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239The excluded middle: Semantic minimalism without minimal propositions (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2). 2006.Insensitive Semantics is mainly a protracted assault on semantic Contextualism, both moderate and radical. Cappelen and Lepore argue that Moderate Contextualism leads inevitably, like marijuana to heroin or masturbation to blindness, to Radical Contextualism and in turn that Radical Contextualism is misguided. Assuming that the only alternative to Contextualism is their Semantic Minimalism, they think they’ve given an indirect argument for it. But they overlook a third view, one that splits the …Read more
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139If you think that semantic minimalism is the only alternative to contextualism but you’d rather do without Cappelen and Lepore’s mysteriously minimal “propositions,” you can. You just have to recognize that being semantically incomplete does not make a sentence context-sensitive. You don’t have to go through the ritual of repeatedly incanting things like this: “John is ready” expresses the proposition that John is ready. Instead, you can opt for Radical Minimalism and suppose that “John is ready…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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182An analysis of self-deceptionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 41 (March): 351-370. 1981.
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145Emotional disorder and attentionIn 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
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184Group slurs are applied to a whole category of people. Whereas slurs like jerk, creep, and hag are generally directed at individuals because of the personal traits (behavior, personality, looks, etc.), group slurs, like spic, commie, and infidel, are applied across the board to members of a category. Even when directed at a particular individual, ethnic, religious, and political slurs are applied on the basis of group membership rather than anything about the person in particular. Before asking …Read more
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34Searle 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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165Content: Wide vs. narrowIn Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal, Routledge. 1996.
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242Sentences whose semantic contents seem to differ in different contexts, in virtue of containing expressions of such sorts as the following (there may be others).
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175Referentially Used Descriptions: A Reply to DevittEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (2): 33-48. 2007.This paper continues an ongoing debate between Michael Devitt and me on referential uses of definite descriptions. He has argued that definite descriptions have referential meanings, and I have argued that they do not. Having previously rebutted the view that referential uses are akin to particularized conversational implicatures, he now he rebuts the view that they are akin to generalized conversational implicatures. I agree that the GCI is not the best model, but I maintain that in exploiting …Read more
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743Conversational ImplicitureMind 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
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16Three other motivational factorsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (5): 651-652. 2005.Ainslie uses his hyperbolic discount model to explain a dazzling array of puzzling motivational phenomena. In so doing, he assumes that the motivational force of a given option at a given time is directly proportional to its discount-adjusted reward as assessed at that time. He overlooks three other factors which, independently of the perceived reward, can affect motivational force.
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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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98Review of Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (review)Philosophical Review. 2000.As the dust jacket proclaims,
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30Review: Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake? And Other Essays, by Howard Wettstein (review)Mind 101 (402). 1992.
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9Thorstein Fretheim and Jeanette K. Gundel , Reference and Referent AccessibilityPragmatics and Cognition 6 (1): 335-338. 1998.
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145Giorgione was so-called because of his namePhilosophical Perspectives 16 73-103. 2002.Proper names seem simple on the surface. Indeed, anyone unfamiliar with philosophical debates about them might wonder what the fuss could possibly be about. It seems obvious why we need them and what we do with them, and that is to talk about particular persons, places, and things. You don't have to be as smart as Mill to think that proper names are simply tags attached to individuals. But sometimes appearances are deceiving.
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184A Rationale for ReliabilismThe Monist 68 (2): 246-263. 1985.What bothers people about reliabilism as a theory of justified belief? It has yet to be formulated adequately, but most philosophical theories have that problem. People seem to be bothered by the very idea of reliabilism, with its apparent disregard for believers’ rationality and responsibility. Yet its supporters can’t seem to understand its opponents complaints. I believe that the conflict can be clarified, if not resolved, by drawing certain important distinctions.
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152Review of Christopher Potts, The Logic of Conventional ImplicaturesJournal of Linguistics 42 (2). 2006.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
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129Minding the gapIn Claudia Bianchi (ed.), the semantics/pragmatics distinction, Csli. pp. 27--43. 2004.
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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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156Default Reasoning: Jumping to Conclusions and Knowing When to Think TwicePacific Philosophical Quarterly 65 (1): 37. 1984.Look before you leap. - Proverb. He who hesitates is lost. - Another proverb
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133You Don't Say?Synthese 128 (1-2): 15-44. 2001.This paper defends a purely semantic notionof what is said against various recent objections. Theobjections each cite some sort of linguistic,psychological, or epistemological fact that issupposed to show that on any viable notion of what aspeaker says in uttering a sentence, there ispragmatic intrusion into what is said. Relying on amodified version of Grice's notion, on which what issaid must be a projection of the syntax of the utteredsentence, I argue that a purely semantic notion isneeded t…Read more
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214Loaded Words: On the Semantics and Pragmatics of SlursIn David Sosa (ed.), Bad Words: Philosophical Perspectives on Slurs, Oxford University Press. pp. 60-76. 2018.There are many mean and nasty things to say about mean and nasty talk, but I don't plan on saying any of them. There's a specific problem about slurring words that I want to address. This is a semantic problem. It's not very important compared to the real-world problems presented by bigotry, racism, discrimination, and worse. It's important only to linguistics and the philosophy of language.
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308The theory of speech acts is partly taxonomic and partly explanatory. It must systematically classify types of speech acts and the ways in which they can succeed or fail. It must reckon with the fact that the relationship between the words being used and the force of their utterance is often oblique. For example, the sentence 'This is a pig sty' might be used nonliterally to state that a certain room is messy and filthy and, further, to demand indirectly that it be straightened out and cleaned u…Read more
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