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185Review of Robyn Carston, Thoughts and Utterances (review)Mind and Language 20 (3). 2005.Relevance Theory is the influential theory of linguistic interpretation first championed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance theorists have made important contributions to our understanding of a wide range of constructions, especially constructions that tend to receive less attention in semantics and philosophy of language. But advocates of Relevance Theory also have had a tendency to form a rather closed community, with an unwillingness to translate their own special vocabulary and dis…Read more
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98Philosophy of Language in the Twentieth CenturyIn Dermot Moran (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 382-437. 2008.In the Twentieth Century, Logic and Philosophy of Language are two of the few areas of philosophy in which philosophers made indisputable progress. For example, even now many of the foremost living ethicists present their theories as somewhat more explicit versions of the ideas of Kant, Mill, or Aristotle. In contrast, it would be patently absurd for a contemporary philosopher of language or logician to think of herself as working in the shadow of any figure who died before the Twentieth Century…Read more
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412Knowledge and practical interestsOxford University Press. 2005.Jason Stanley presents a startling and provocative claim about knowledge: that whether or not someone knows a proposition at a given time is in part determined by his or her practical interests, i.e. by how much is at stake for that person at that time. In defending this thesis, Stanley introduces readers to a number of strategies for resolving philosophical paradox, making the book essential not just for specialists in epistemology but for all philosophers interested in philosophical methodolog…Read more
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495Context and logical formLinguistics and Philosophy 23 (4): 391--434. 2000.In this paper, I defend the thesis that alleffects of extra-linguistic context on thetruth-conditions of an assertion are traceable toelements in the actual syntactic structure of thesentence uttered. In the first section, I develop thethesis in detail, and discuss its implications for therelation between semantics and pragmatics. The nexttwo sections are devoted to apparent counterexamples.In the second section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of true non-sentential assertions.In t…Read more
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69Replies to Gilbert Harman, Ram Neta, and Stephen Schiffer (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (1): 196-210. 2007.
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100Précis of knowledge and practical interests (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (1). 2007.Our intuitions about whether someone knows that p vary even fixing the intuitively epistemic features of that person’s situation. Sometimes they vary with features of our own situation, and sometimes they vary with features of the putative knower’s situation. If the putative knower is in a risky situation and her belief that p is pivotal in achieving a positive outcome of one of the actions available to her, or avoiding a negative one, we often feel she must be in a particularly good epistemic p…Read more
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60Context and Logical FormIn Maite Ezcurdia & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy, Broadview Press. pp. 316. 2013.
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1393Hermeneutic fictionalismMidwest Studies in Philosophy 25 (1). 2001.Fictionalist approaches to ontology have been an accepted part of philosophical methodology for some time now. On a fictionalist view, engaging in discourse that involves apparent reference to a realm of problematic entities is best viewed as engaging in a pretense. Although in reality, the problematic entities do not exist, according to the pretense we engage in when using the discourse, they do exist. In the vocabulary of Burgess and Rosen (1997, p. 6), a nominalist construal of a given discou…Read more
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115Reply to Hintikka and Sandu: Frege and Second-Order LogicJournal of Philosophy 90 (8): 416-424. 1993.Hintikka and Sandu had argued that 'Frege's failure to grasp the idea of the standard interpretation of higher-order logic turns his entire foundational project into a hopeless daydream' and that he is 'inextricably committed to a non-standard interpretation' of higher-order logic. We disagree.
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247Understanding, context-relativity, and the Description TheoryAnalysis 59 (1): 14-18. 1999.I argue that it follows from a very plausible principle concerning understanding that the truth of an ascription of understanding is context-relative. I use this to defend an account of lexical meaning according to which full understanding of a natural kind term or name requires knowing informative, uniquely identifying information about its referent. This point undermines Putnam-style 'elm-beech' arguments against the description theory of names and natural kind terms.
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163Review of François Recanati, Literal Meaning (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (9). 2005.
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450On the linguistic basis for contextualismPhilosophical Studies 119 (1-2): 119-146. 2004.Contextualism in epistemology is the doctrine that the proposition expressed by a knowledge attribution relative to a context is determined in part by the standards of justification salient in that context. The (non-skeptical) contextualist allows that in some context c, a speaker may truly attribute knowledge at a time of a proposition p to Hannah, despite her possession of only weak inductive evidence for the truth of that proposition. Relative to another context, someone may make the very sam…Read more
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590Singular Thoughts and Singular PropositionsPhilosophical Studies 154 (2). 2011.A singular thought about an object o is one that is directly about o in a characteristic way—grasp of that thought requires having some special epistemic relation to the object o, and the thought is ontologically dependent on o. One account of the nature of singular thought exploits a Russellian Structured Account of Propositions, according to which contents are represented by means of structured n-tuples of objects, properties, and functions. A proposition is singular, according to this framewo…Read more
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175Semantics in contextIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth, Oxford University Press. pp. 221--54. 2005.
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14Précis of Knowledge and Practical InterestsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (1): 168-172. 2007.
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Meaning and MetatheoryDissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995.Semantic theory has been used for many different philosophical purposes. This thesis investigates two such uses of semantic theory. The first is the use of semantic theory in providing a justification for a formal theory. The second is the use of semantic theory in yielding an account of understanding. ;The first paper is "Truth and Metatheory in Frege". In this paper, it is contended, against much recent work in Frege interpretation, that Frege should be credited with the first semi-rigourous f…Read more
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319Empirical tests of interest-relative invariantismEpisteme 9 (1): 3-26. 2012.According to Interest-Relative Invariantism, whether an agent knows that p, or possesses other sorts of epistemic properties or relations, is in part determined by the practical costs of being wrong about p. Recent studies in experimental philosophy have tested the claims of IRI. After critically discussing prior studies, we present the results of our own experiments that provide strong support for IRI. We discuss our results in light of complementary findings by other theorists, and address the…Read more
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