurally ambiguous, as 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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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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140MeaningIn L. Nadel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Nature Publishing Group. 2003.Language is used to express thoughts and to represent aspects of the world. What thought a sentence expresses depends on what the sentence means, and how it represents the world also depends on what it means. Moreover, it is ultimately arbitrary, a matter of convention, that the words of a language mean what they do. So it might seem that what they mean is a matter of how they are used. However, they need not be used in accordance with their literal meanings. One can speak nonliterally, and conv…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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125Burge'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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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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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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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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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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