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20We’re lucky in that many (so far about twenty)1 extremely able philosophers have read and commented on our work in print. A slightly discouraging fact is that all these commentators seem to think we are completely, utterly mistaken. On the positive side: Our critics seem to disagree about what we’re completely wrong about. On the one hand, radical contextualists (e.g. Travis) find our objections against them off the mark, but our objections to moderate contextualism dead-on. On the other hand, t…Read more
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56It’s been, for some time now, a pet thesis of ours that compositionality is the key constraint on theories of linguistic content. On the one hand, we’re convinced by the usual arguments that the compositionality of natural languages1 explains how L-speakers can understand any of the indefinitely many expressions that belong to L.2 And, on the other hand, we claim that compositionality excludes all “pragmatist”3 accounts of content; hence, practically all of the theories of meaning that have been…Read more
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28New directions in semantics (edited book)Academic Press. 1987.Contributors from different disciplines and schools of thought cover topics such as meaning, truth, form of a semantic theory, and natural logic in this book, providing a comparative evaluation of the major new approaches to semantics for natural language. The contributors discuss the different theories and attempt to justify or criticize them, disagreements and points of contact with others, problem areas, and suggestions for future development.
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7Of Donald Davidson, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. xii, 520, $86.00. Truth and Interpretation is the second of two companion volumes to emerge from the 1984 Rutgers conference on the philosophy of Donald Davidson.(The first was Actions and Events (1985).) With two massive collections of (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 66 (2). 1988.
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Meaning and Argument: An Introduction to Logic through LanguageStudia Logica 79 (2): 307-310. 2005.
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76Meaning, mind, and matter: philosophical essaysOxford University Press. 2011.Ernie Lepore and Barry Loewer present a series of papers in which they come to terms with three views that have loomed large in philosophy for several decades: ...
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48Plato did it. Aristotle did it. All the great philosophers did it. You do it and we do it: we draw philosophical conclusions from linguistic data. Although we all do it, the degree, manner, and intensity to which it is done varies. Some have made piecemeal observations about language (e.g., “all these different things have the same term predicated of them”) to draw metaphysical conclusions (e.g., “there is some one existing thing that all these different entities share”). Others have made observ…Read more
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131Meaning and Argument: An Introduction to Logic Through Language (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2000.Meaning and Argument shifts introductory logic from the traditional emphasis on proofs to the symbolization of arguments. Another distinctive feature of this book is that it shows how the need for expressive power and for drawing distinctions forces formal language development. This revised edition includes expanded sections, additional exercises, and an updated bibliography. Updated and revised edition includes extended sections, additional exercises, and an updated bibliography. Distinctive ap…Read more
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69Roger Gibson has achieved as much as anyone else, indeed, more, in presenting and defending Quine’s philosophy. It is no surprise that the great man W.V. Quine himself said that in reading Gibson he gained a welcome perspective on his own work. His twin books The Philosophy of W.V. Quine and Enlightened Empiricism have no rivals. We are all indebted to Roger. The essay that follows is intended not only to honor him but also to continue a theme that runs throughout his (and Quine’s) work, namely,…Read more
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98Logic and semantic analysisIn Dale Jacquette (ed.), Philosophy of Logic, North Holland. pp. 173. 2006.
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L'olismo della credenza e l'olismo del significato: John Searle su" Rete" e Sfondo"Rivista di Filosofia 86 (1): 55. 1995.
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290John Searle and His Critics (edited book)Blackwell. 1991.For more than three decades John Searle has been developing and elaborating a unified theory of language and mind. What has emerged is an impressive and detailed account of intentionality embracing both mental states and linguistic behaviour. Though the developing theory has been presented in a steady stream of books and articles over the last thirty years, two items stand out as major landmarks: the publication of Speech Acts in 1969 and of Intentionality in 1983. Both of these seminal books of…Read more
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12III*—Conditions on Understanding Language1Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 97 (1): 41-60. 1997.Ernest Lepore; III*—Conditions on Understanding Language1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 97, Issue 1, 1 June 1997, Pages 41–60, https://doi.or.
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83from Donald Davidson: Problems of Rationality, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 231-266.
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46Does Syntax Reveal Semantics?: A Case Study of Complex DemonstrativesPhilosophical Perspectives 16 17--41. 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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596The Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Language (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2006.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 …Read more
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219Donald Davidson: meaning, truth, language, and realityOxford University Press. 2005.Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig present the definitive critical exposition of the philosophical system of Donald Davidson. Davidson 's ideas had a deep and broad influence in the central areas of philosophy; he presented them in brilliant essays over four decades, but never set out explicitly the overarching scheme in which they all have their place. Lepore's and Ludwig's book will therefore be the key work, besides Davidson 's own, for understanding one of the greatest philosophers of the twentie…Read more
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97Conditions on understanding languageProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 97 (1). 1997.Philosophers in general are uncomfortable, if not downright skeptical, about attributing semantic knowledge, particularly of a semantic theory, to ordinary speakers. 2 Those who do not feel the pinch often adopt a two-pronged defense: they rebut skeptics with an array of distinctions (and hedges), contending that the skeptics' confusions arise because they ignore such..
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64Dual aspect semanticsIn Stuart Silvers (ed.), ReRepresentation, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1989.
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27Absolute Truth Theories for Modal Languages as Theories of InterpretationCritica 21 (61): 43-73. 1989.
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A study in comparative semanticsIn C. A. Anderson J. Owens (ed.), Propositional Attitudes: The Role of Content in Logic, Language, and Mind, Csli Publications. pp. 20--91. 1990.
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416Against Metaphorical MeaningTopoi 29 (2): 165-180. 2010.The commonplace view about metaphorical interpretation is that it can be characterized in traditional semantic and pragmatic terms, thereby assimilating metaphor to other familiar uses of language. We will reject this view, and propose in its place the view that, though metaphors can issue in distinctive cognitive and discourse effects, they do so without issuing in metaphorical meaning and truth, and so, without metaphorical communication. Our inspiration derives from Donald Davidson’s critical…Read more
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79Critics and champions alike have fussed and fretted for well over fifty years about whether Russell’s treatment is compatible with certain alleged acceptable uses of incomplete definite descriptions,[2] where a description (the F( is incomplete just in case more than one object satisfies its nominal F, as in (1).
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87It would be ever so nice if there were a viable analytic/synthetic distinction. Though nobody knows for sure, there would seem to be several major philosophical projects that having one would advance. For example: analytic sentences2 are supposed to have their truth values solely in virtue of the meanings (together with the syntactic arrangement) of their constituents; i.e., their truth values are supposed to supervene on their linguistic properties alone.3 So they are true in every possible wor…Read more
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