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
  •  46
    Review of Scott Soames, Philosophy of Language (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (2). 2011.
  •  423
    Nominalism
    In Michael J. Loux & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), The Oxford handbook of metaphysics, Oxford University Press. 2003.
    …entities? 2. How to be a nominalist 2.1. “Speak with the vulgar …” 2.2. “…think with the learned” 3. Arguments for nominalism 3.1. Intelligibility, physicalism, and economy 3.2. Causal..
  •  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.
  •  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
  •  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.