Mark Sainsbury

People use words and concepts to refer to things. There are agents who refer, there are acts of referring, and there are tools to refer with: words and concepts. Reference is a relation between people and things, and also between words or concepts and things, and perhaps it involves all three things at once. It is not just any relation between an action or word and a thing; the list of things which can refer, people, words and concepts, is probably not complete ; and a complete account would need to speak of cases in which the reference relation seems to involve three terms in a different way from the one already mentioned. In the philosophy of language, it has been customary to think of reference as a two-place relation, with some object as the second term and a word or phrase as the first.

I argue against a standard conception of classification, according to which concepts classify by drawing boundaries. This conception cannot properly account for "higher-order vagueness." I discuss in detail claims by Crispin Wright about "definitely," and its connection with higher-order vagueness. Contrary to Wright, I argue that the line between definite cases of red and borderline ones is not sharp. I suggest a new conception of classification: many concepts classify without drawing boundaries; they are boundaryless. Within this picture, there are no orders of vagueness, though the phenomena which suggest the description "higher-order vagueness" are real enough

This belongs to a symposium about Crispin Wright's Truth\nand Objectivity. Wright entertains the "possibility of a\npluralist view of truth." I suggest that this should not\nentail ambiguity in the word "true." For truth to amount to\ndifferent things for different kinds of subject matter no\nmore entails ambiguity than does the fact that existence\namounts to different things for different kinds of entity.\nTurning to cognitive command, I argue that it is trivially\nsatisfied: if I judge that p and you disagree, then under\nsuitable conditions I must take it that something is wrong\nwith your cognitive mechanisms

Bertrand Russell , born in Trelleck, Wales, was the grandson of the first Earl Russell, who introduced the Reform Bill of 1832 and served as prime minister under Queen Victoria. He studied mathematics and philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1890–1894, was a Fellow of Trinity College, 1895–1901, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1908, and was a lecturer in philosophy, 1910–1916. Among his publications in philosophy in this period were An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry , A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz , The Principles of Mathematics , Principia Mathematica , The Problems of Philosophy and Our Knowledge of the External World

In the early part of the paper, I attempt to explain a dispute between two parties who endorse the compositionality of language but disagree about its implications: Paul Horwich, and Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore. In the remainder of the paper, I challenge the thesis on which they are agreed, that compositionality can be taken for granted. I suggest that it is not clear what compositionality involves nor whether it obtains. I consider some kinds of apparent counterexamples, and compositionalist responses to them in terms of covert indexicality and unspecific meanings. I argue that the last option is the best for most of the cases I consider. I conclude by stressing, as against Horwich and Fodor and Lepore, that the appropriate question concerns the extent to which compositionality obtains in a natural language, rather than whether it obtains or not, so that the answer is essentially messy, requiring detailed consideration of a wide range of examples.