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Scorekeeping in a chess gameSemantics and Pragmatics 15 (12). 2022.There is an important analogy between languages and games. Just as a scoresheet records features of the evolution of a game to determine the effect of a move in that game, a conversational score records features of the evolution of a conversation to determine the effect of the linguistic moves that speakers make. Chess is particularly interesting for the study of conversational dynamics because it has language-like notations, and so serves as a simplified study in how the effect of an assertion …Read more
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Against Fregean QuantificationErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (37): 971-1007. 2023.There are two dominant approaches to quantification: the Fregean and the Tarskian. While the Tarskian approach is standard and familiar, deep conceptual objections have been pressed against its employment of variables as genuine syntactic and semantic units. Because they do not explicitly rely on variables, Fregean approaches are held to avoid these worries. The apparent result is that the Fregean can deliver something that the Tarskian is unable to, namely a compositional semantic treatment of…Read more
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The Antinomy of the Variable: A Tarskian ResolutionJournal of Philosophy 113 (3): 137-170. 2016.Kit Fine has reawakened a puzzle about variables with a long history in analytic philosophy, labeling it “the antinomy of the variable”. Fine suggests that the antinomy demands a reconceptualization of the role of variables in mathematics, natural language semantics, and first-order logic. The difficulty arises because: (i) the variables ‘x’ and ‘y’ cannot be synonymous, since they make different contributions when they jointly occur within a sentence, but (ii) there is a strong temptation to s…Read more
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Does Semantic Relationism Solve Frege's Puzzle?Journal of Philosophical Logic 46 (1): 97-118. 2017.In a series of recent works, Kit Fine, 605–631, 2003, 2007) has sketched a novel solution to Frege’s puzzle. Radically departing from previous solutions, Fine argues that Frege’s puzzle forces us to reject compositionality. In this paper we first provide an explicit formalization of the relational semantics for first-order logic suggested, but only briefly sketched, by Fine. We then show why the relational semantics alone is technically inadequate, forcing Fine to enrich the syntax with a coordi…Read more
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Frege and saving substitutionPhilosophical Studies 178 (8): 2687-2697. 2021.
Glasgow, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
20th Century Philosophy |