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9Meaning, Mind, and Matter: Philosophical EssaysOxford University Press. 2011.Ernie Lepore and Barry Loewer present a series of papers on three key ideas of contemporary philosophy: that a theory of meaning for a language is best understood as a theory of truth for that language; that thought and language are best understood together via a theory of interpretation; and that the mental is irreducible to the physical
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43Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in LanguageOxford University Press. 2014.How do hearers manage to understand speakers? And how do speakers manage to shape hearers' understanding? Lepore and Stone show that standard views about the workings of semantics and pragmatics are unsatisfactory. They advance an alternative view which better captures what is going on in linguistic communication.
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15Figures of speechThe Philosophers' Magazine 56 31-41. 2012.We cannot explain our diverse practices for engaging with imagery through general pragmatic mechanisms. There is no general mechanism behind practices like metaphor and irony. Metaphor works the way it works; irony works the way it works.
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52Figures of speechThe Philosophers' Magazine 56 (56): 31-41. 2012.We cannot explain our diverse practices for engaging with imagery through general pragmatic mechanisms. There is no general mechanism behind practices like metaphor and irony. Metaphor works the way it works; irony works the way it works.
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31Davidson: sobre decir-lo-mismoIdeas Y Valores 53 (125): 7-21. 2004.Three basic elements for a neodavidsonian semantics are presented in thisarticle. Firstly, a rejection of the thesis according to which the semanticcontent is identical with the speech act content. Secondly, the adoption ofsemantic minimalism as the proper domain where a truth-conditionalsemantics ..
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596Donald DavidsonMidwest Studies in Philosophy 28 (1). 2004.This chapter reviews the major contributions of Donald Davidson to philosophy in the 20th century.
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163Donald Davidson's truth-theoretic semanticsClarendon Press. 2007.The work of Donald Davidson (1917-2003) transformed the study of meaning. Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig, two of the world's leading authorities on Davidson's work, present the definitive study of his widely admired and influential program of truth-theoretic semantics for natural languages, giving an exposition and critical examination of its foundations and applications.
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178Donald DavidsonIn Christopher Belshaw & Gary Kemp (eds.), 12 Modern Philosophers, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 199-224. 2009.This chapter reviews the work and influence of Donald Davidson across all the areas to which he contributed.
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95Context sensitivity and content sharingThe Philosophers' Magazine 50 (50): 76-77. 2010.Most linguists think that there are infinitely many sentences, that languages are productive and systematic. Maybe the most remarkable achievement of our lives is that we learn this thing with infinite power. But the whole thing hangs on those sentences being built up out of their components, which are words. So it’s not even clear what one of the more striking theses in the development of linguistics over the last half century signifies or means without an account of the atoms, so to speak, out…Read more
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152Brandom BeleagueredPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (3): 677-691. 2007.We take it that Brandom’s sense of the geography is that our way of proceeding is more or less the first and his is more or less the second. But we think this way of describing the situation is both unclear and misleading, and we want to have this out right at the start. Our problem is that we don’t know what “you start with” means either in formulations like “you start with the content of words and proceed to the content of sentences” or in formulations like “you start with the content of sente…Read more
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An Abuse of Context in Semantics: The Care of Incomplete Definite DescriptionsIn Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and beyond, Oxford University Press. pp. 42--68. 2004.
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61De Ray: On the Boundaries of the Davidsonian Semantic ProgrammeMind 126 (503): 697-714. 2017.Greg Ray (2014) believes he has discovered a crucial oversight in Donald Davidson’s semantic programme, recognition of which paves the way for a novel approach to Davidsonian semantics. We disagree: Ray’s novel approach involves a tacit appeal to pre-existing semantic knowledge which vitiates its interest as a development of the Davidsonian programme.
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115Does Syntax Reveal Semantics? A Case Study of Complex DemonstrativesNoûs 36 (s16). 2002.Following Aristotle (who himself was following Parmenides), philosophers have appealed to the distributional reflexes of expressions in determining their semantic status, and ultimately, the nature of the extra-linguistic world. This methodology has been practiced throughout the history of philosophy; it was clarified and made popular by the likes of Zeno Vendler and J.L. Austin, and is realized today in the toolbox of linguistically minded philosophers. Studying the syntax of natural language w…Read more
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97A Companion to Donald Davidson (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy) (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2013.
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38Knowledge and Semantic CompetenceIn M. Sintonen, J. Wolenski & I. Niiniluoto (eds.), Handbook of Epistemology, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 707--731. 2004.
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74Misrepresenting misrepresentationIn Elke Brendel (ed.), Understanding Quotation, De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 7--231. 2011.
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130Why meaning (probably) isn't conceptual rolePhilosophical Issues 3 15-35. 1993.It's an achievement of the last couple of decades that people who work in linguistic semantics and people who work in the philosophy of language have arrived at a friendly, de facto agreement as to their respective job descriptions. The terms of this agreement are that the semanticists do the work and the philosophers do the worrying. The semanticists try to construct actual theories of meaning (or truth theories, or model theories, or whatever) for one or another kind of expression in one or an…Read more
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35A Companion to W. V. O. Quine (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2013.This Companion brings together a team of leading figures in contemporary philosophy to provide an in-depth exposition and analysis of Quine’s extensive influence across philosophy’s many sub-fields, highlighting the breadth of his work, and revealing his continued significance today.
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40What Is the Connection Principle?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (4): 837-845. 1994.
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150Why Compositionality Won’t Go Away: Reflections on Horwich’s ‘Deflationary’Ratio 14 (4): 350-368. 2001.Compositionality is the idea that the meanings of complex expressions (or concepts) are constructed from the meanings of the less complex expressions (or concepts) that are their constituents.1 Over the last few years, we have just about convinced ourselves that compositionality is the sovereign test for theories of lexical meaning.2 So hard is this test to pass, we think, that it filters out practically all of the theories of lexical meaning that are current in either philosophy or cognitive sc…Read more
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95The emptiness of the lexicon: Critical reflections on J. Pustejovsky's the generative lexiconLinguistic Inquiry 29 269-288. 1998.A certain metaphysical thesis about meaning that we'll call Informational Role Semantics (IRS) is accepted practically universally in linguistics, philosophy and the cognitive sciences: the meaning (or content, or `sense') of a linguistic expression1 is constituted, at least in part, by at least some of its inferential relations. This idea is hard to state precisely, both because notions like metaphysical constitution are moot and, more importantly, because different versions of IRS take differe…Read more
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16This is a long paper with a long title, but its moral is succinct. There are supposed to be two, closely related, philosophical problems about sentences1 with truth value gaps: If a sentence can't be semantically evaluated, how can it mean anything at all? and How can classical logic be preserved for a language which contains such sentences? We are neutral on whether either of these supposed problems is real. But we claim that, if either is, supervaluation won't solve it.
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24What cannot be evaluated cannot be evaluated and it cannot be supervalued eitherJournal of Philosophy 93 (1): 516--35. 1996.
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48It matters to a number of projects whether monomorphemic lexical items (‘boy’, ‘cat’, ‘give’, ‘break’, etc.) have internal linguistic structure. (Call the theory that they do the Decomposition Hypothesis (DC).) The cognitive science consensus is, overwhelmingly, that DC is true; for example, that there is a level of grammar at which ‘breaktr’ has the structure ‘cause to breakint’ and so forth. We find this consensus surprising since, as far as we can tell, there is practically no evidence to sup…Read more
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