Christopher Gauker

Language acquisition is often said to be a process of mapping words into pre-existing concepts. If that is right, then we ought to be able to obtain experimental evidence for the existence of concepts in prelinguistic children. One line of research that attempts to provide such evidence is the work of Paul Quinn, who claims that looking-time results show that four--month old infants form “category representations”. This paper argues that Quinn’s results have an alternative explanation. A distinction is drawn between conceptual thought and the perception of comparative similarity relations, and it is argued that Quinn’s results can be explained in terms of the latter rather than the former

A similarity space is a hyperspace in which the dimensions represent various dimensions on which objects may differ. The similarity space theory of concepts is the thesis that concepts are regions of similarity spaces that are somehow realized in the brain. Proponents of such a theory of concepts include Paul Churchland and Peter Gärdenfors. This paper argues that the similarity space theory of concepts is mistaken because regions of similarity spaces cannot serve as the components of judgments. It emerges that although similarity spaces cannot model concepts, they may model a kind of nonconceptual representation.

Abstract In their book, Holism: A Shopper's Guide, Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore fail to distinguish between two kinds of holism. One of these is holism about meaning, which is indeed problematic. The other is holism about translation, which is not so clearly problematic. Moreover, the problem with the first sort is that it renders communication unintelligible, not that it rules out psychological laws. Further, Fodor and Lepore's criticisms of various contemporary holists are based on serious misreadings. In particular, Quine need not accept the conception of statements that they force on him, and Davidson and Dennett do not argue for the principle of charity in the ways Fodor and Lepore suppose. But Fodor and Lepore's question about the provenance of the principle of charity is a good one and deserves an answer

The Lockean theory of communication is here defined as the theory that communication takes place when a hearer grasps some sort of mental object, distinct from the speaker's words, that the speaker's words express. This theory contrasts with the view that spoken languages are the very medium of a kind of thought of which overt speech is the most basic form. This article is a critique of some of the most common motives for adopting a Lockean theory of communication. It is not enough that words in some sense express thoughts. It is not enough that animals and prelinguistic infants in some sense think. It is not enough that speakers mean something by what they say or that hearers must understand a speaker's presuppositions. On the contrary, any explanation of how children can learn to communicate in the way the Lockean imagines will presuppose that words can instill beliefs in some way more fundamental than the Lockean theory itself can explain.

This paper spells out the positive theory sketched at the end of "Against Stepping Back".): According to deflationists, [p] is true is in some sense equivalent to p. The problem that the semantic paradoxes pose for the deflationist is to explicate this equivalence without relying on a semantics grounded in the sort of real reference relations that a deflationist thinks do not exist. More generally, the deflationist is challenged to give an account of logical validity that does not force us to countenance such relations. (The usual model-theoretic definition seems to presuppose that there is some special interpretation, the intended interpretation, such that truth simpliciter is truth on that intended interpretation. So if the deflationist adopts this sort of definition, the deflationist will be challenged to identify the intended interpretation without positing real reference relations.) Fortunately, a precise semantics compatible with the deflationist philosophy can be had as follows: First, we define a context as a certain sort of set constructed from a basis of literals (atomic sentences and negations of atomic sentences). This formal account of contexts has to be supplemented with an account of the conditions under which a structure satisfying the formal definition is the structure of that kind pertinent ot a given conversation. For each syntactic type of sentence, we define the conditions under which a sentence of that type is assertible relative to a context. In particular, we define the conditions under which sentences of the form " [p] is true" are assertible in a context, and we define the conditions under which sentences of the form "[p] is assertible in context G" are assertible in a context. Finally, logical validity is defined as preservation of assertibility in a context. It is demonstrated that this approach to semantics resists the semantic paradoxes.

This is a free book, 165 pages. It is for anyone who has had a solid introductory logic course and wants more. Topics covered include soundness and completeness for first-order logic, Tarski's theorem on the undefinability of truth, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the undecidability of first-order logic, a smattering of second-order logic, and modal logic (both propositional and quantificational). I wrote it for use in my own course, because I thought I could present the most important results and concepts more clearly than the available textbooks.

The proposition expressed by a sentence is relative to a context. But what determines the content of the context? Many theorists would include among these determinants aspects of the speaker’s intention in speaking. My thesis is that, on the contrary, the determinants of the context never include the speaker’s intention. My argument for this thesis turns on a consideration of the role that the concept of proposition expressed in context is supposed to play in a theory of linguistic communication. To illustrate an alternative approach, I present an original theory of the reference of demonstratives according to which the referent of a demonstrative is the object that adequately and best satisfies certain accessibility criteria. Although I call my thesis zero tolerance for pragmatics, it is not an expression of intolerance for everything that might be called “pragmatics.”.

This is not a research paper. It is just a handout that I prepared for a course some years ago. It is a presentation of Kripke's theory of truth that I intend to be understandable even to people who have had only a first course in logic. Although elementary, it is completely precise. All the terms are defined and all the proofs (except one trivial induction) are given in detail. I am putting this on the web because I think there are probably a lot of people who want to think about truth and who recognize that they need to know something about Kripke's theory but who are not sure whether they have the necessary background to follow the precise presentations that have been published.

