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130The 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
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45ResponseMind 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
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34One 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
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358Context-sensitivityIn Gillian Russell & Delia Graff Fara (eds.), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language, Routledge. 2012.This article is a survey of the literature on context sensitivity in the philosophy of language.
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66Précis of Holism: A Shopper's Guide (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (3): 637. 1993.
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Actions and Events, Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald DavidsonRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 176 (4): 542-544. 1986.
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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.
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134Saying and AgreeingMind 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
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2Rule-Following, Meaning, and NormativityIn Barry C. Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. 2006.
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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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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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53What Davidson Should Have SaidGrazer 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
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40A 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
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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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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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281Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (edited book)Blackwell. 1986.Each of these 28 essays is part of a comprehensive program to address questions about language, mind, action, and their interconnections. (Philosophy)
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33Subjectivism and environmentalismInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 33 (2): 197-214. 1990.The main thesis of this paper is that the most cogent demands of subjectivity, at least with respect to questions concerning the contents of our thoughts, can be accommodated within an objectivist framework. I begin with two theses: (1) Subjectivity: I can know (the contents of) my own thoughts without appeal to any knowledge of features external to my mind; (2) Environmentalism: (The contents of) my thoughts are determined by features external to my mind, at least in this sense: without causal …Read more
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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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29It 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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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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