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1158Synonymy between Token-Reflexive ExpressionsMind 129 (514). 2020.Synonymy, at its most basic, is sameness of meaning. A token-reflexive expression is an expression whose meaning assigns a referent to its tokens by relating each particular token of that particular expression to its referent. In doing so, the formulation of its meaning mentions the particular expression whose meaning it is. This seems to entail that no two token-reflexive expressions are synonymous, which would constitute a strong objection against token-reflexive semantics. In this paper, I pr…Read more
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1115A Defence of Intentionalism about DemonstrativesAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4). 2019.Intentionalism about demonstratives is the view that the referent of a demonstrative is determined solely by the speaker's intentions. Intentionalists can disagree about the nature of these intentions, but are united in rejecting the relevance of other factors, such as the speaker's gestures, her gaze, and any facts about the addressee or the audience. In this paper, I formulate a particular version of this view, and I defend it against six objections, old and new.
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889Meaning without Gricean IntentionsAnalysis. forthcoming.Gricean theories analyse meaning in terms of certain complex intentions on the part of the speaker—the intention to produce an effect on the addressee, and the intention to have that intention recognized by the addressee. By drawing an analogy with cases widely discussed in action theory, we propose a novel counterexample where the speaker lacks these intentions, but nonetheless means something, and successfully performs a speech act.
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679Token-Reflexivity and RepetitionErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5 745-763. 2018.The classical rule of Repetition says that if you take any sentence as a premise, and repeat it as a conclusion, you have a valid argument. It's a very basic rule of logic, and many other rules depend on the guarantee that repeating a sentence, or really, any expression, guarantees sameness of referent, or semantic value. However, Repetition fails for token-reflexive expressions. In this paper, I offer three ways that one might replace Repetition, and still keep an interesting notion of validity…Read more
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219Intentionalism out of controlAustralasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.Suppose I say, ‘That is my dog’ and manage to refer to my dog, Fido. According to intentionalism, my intention to refer to Fido is part of the explanation of the way that the demonstrative gets Fido as its referent. A natural corollary is that the speaker is, to some extent, in control of this semantic fact. In this paper, we argue that intentionalism must give up the claim that the speaker is always in control, and thus, that intentions are always the mental states that do the semantic work: we…Read more
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170The logic of indexicalsSynthese 192 (6): 1839-1860. 2015.Since Kaplan : 81–98, 1979) first provided a logic for context-sensitive expressions, it has been thought that the only way to construct a logic for indexicals is to restrict it to arguments which take place in a single context— that is, instantaneous arguments, uttered by a single speaker, in a single place, etc. In this paper, I propose a logic which does away with these restrictions, and thus places arguments where they belong, in real world conversations. The central innovation is that valid…Read more
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143Against the Locutionary ThesisAnalysis. forthcoming.For Austin, Grice, and many others, undertaking a speech act like asserting or promising requires uttering something with a particular sense and reference in mind. We argue that the phenomenon of open-ended promises reveals this 'Locutionary Thesis' to be mistaken.
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105Separatory Confusion Does Not CorruptCroatian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.If I am confused, and I think two people are one and the same, that may impair my ability to refer to either of them. This is combinatory confusion. What if I am confused, and think that one person is actually two people? This is separatory confusion, and it seems quite different. After all, even in my confusion, my thoughts and my referential devices seem to track back to a single individual. Elmar Unnsteinsson has recently argued that both types of confusion corrupt, i.e. they may prevent us f…Read more
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97The difference between indexicals and demonstrativesSynthese 195 (7): 3173-3196. 2018.In this paper, I propose a new way to distinguish between indexicals, like “I” and “today”, and demonstratives, like “she” and “this”. The main test case is the second person singular pronoun “you”. The tradition would generally count it as a demonstrative, because the speaker’s intentions play a role in providing it with a semantic value. I present cross-linguistic data and explanations offered of the data in typology and semantics to show that “you” belongs on the indexical side, and argue tha…Read more
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28Intentionalism and the Natural Interpretation of DiscoursesCroatian Journal of Philosophy 23 (69): 295-306. 2023.Intentionalism is the view that a demonstrative refers to something partly in virtue of the speaker intending it to refer to that thing. In recent work, Una Stojnić has argued that the natural interpretation of demonstratives in some discourses is that they do not refer to the objects intended by the speaker, and instead refer to other things. In this paper, I defend intentionalism against this charge. In particular, I argue that the data presented by Stojnić can be explained from an intentional…Read more
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