Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
PhD, 1995
New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics
Philosophy of Language
  •  87
    Expressions and their representations
    Philosophical Quarterly 49 (195). 1999.
    It is plausible to think that our knowledge of linguistic types can bejustified by what we know about the tokens of these types. But one then hasto explain what it is about the relation a type bears to its tokens that makespossible the move from knowledge of the concrete to knowledge of theabstract. I argue that the standard solution to this difficulty, that the relevant relation is instantiation and that the transition is inductive generalization, is inadequate. I propose an alternative, accord…Read more
  •  90
    On Qualification
    Philosophical Perspectives 17 (1): 385-414. 2003.
  •  134
    Compositionality as supervenience
    Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (5): 475-505. 2000.
  •  107
    When we utter sentences containing quantifiers, typically we are not to be taken to speak about absolutely everything there is. Suppose Mary has invited her friend John to a party to which she is going. If, upon entering the party, Mary turns to Jack and utters (1), it would be rather odd of Jack to object by pointing out that John in fact knows several people who are not present.
  •  211
    Semantics vs. pragmatics (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2005.
    Leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics present brand-new papers on a major topic at the intersection of the two fields, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Anyone engaged with this issue in either discipline will find much to reward their attention here. Contributors: Kent Bach, Herman Cappelen, Michael Glanzberg, Jeffrey C. King, Ernie Lepore, Stephen Neale, F. Recanati, Nathan Salmon, Mandy Simons, Scott Soames, Robert J. Stainton, Jason Stanle…Read more
  •  7
    Problems of Compositionality
    Routledge. 2000.
    This book is a critical discussion of the principle of compositionality, the thesis that the meaning of a complex expression is fully determined by the meanings of its constituents and its structure. The aim of this book is to clarify what is meant by this principle, to show that its traditional justification is insufficient, and to discuss some of the problems that have to be addressed before a new attempt can be made to justify it.
  •  48
    Knowledge of Meaning: An Introduction to Semantic Theory
    with Richard Larson and Gabriel Segal
    Philosophical Review 106 (1): 122. 1997.
    To the best of my knowledge, no one in recent decades has written a book of this magnitude about the semantics of natural language. Certainly, nothing available today matches this volume in depth, precision, and coherence. The authors present classical and recent results of linguistic semantics within the framework of interpretative T-theories and defend the philosophical foundations of their approach by showing how it fits into the larger enterprise of cognitive linguistics. The book also inclu…Read more