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271Relative Truth and the First PersonPhilosophical Studies 150 (2). 2010.In recent work on contextdependency, it has been argued that certain types of sentences give rise to a notion of relative truth. In particular, sentences containing predicates of personal taste and moral or aesthetic evaluation as well as epistemic modals are held to express a proposition (relative to a context of use) which is true or false not only relative to a world of evaluation, but other parameters as well, such as standards of taste or knowledge or an agent. Thus, a sentence like chocol…Read more
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1013Levels of Linguistic Acts and the Semantics of Saying and QuotingIn Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), Interpreting Austin: Critical Essays, Cambridge University Press. pp. 34-59. 2017.This paper will outline a novel semantics of verbs of saying and of quotation based on Austin’s (1962) distinction among levels of linguistic acts (illocutionary, locutionary, rhetic, phatic, and phonetic acts). It will propose a way of understanding the notion of a rhetic act and argue that it is well-reflected in the semantics of natural language. The paper will furthermore outline a novel, unified and compositional semantics of quotation which is guided by two ideas. First, quotations convey…Read more
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138On the Semantics of Existence PredicatesIn Ingo Reich (ed.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 15, Saarbruecken, . pp. 31-54. 2010.The most common philosophical view about the notion of existence is that it is a second-order property or existential quantification. A less common view is that existence is a (first-order) property of 'existent' as opposed to 'nonexistent' (past or merely intentional) objects. An even less common view is that existence divides into different 'modes of being' for different sorts of entities. In this paper I will take a closer look at the semantic behavior of existence predicates in natural langu…Read more
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938Identificational SentencesNatural Language Semantics 21 (1): 43-77. 2013.Based on the notion of a trope, this paper gives a novel analysis of identificational sentences such as 'this is Mary','this is a beautiful woman', 'this looks like Mary', or 'this is the same lump of clay, but not the same statue as that'.
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71Clausal complements of different kinds of attitude verbs such as believe, doubt, be surprised, wonder, say, and whisper behave differently semantically in a number of respects. For example, they differ in the inference patterns they display. This paper develops a semantic account of clausal complements using partial logic which accounts for such semantic differences on the basis of a uniform meaning of clauses. It focuses on explaining the heterogeneous inference patterns associated with differe…Read more
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352States versus Tropes. Comments on C. Anderson and M. Morzycki: 'Degrees as Kinds'Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 33 (3): 829-841. 2015.In their paper ‘Degrees as Kinds’, Anderson and Morzycki, demonstrate how certain constructions in a range of languages treat kinds, manners, and degrees alike. Their proposal is to identify degrees with kinds of states and they consider states to be interchangeable with tropes. In these comments, I will raise some issues about the interchangeability of (concrete) states and tropes as well as the category of concrete states as well as Anderson and Morzycki's analysis of the comparative.
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195Two kinds of first-person-oriented contentSynthese 184 (2). 2012.In this paper, I will argue that two kinds of first-person-oriented content are distinguished in more ways than usually thought and I propose an account that will shed new light on the distinction. The first kind consists of contents of attitudes de se (in a broad sense); the second kind consists of contents that give rise to intuitions of relative truth. I will present new data concerning the two kinds of first-person-oriented content, together with a novel account of propositional content in g…Read more
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PhD, 1992
La Terrasse, Rhone-Alpes, France
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |