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
  •  76
    Review of Scott Soames, Philosophy of Language (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (2). 2011.
  •  328
    Modals with a Taste of the Deontic
    Semantics and Pragmatics 6 (1): 1-42. 2013.
    The aim of this paper is to present an explanation for the impact of normative considerations on people’s assessment of certain seemingly purely descriptive matters. The explanation is based on two main claims. First, a large category of expressions are tacitly modal: they are contextually equivalent to modal proxies. Second, the interpretation of predominantly circumstantial or teleological modals is subject to certain constraints which make certain possibilities salient at the expense of other…Read more
  •  240
    Descriptions and uniqueness
    Philosophical Studies 101 (1): 29-57. 2000.
  •  195
    On Qualification
    Philosophical Perspectives 17 (1): 385-414. 2003.
  •  367
    Believing in things
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (3). 2003.
    I argue against the standard view that ontological debates can be fully described as disagreements about what we should believe to exist. The central thesis of the paper is that believing in Fs in the ontologically relevant sense requires more than merely believing that Fs exist. Believing in Fs is not even a propositional attitude; it is rather an attitude one bears to the term expressed by 'Fs'. The representational correctness of such a belief requires not only that there be Fs, but also that…Read more
  •  246
    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
  •  55
    Problems of Compositionality
    Routledge. 2015.
    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.
  •  130
    Finding the question
    Philosophical Studies 174 (3): 779-786. 2017.
    Yablo gives us an account of subject-matter - a characterization of what declarative sentences are about. I argue that this account can be seen as a way of adjusting Frege’s theory of meaning, so as it no longer carries the implausible commitment that declarative sentences refer to their truth-values. I also point out that Yablo’s approach faces an unpleasant choice: give up a uniform compositional semantics for interrogative sentences or abandon the idea that ordinary characterizations of subje…Read more
  •  147
    Category Mistakes (review)
    Philosophical Review 124 (2): 289-292. 2015.
  •  61
    Things in Progress
    Noûs 42 (1): 499-525. 2008.
    I argue that sentences like ‘ John is building a house’ entail the existence of some thing John is building, althoguh they do not entail that this thing is a house. It is a house in progress. On the way, I argue against intensional analyses of the progressive. This is a follow-up of my earlier paper ‘On the Progressive and the Perfective.’
  •  3
    Adjectives in context
    In Darragh Byrne & Max Kolbel (eds.), Arguing about language, Routledge. 2010.
    0. Abstract In this paper, I argue that although the behavior of adjectives in context poses a serious challenge to the principle of compositionality of content, in the end such considerations do not defeat the principle. The first two sections are devoted to the precise statement of the challenge; the rest of the paper presents a semantic analysis of a large class of adjectives that provides a satisfactory answer to it. In section 1, I formulate the context thesis, according to which the conten…Read more
  •  54
    These are the comments I gave at Ohio State in October 2006 on Kai von Fintel’s paper on presupposition accommodation.
  •  92
    Definite descriptions without uniqueness: A reply to Abbott (review)
    Philosophical Studies 114 (3). 2003.
  •  187
    Compositionality
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
  •  112
    Semantics Versus Pragmatics (edited book)
    Oxford University Press UK. 2004.
    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
  •  138
    Review: Descriptions and Beyond (review)
    Mind 115 (459): 796-800. 2006.
  •  198
    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
  •  74
    I present two challenges to fictionalism. According to the first, the reasons fictionalists offer for acceptance without belief often warrant a somewhat different attitude. According to the second, the possibility of fictionalist acceptnace rests on the poorly supported hypothesis that there is a clear distinction between philsophical and ordinary contexts. This is forthcoming in Noûs
  •  156
    Things in progress
    Philosophical Perspectives 22 (1): 499-525. 2008.
    No Abstract
  •  81
    Against logical form
    In Gerhard Preyer (ed.), Donald Davidson on truth, meaning, and the mental, Oxford University Press. 2012.
  • Semantics and
    In Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. 2005.