•  12
    Presupposition and Context Sensitivity
    Mind and Language 29 (5): 613-627. 2014.
    We argue there is a clash between the standard treatments of context sensitivity and presupposition triggering. We use this criticism to motivate a defense of an often-discarded view about how to represent context sensitivity, according to which there are more lexically implicit items in logical form than has been appreciated
  •  10
    Three Trivial Truth Theories
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (3). 1983.
    According to Tarski, a theory of truth for a language L is a theory which logically implies for each sentence S of L a sentence of the form:S is true-in-L if and only if p,where rS1 is replaced by a canonical description of a sentence of L and rp1 is replaced by that sentence if L is contained in the metalanguage or by a translation of S if it is not so contained. Tarski constructed consistent and finitely axiomatized theories of truth for various formal languages and showed how to explicitly de…Read more
  •  659
    Discourse and logical form: pronouns, attention and coherence
    Linguistics and Philosophy 40 (5): 519-547. 2017.
    Traditionally, pronouns are treated as ambiguous between bound and demonstrative uses. Bound uses are non-referential and function as bound variables, and demonstrative uses are referential and take as a semantic value their referent, an object picked out jointly by linguistic meaning and a further cue—an accompanying demonstration, an appropriate and adequately transparent speaker’s intention, or both. In this paper, we challenge tradition and argue that both demonstrative and bound pronouns ar…Read more
  •  117
    Pointing things out: in defense of attention and coherence
    Linguistics and Philosophy 43 (2): 139-148. 2020.
    Nowak and Michaelson have done us the service of presenting direct and clear worries about our account of demonstratives. In response, we use the opportunity to engage briefly with their remarks as a useful way to clarify our view.
  •  18
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language, Volume 1 (edited book)
    with David Sosa
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    Philosophy of language has been at the center of philosophical research at least since the start of the 20th century. But till now there has been no regular forum for outstanding original work in this area. That is what Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language offers.
  •  5
    Impossible words: A reply to Kent Johnson
    with Jerry Fodor
    Mind and Language 20 (3). 2005.
  •  36
    The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2005.
    The Oxford Handbooks series is a major new initiative in academic publishing. Each volume offers an authoritative and up-to-date survey of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned essays from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates. Oxford Handbooks provide scholars and graduate students with compelling new perspectives upon a wide range of subjects in the humanities and social sciences. Ernie Lepore a…Read more
  •  9
    Response
    Mind and Language 21 (1): 50-73. 2006.
    We start off with some points of clarification about the view we defend in Insensitive Semantics, before going on to consider responses from Charles Travis, Zoltan Szabo,Anne Bezuidenhout, Steven Gross, and Francois Recanati
  •  34
    One of Szabo's central objections is his ‘reservations about the alleged slide from moderate to radical contextualism’. First, some background: the argument Szabo expresses doubt about is essential both to the critical part of our book and to its positive part. Our argument against what we call moderate contextualism depends on the assumption that it collapses into radical contextualism. Our positive view depends on the assumption that for any utterance, we can trigger the intuition that many di…Read more
  •  66
    Précis of Holism: A Shopper's Guide (review)
    with Jerry Fodor
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (3): 637. 1993.
  • Actions and Events, Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson
    Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 176 (4): 542-544. 1986.
  •  4
    In defense of Davidson
    Linguistics and Philosophy 5 (2). 1982.
  •  1
    Reflexions sobre l'holisme
    Enrahonar: Quaderns de Filosofía 25 41-53. 1996.
  •  1
    ¿Qué es lo que una semántica de teoría de modelos no puede hacer?
    Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica 54 1-98. 1983.
  •  1
    Preface
    with Jerry Fodor
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 46 1-2. 1993.
  •  9
    Saying and Agreeing
    Mind and Language 25 (5): 583-601. 2010.
    No semantic theory is complete without an account of context sensitivity. But there is little agreement over its scope and limits even though everyone invokes intuition about an expression's behavior in context to determine its context sensitivity. Minimalists like Cappelen and Lepore identify a range of tests which isolate clear cases of context sensitive expressions, such as ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’, to the exclusion of all others. Contextualists try to discredit the tests and supplant them with…Read more
  •  18
    Why meaning (probably) isn't conceptual role
    with Jerry A. Fodor
    In Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Arguing about language, Routledge. 2010.
  •  8
    What is Cognitive Science (edited book)
    Wiley-Blackwell. 1999.
    Written by an assembly of leading researchers in the field, this volume provides an innovative and non-technical introduction to cognitive science, and the key issues that animate the field.
  •  4
    What Davidson Should Have Said
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 36 (1): 65-78. 1989.
    According to Davidson, a theory of meaning for a language L should specify information such that if someone had this information he would be in a position to understand L. He claims that a theory of truth for L fits this description. Many critics have argued that a truth theory is too weak to be a theory of meaning. We argue that these critics and Davidson's response to them have been misguided. Many critics have been misguided because they have not been clear aboutwhat a theory of meaning is su…Read more
  •  40
    A standard view about the quotation is that ‘the result of enclosing any expression...in quotation marks is a constant singular term’ [Wallace 1972, p.237]. There is little sense in treating the entire complex of an expression flanked by a right and left quotation mark, a quotation term for short, as a ‘constant singular term’ of a language L if that complex is not, in some sense, itself a constituent of L. So, just as (1) contains twenty-seven tokened symbols (including twenty-three roman lette…Read more
  •  3
    Translational semantics
    Synthese 48 (1). 1981.
  •  82
    I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered or born with. (Davidson, 1986, p. 446).
  •  25
    Truth and inference
    Erkenntnis 18 (3). 1982.
  •  13
    The Heresy of Paraphrase: When the Medium Really Is the Message
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33 (1): 177-197. 2009.
    Now I may not be an educated man . . . But it seems to me to go against common sense to ask what the poet is ‘trying to say’. The poem isn’t a code for something easily understood. The poem is what he is trying to say.