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19Quantification and Second-Order QuantificationPhilosophical Perspectives 17 (1): 259--298. 2003.
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18Causing ActionsOxford University Press. 2000.Paul Pietroski presents an original philosophical theory of actions and their mental causes. We often act for reasons: we deliberate and choose among options, based on our beliefs and desires. However, bodily motions always have biochemical causes, so it can seem that thinking and acting are biochemical processes. Pietroski argues that thoughts and deeds are in fact distinct from, though dependent on, underlying biochemical processes within persons.
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11Chomsky on Meaning and ReferenceIn Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.Noam Chomsky offered a fruitful conception of the languages that children regularly acquire and use in human speech. In discussions of meaning, Chomsky often emphasizes complexities of usage and warns against theories that identify word meanings with sets of things that the words are allegedly “true of.” While syntactic structure plays an important role in determining the conditions on reference that complex expressions impose, Chomsky denied that the semantic role of syntax is adequately charac…Read more
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5Meaning before truthIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth, Oxford University Press. 2005.
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5Event Variables and Their ValuesIn Ernie Lepore & Kurt Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson, Blackwell. 2013.We can use language to say what people did, often describing the same action in different complex ways. Davidson offered an illuminating analysis of action reports like “Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard with a dagger in the library,” which involve adverbial modifiers. Part of the challenge here is to say how such modifiers are semantically related to the rest of the sentence. Building on the ancient observation that verbs are often used to describe what happened, Davidson argued that an acti…Read more
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32.1 patterns of reason and traditional grammarIn Barry C. Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 822. 2006.
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Semantic typology and compositionIn Derek Ball & Brian Rabern (eds.), The Science of Meaning: Essays on the Metatheory of Natural Language Semantics, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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Does every sentence like this exhibit a scope ambiguityIn Wolfram Hinzen & Hans Rott (eds.), Belief and Meaning: Essays at the Interface, Deutsche Bibliothek Der Wissenschaften. pp. 43--72. 2002.
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The character of natural language semanticsIn Alex Barber (ed.), Epistemology of language, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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Specifying senses innocently1In Dunja Jutronic (ed.), The Maribor Papers in Naturalized Semantics, Maribor. pp. 318. 1997.
New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language |
Cognitive Sciences |
Areas of Interest
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |