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118Situated Utterances and Discourse RelationsIn Ernest Lepore, Una Stojnic & Matthew Stone (eds.), Proceedings of the 10 th International Conference on Computational Semantics, Iwcs. 2013.Utterances in situated activity are about the world. Theories and systems normally capture this by assuming references must be resolved to real-world entities in utterance understanding. We describe a number of puzzles and problems for this approach, and propose an alternative semantic representation using discourse relations that link utterances to the nonlinguistic context to capture the context-dependent interpretation of situated utterances. Our approach promises better empirical coverage an…Read more
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118Reply to Richard and ReimerMind and Language 13 (4): 588-621. 1998.We reply to Marga Reimer and Mark Richard's comments on our article 'On An Alleged Connection Between Indirect Speech and the Theory of Meaning'.
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116What 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.
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113Shared ContentIn Ernest Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 1020--1055. 2006.A general and fundamental tension surrounds our concept of what is said. On the one hand, what is said (asserted, claimed, stated, etc.) by utterances of a significant range of sentences is highly context sensitive. More specifically, (Observation 1 (O1)), what these sentences can be used to say depends on their contexts of utterance. On the other hand, speakers face no difficulty whatsoever in using many of these sentences to say (or make) the exact same claim, assertion, etc., across a wide ar…Read more
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113Replies (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2). 2006.Symposium on Insensitive Semantics. Replies to Kent Bach, John Hawthorne, Kepa Korta and John Perry, and Robert J. Stainton.
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111Does 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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107Why meaning (probably) isn't conceptual roleIn Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Arguing about language, Routledge. 2010.
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107Pointing things out: in defense of attention and coherenceLinguistics 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.
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104A 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 subfields, highlighting the breadth of his work, and revealing his continued significance today. Provides an in-depth account and analysis of W.V.O. Quine’s contribution to American Philosophy, and his position as one of the late twentieth-century’s most influential analytic philosophers Brings together newly-co…Read more
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101The Heresy of Paraphrase: When the Medium Really Is the MessageMidwest 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.
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100A Tall Tale: In Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act PluralismIn Maite Ezcurdia & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy, Broadview Press. pp. 412-28. 2005.We provide a defense of our insensitive semantics: that is, the combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism argued for at more length in our book Insensitive Semantics.
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98Logic and semantic analysisIn Dale Jacquette (ed.), Philosophy of Logic, North Holland. pp. 173. 2006.
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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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97A Tall Tale: In Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act PluralismCanadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (sup1): 2-28. 2004.In Insensitive Semantics (2004), we argue for two theses – Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism. In this paper, we outline our defense against two objections often raised against Semantic Minimalism. We begin with five stage-setting sections. These lead to the first objection, viz., that it might follow from our view that comparative adjectives are context insensitive. We defend our view against that objection (not, as you might expect, by denying that implication, but by endorsing it). …Read more
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97A Companion to Donald Davidson (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy) (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2013.
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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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93The 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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92Reply to HawthornePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research (2). 2006.In Chapter 7 of IS we rely crucially on tests for how speakers share content across contexts. We claim these tests can be used to gather evidence both for and against claims about an expression being context sensitive. Many philosophers now rely on these and related tests – Hawthorne (2003) being early proponent (cf. also Egan, Hawthorne and Weatherson (2004), Lasersohn (2006), Macfarlane (2004), Richard (2004), and (arguably) Stanley (2005)). In his reply, Hawthorne raises interesting challenge…Read more
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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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84Truth in the Theory of MeaningIn Ernie Lepore & Kurt Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson, Blackwell. 2013.In this chapter, we defend the view that Davidson aimed not to replace the theory of meaning with the theory of truth, or to capture only certain features of the ordinary notion of meaning for certain theoretical purposes, but rather to pursue the traditional project of explaining in the broadest terms “what it is for words to mean what they do” through a clever bit of indirection, namely, by exploiting the recursive structure of a Tarskian‐style truth theory, which meets certain constraints in …Read more
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83Insensitive SemanticsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2): 443-450. 2006.We give a precis of our book Insensitive Semantics.
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83from Donald Davidson: Problems of Rationality, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 231-266.
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82Varieties of Quotation RevisitedBelgian Journal of Linguistics (17): 51-75. 2003.This paper develops the view presented in our 1997 paper "Varieties of Quotation". In the first part of the paper we show how phenomena such as scare-quotes, echoing and mimicry can be treated as what we call Speech Act Heuristics. We then defend a semantic account of mixed quotation. Along the way we discuss the role of indexicals in mixed quotation and the noncancelability of reference to words in mixed quotation. We also respond to some objections raised by Recanati, Saka, Stainton and Reimer
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82I 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).
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