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61Offending by mentioningInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.1. Anderson and Lepore (2013) argue that the offensiveness of slur terms can’t consist (merely?) in their having derogatory meanings because even quotation marks fail to prevent offence being cause...
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6ParataxisIn Ernie Lepore & Kurt Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson, Blackwell. 2013.Davidson used parataxis for three purposes: to give an account of the truth conditions of indirect speech reports, to give a theory of quotation, and to account for mood. This chapter critically investigates Davidson's use of parataxis and investigates some developments of his views in the hands of neo‐Davidsonians.
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8Quine on Paraphrase and RegimentationIn Ernie Lepore & Gilbert Harman (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.Dagfinn Føllesdal: “Developments in Quine's Behaviorism”: Quine insisted throughout his life that he was a behaviorist. He began briefly as an “ontological behaviorist,” that is, he held that there is nothing mental. However, very early he switched to evidential behaviorism: the view that behavior provides the only evidence we have for the mental and its properties. Ultimately, Quine's behaviorism springs from his empiricism. All knowledge about the world around us and about other people reaches…Read more
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94Pejorative Verbs and the Prospects for a Unified Theory of SlursAnalytic Philosophy 61 (2): 130-151. 2020.Analytic Philosophy, EarlyView.
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35Comments on Peter Ludlow’s Living WordsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (3): 344-354. 2019.
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27Comments on Peter Ludlow’s the dynamic lexiconInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1-11. forthcoming.
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58Critical Notice: Peter Ludlow’s Living Words: Meaning Underdetermination and he Dynamic Lexicon, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014 (review)Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (1): 106-128. 2018.A provocative view has it that word meanings are underdetermined and dynamic, frustrating traditional approaches to theorizing about meaning. Peter Ludlow’s Living Words provides some of the philosophical reasons and motivations for accepting one such view, develops some of its details, and explores some of its ramifications. We critically examine some of the arguments in Living Words, paying particular attention to some of Ludlow’s views about the meanings of predicates, preservation of bivalen…Read more
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24Semantic Minimalism and PresuppositionProtoSociology 31 43-49. 2014.This paper is about the interface between two phenomena—context sensitivity and presupposition. I argue that favored competing treatments of context sensitivity are incompatible with the received view about presupposition triggering. In consequence, I will urge a reconsideration of a much-maligned view about how best to represent context s ensitivity.
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25The Binding Argument and Pragmatic Enrichment, or, Why Philosophers Care Even More Than Weathermen about ‘Raining’Philosophy Compass 3 (1): 135-157. 2008.What is the proper way to draw the semantics‐pragmatics distinction, and is what is said by a speaker ever enriched by pragmatics? An influential but controversial answer to the latter question is that the inputs to semantic interpretation contains representations of every contribution from context that is relevant to determining what is said, and that pragmatics never enriches the output of semantic interpretation. The proposal is bolstered by a controversial argument from syntactic binding des…Read more
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8Saying 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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72Presupposition and Context SensitivityMind and Language 29 (5): 613-627. 2014.We argue there is a clash between the standard treatments of context sensitivity and presupposition triggering. We use this criticism to motivate a defense of an often-discarded view about how to represent context sensitivity, according to which there are more lexically implicit items in logical form than has been appreciated
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67Embedding If and Only IfJournal of Philosophical Logic 41 (2): 449-460. 2012.Some left-nested indicative conditionals are hard to interpret while others seem fine. Some proponents of the view that indicative conditionals have No Truth Values (NTV) use their view to explain why some left-nestings are hard to interpret: the embedded conditional does not express the truth conditions needed by the embedding conditional. Left-nestings that seem fine are then explained away as cases of ad hoc, pragmatic interpretation. We challenge this explanation. The standard reasons for NT…Read more
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158The binding argument and pragmatic enrichment, or, why philosophers care even more than weathermen about 'raining'Philosophy Compass 3 (1): 135-157. 2007.What is the proper way to draw the semantics-pragmatics distinction, and is what is said by a speaker ever enriched by pragmatics? An influential but controversial answer to the latter question is that the inputs to semantic interpretation contains representations of every contribution from context that is relevant to determining what is said, and that pragmatics never enriches the output of semantic interpretation. The proposal is bolstered by a controversial argument from syntactic binding des…Read more
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101Survey Article: On the Nature of the Political Concept of PrivilegeJournal of Political Philosophy 25 (4): 487-507. 2017.
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1Quine on Paraphrase and RegimentationIn Gilbert Harman & Ernest LePore (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 89--113. 2013.
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44Context, Compositionality and Amity: A Response to RettCanadian Journal of Philosophy 42 (1): 29-41. 2012.In an insightful and provocative paper, Jessica Rett (2006) claims that attempts to locate the (non-indexical, non-demonstrative) semantic contributions of context in syntax run into problems respecting compositionality. This is an especially biting problem for hidden indexical theorists such as Stanley (2000, 2002) who deploy hidden variables to provide a compositional theory of semantic interpretation. Fortunately for the hidden indexical theorists, her attack fails, albeit in interesting and …Read more
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100Unarticulated Constituents and Propositional StructureMind and Language 26 (4): 412-435. 2011.Attempts to characterize unarticulated constituents (henceforth: UCs) by means of quantification over the parts of a sentence and the constituents of the proposition it expresses come to grief in more complicated cases than are commonly considered. In particular, UC definitions are inadequate when we consider cases in which the same constituent appears more than once in a proposition that only has one word with the constituent as its semantic value. This article explores some consequences of try…Read more
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39Review of H. Laycock, Words Without Objects: Semantics, Ontology, and Logic for Non-Singularity (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (3). 2007.
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53Saying 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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265What kind of a mistake is it to use a slur?Philosophical Studies 172 (4): 1079-1104. 2015.What accounts for the offensive character of pejoratives and slurs, words like ‘kike’ and ‘nigger’? Is it due to a semantic feature of the words or to a pragmatic feature of their use? Is it due to a violation of a group’s desires to not be called by certain terms? Is it due to a violation of etiquette? According to one kind of view, pejoratives and the non-pejorative terms with which they are related—the ‘neutral counterpart’ terms—have different meanings or senses, and this explains the offens…Read more
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114An ambiguity test for definite descriptionsPhilosophical Studies 111 (1): 81-95. 2002.Donnellan makes a convincing case for two distinct uses ofdefinite descriptions. But does the difference between the usesreflects an ambiguity in the semantics of descriptions? This paperapplies a linguistic test for ambiguity to argue that the differencebetween the uses is not semantically significant
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157Semantic plasticity and epistemicismPhilosophical Studies 161 (2): 273-285. 2012.This paper considers the connections between semantic shiftiness (plasticity), epistemic safety and an epistemic theory of vagueness as presented and defended by Williamson (1996a, b, 1997a, b). Williamson explains ignorance of the precise intension of vague words as rooted in insensitivity to semantic shifts: one’s inability to detect small shifts in intension for a vague word results in a lack of knowledge of the word’s intension. Williamson’s explanation, however, falls short of accounting fo…Read more
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71Water and IcePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3). 2006.(I) In Beyond Rigidity, Scott Soames argues that the term ‘water’ is ambiguous. On one disambiguation, it is an expansive predicate that is true of any quantity of H2O whatsoever. On a second disambiguation, it is a restricted predicate, true only of liquid quantities of H2O. Analytic philosophers are fond of claiming ambiguities where there are none. This, I shall argue, is the case with the claimed expansive‐restricted ambiguity. The predicate‐kind ambiguity I have no quibble with.
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |