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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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21When to ask, "what if everyone did that?"Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 37 (4): 464-481. 1977.
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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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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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149What 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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206How performatives really work: A reply to Searle (review)Linguistics and Philosophy 15 (1). 1992.
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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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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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142Even though it’s based on a bad argument, there’s something to Strawson’s dictum. He might have likened ‘referring expression’ to phrases like ‘eating utensil’ and ‘dining room’: just as utensils don’t eat and dining rooms don’t dine, so, he might have argued, expressions don’t refer. Actually, that wasn’t his argument, though it does make you wonder. Rather, Strawson exploited the fact that almost any referring expression, whether an indexical, demonstrative, proper name, or definite descriptio…Read more
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30Semantic slack: What is said and moreIn Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives, Routledge. pp. 267--291. 1994.
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150Meaning and CommunicationIn G. Russell & D. G. Fara (eds.), Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 79--90. 2012.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
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18Subject and name indexIn Rita Finkbeiner, Jörg Meibauer & Petra Schumacher (eds.), What is a Context?: Linguistic Approaches and Challenges, John Benjamins. pp. 196--251. 2012.
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158Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went WrongPhilosophical Review 109 (4): 627. 2000.As the dust jacket proclaims, “this is surely Fodor’s most irritating book in years …. It should exasperate philosophers, linguists, cognitive psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists alike.” Yes, Fodor is an equal-opportunity annoyer. He sees no job for conceptual analysts, no hope for lexical semanticists, and no need for prototype theorists. When it comes to shedding light on concepts, these luminaries have delivered nothing but moonshine. Fodor aims to remedy things, and not just with sn…Read more
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179What's in a nameAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 59 (4). 1981.This Article does not have an abstract
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216Knowledge in and out of contextIn Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O.’Rourke & Harry S. Silverstein (eds.), Knowledge and Skepticism, Mit Press. pp. 105--36. 2007.In this chapter, the author offers another explanation of the variation in contents, which is explained by contextualism as being related to a variation in standards. The author’s explanation posits that the contents of knowledge attributions are invariant. The variation lies in what knowledge attributions we are willing to make or accept. Although not easy to acknowledge, what contextualism counts as knowledge varies with the context in which it is attributed. A new rival to contextualism, know…Read more
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26Replies to My CriticsCroatian 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
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498Frege's and Russell's views are obviously different, but because of certain superficial similarities in how they handle certain famous puzzles about proper names, they are often assimilated. Where proper names are concerned, both Frege and Russell are often described together as "descriptivists." But their views are fundamentally different. To see that, let's look at the puzzle of names without bearers, as it arises in the context of Mill's purely referential theory of proper names, aka the 'Fid…Read more
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