•  20
    Nonsense Made Intelligible
    with Alex Burri
    Erkenntnis 80 (1): 111-136. 2015.
    My topic is the relation between nonsense and intelligibility, and the contrast between nonsense and falsehood which played a pivotal role in the rise of analytic philosophy. I shall pursue three lines of inquiry. First I shall briefly consider the positive case, namely linguistic understanding. Secondly, I shall consider the negative case—different breakdowns of understanding and connected forms of failure to make sense. Third, I shall criticize three important misconceptions of nonsense and un…Read more
  •  13
    Framing Event Variables
    with Alex Burri
    Erkenntnis 80 (1): 31-60. 2015.
    Davidsonian analyses of action reports like ‘Alvin chased Theodore around a tree’ are often viewed as supporting the hypothesis that sentences of a human language H have truth conditions that can be specified by a Tarski-style theory of truth for H. But in my view, simple cases of adverbial modification add to the reasons for rejecting this hypothesis, even though Davidson rightly diagnosed many implications involving adverbs as cases of conjunct-reduction in the scope of an existential quantifi…Read more
  •  17
    I distinguish between the classical Gricean approach to conversational implicatures, which I call the action-theoretic approach, and the approach to CIs taken in contemporary cognitive science. Once we free ourselves from the AT account, and see implicating as a form of what I call “conversational tailoring”, we can more easily see the many different ways that CIs arise in conversation. I will show that they arise not only on the basis of a speaker’s utterance of complete sentences but also on t…Read more
  •  7
    Introductory Remark
    with Alex Burri
    Erkenntnis 80 (1): 1-1. 2015.
    The contributions to this special issue trace back to a conference entitled “Language: The Limits of Representation and Understanding” that was held at the University of Erfurt, August 30th to September 1st, 2012. We thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for financial support
  •  26
    Meaning and Formal Semantics in Generative Grammar
    with Alex Burri
    Erkenntnis 80 (1): 61-87. 2015.
    A generative grammar for a language L generates one or more syntactic structures for each sentence of L and interprets those structures both phonologically and semantically. A widely accepted assumption in generative linguistics dating from the mid-60s, the Generative Grammar Hypothesis, is that the ability of a speaker to understand sentences of her language requires her to have tacit knowledge of a generative grammar of it, and the task of linguistic semantics in those early days was taken to …Read more
  •  30
    A Puzzle About Disputes and Disagreements
    with Alex Burri
    Erkenntnis 80 (1): 167-189. 2015.
    The paper addresses the situation of a dispute in which one speaker says ϕ and a second speaker says not-ϕ. Proceeding on an idealising distinction between “basic” and “interesting” claims that may be formulated in a given idiolectal language, I investigate how it might be sorted out whether the dispute reflects a genuine disagreement, or whether the speakers are only having a merely verbal dispute, due to their using different interesting concepts. I show that four individually plausible princi…Read more
  •  10
    Major Parts of Speech
    with Alex Burri
    Erkenntnis 80 (1): 3-29. 2015.
    According to the contemporary consensus, when reaching in the lexicon grammar looks for items like nouns, verbs, and prepositions while logic sees items like predicates, connectives, and quantifiers. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a single lexical category contemporary grammar and logic both make use of. I hope to show that while a perfect match between the lexical categories of grammar and logic is impossible there can be a substantial overlap. I propose semantic definitions for all the majo…Read more
  •  23
    Contextualism and Disagreement
    with Alex Burri
    Erkenntnis 80 (1): 137-152. 2015.
    My aim in the paper will be to better understand what faultless disagreement could possibly consist in and what speakers disagree over when they faultlessly do so. To that end, I will first look at various examples of faultless disagreement. Since I will eventually claim that different forms of faultless disagreement can be modeled semantically on different forms of context-sensitivity I will, in a second step, discuss three different semantic accounts that all promise to successfully accommodat…Read more