Jason Stanley has argued that in order to obtain the desired readings of certain sentences, such as “In most of John’s classes, he fails exactly three Frenchmen”, we must suppose that each common noun is associated with a hidden indexical that may be either bound by a higher quantifier phrase or interpreted by the context. This paper shows that the desired readings can be obtained as well by interpreting nouns as expressing relations and without supposing that nouns are associated with hidden indexicals. Stanley’s theory and the present alternative are not equivalent, however. They differ over the status of sentences such as “Every student is happy and some student is not happy”. On Stanley’s theory, this sentence will be true in some contexts, while on the present alternative it will be true in no context. Considerations in favor of the present theory’s verdict on such sentences are presented. The broader question at issue is the correct way to incorporate context-relativity into formal semantics.

The question whether semantics is a normative discipline can be formulated as a question about the meaning of the word “means”. If I assert, “The word ‘gatto’ in Italian means cat,” what have I done? The naturalist about meaning claims that I have asserted that a certain natural relation obtains between Italian speakers’ tokens of “gatto” and cats. Or at least, I have asserted something about the way Italian speakers use the word “gatto”, which way presumably has something to do with cats. The normativist claims, on the contrary, that what I have said is that in speaking Italian one ought to use the word “gatto” in a certain way, which way has something to do with cats. What I have done is endorse a certain proposal about how to use the word, which, if accepted, will have normative force.

The key to an adequate account of presupposition projection is to accommodate the fact that the presuppositions of a sentence cannot always be read off the sentence but can often be identified only on the basis of prior utterances in the conversation in which the sentence is uttered. In addition, an account of presupposition requires a three-valued semantics of assertibility and deniability in a context. Presuppositions can be explicated as sentences that belong to the conversation and the assertibility of which ensures that the remaining assertibility and deniability conditions of the presupposition-bearing sentence are dual to one another. The prevailing approach to presuppositions, grounded in Heim’s context-change semantics, can be criticized both on philosophical grounds and for failing to accommodate the phenomena

The network theory of conceptual development is the theory that conceptual developmentmay be represented as a process of constructing a network of linked nodes. The nodes of such a network represent concepts and the links between nodes represent relations between concepts. The structure of such a network is not determined by experience alone but must evolve in accordance with abstraction heuristics, which constrain the varieties of network between which experience must decide. This paper criticizes the network theory on the grounds that current proposals regarding these abstraction heuristics all fail, and further, that, given certain plausible assumptions, no viable account of these abstraction heuristics will be possible. Abstraction heuristics cannot be universal principles of rational thought because virtually no concept is intrinsically unsuitable for use in a true and useful representation of reality. Nor can they be species-specific natural conventions because in that case, it is argued, we would not be able even in principle to learn to understand the language of creatures who used different ones.

Much discussed but still unresolved is whether a subject's internal physical structure is a sufficient condition for his beliefs and desires. The question has sometimes been expressed as a question about microstructurally identical Doppelgänger. Imagine two subjects who are identical right down to the ions traversing the synapses. Their senses are stimulated in all the same ways, their bodies execute the same motions, and identical physical events mediate between the sensory inputs and the behavioral outputs. Must they have the very same beliefs and desires? Let us call the thesis that they must, internalism. The internalist may hold that a physical similarity less complete than this will also guarantee identity in beliefs and desires, but certainly, he holds, perfect identity of internal physical histories will suffice.Internalism will be opposed by those who sense that the nature of mentality is closely tied to the nature of explanation in terms of mental states and that in explaining a subject's behavior we cannot abstract, even in principle, from the character of the environment in which the subject is embedded. This essay offers a partial articulation of this point of view and shows how it conflicts with internalism. A consequence of the view to be described is that our attributions of belief must reflect the probabilistic regularities in the subject's environment. As we shall see, this consequence conflicts with internalism in two ways. The first conflict turns on the fact that there is no limit on the possible variety of such regularities. The second conflict turns on the fact that two subjects might by chance have the same micro-structural history though different probabilistic regularities obtain in their respective environments.

For many purposes in pragmatics one needs to appeal to a context of utterance conceived as a set of sentences or propositions. The context of utterance in this sense is often defined as the set of assumptions that the speaker supposes he or she shares with the hearer. I argue by stages that this is a mistake. First, if contexts must be defined in terms of shared assumptions, then it would be preferable to define the context as the set of assumptionsthat the interlocutors really do share. Second, not all shared assumptions belong to the context, because not all are relevant. Third, hearers need not accept every member of the context, because some presuppositions are informative. Finally, presupposition coordination problems show that contexts may have contents that even the speaker does not accept. Contexts, we may conclude, are mind-transcendent. In one sense of the term a "presupposition" is an interlocutor's take on this mind-transcendent context.

[Note 2015: Much of the content of these remarks has now been published in my paper "Presuppositions as Anaphoric Duality Enablers", Topoi.] This is the text of my comments on the project of dynamic semantics for the session on that topic at the Central Division APA meeting on April 21, 2007. The other speakers were Jeroen Groenendijk, Frank Veltman and Thony Gillies. I question the philosophical basis for dynamic semantics. My doubts have to do with the nature of information states and the norms of semantics. I also question the data that inspire the project. In particular, I question the data concerning presupposition and the data concerning modal operators and conditionals.