•  4
    Permissive Updates
    In Federico L. G. Faroldi & Frederik Van De Putte (eds.), Kit Fine on Truthmakers, Relevance, and Non-classical Logic, Springer Verlag. pp. 615-662. 2023.
    David Lewis asked in “A problem about permission” about the effects on context, specifically on the “sphere of permissibility,” of allowing behavior that had previously been forbidden. The framework of truthmaker semantics sheds useful light on this problem. Update procedures are definable in the truthmaker framework that capture more than Lewis was able to just with worlds. Connections are drawn with epistemic modals, belief revision and the semantics of exceptives. We consider how a truthmaker…Read more
  •  354
    We argue against the halving response to Sleeping Beauty. First, we outline an appealing constraint on probability assignments: the Principle of Irrelevant Information. Roughly, this says: if you don’t know whether C, but you would assign probability p to X regardless of whether C or not-C, then you should assign p to X. This Principle is deeply plausible, but we show that it contradicts halving. Second, we show that halving either violates solid statistical reasoning or draws absurd distinction…Read more
  •  11
    The influence of polarity items on inferential judgments
    with Milica Denić, Vincent Homer, and Emmanuel Chemla
    Cognition 215 (C): 104791. 2021.
  •  117
    Barristers in England are obliged to follow the ‘cab rank rule’, according to which they must take any case offered to them, as long as they have time in their
  •  29
    Lockean Beliefs, Dutch Books, and Scoring Systems
    Erkenntnis 88 (5): 1979-1995. 2021.
    On the Lockean thesis one ought to believe a proposition if and only if one assigns it a credence at or above a threshold (Foley in Am Philos Q 29(2):111–124, 1992). The Lockean thesis, thus, provides a way of characterizing sets of all-or-nothing beliefs. Here we give two independent characterizations of the sets of beliefs satisfying the Lockean thesis. One is in terms of betting dispositions associated with full beliefs and one is in terms of an accuracy scoring system for full beliefs. These…Read more
  •  426
    Definiteness Projection
    Natural Language Semantics 1-33. 2019.
    We argue that definite noun phrases give rise to uniqueness inferences characterized by a pattern we call definiteness projection. Definiteness projection says that the uniqueness inference of a definite projects out unless there is an indefinite antecedent in a position that filters presuppositions. We argue that definiteness projection poses a serious puzzle for e-type theories of (in)definites; on such theories, indefinites should filter existence presuppositions but not uniqueness presupposi…Read more
  •  300
    Roads to Necessitarianism
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (1): 89-96. 2021.
    We show that each of three natural sets of assumptions about the conditional entails necessitarianism: that anything possible is necessary.
  •  145
    What it takes to believe
    Philosophical Studies 177 (5): 1345-1362. 2020.
    Much linguistic evidence supports the view believing something only requires thinking it likely. I assess and reject a rival view, based on recent work on homogeneity in natural language, according to which belief is a strong, demanding attitude. I discuss the implications of the linguistic considerations about ‘believe’ for our philosophical accounts of belief.
  •  251
    Independence Day?
    Journal of Semantics 36 (2): 193-210. 2019.
    Two recent and influential papers, van Rooij 2007 and Lassiter 2012, propose solutions to the proviso problem that make central use of related notions of independence—qualitative in the first case, probabilistic in the second. We argue here that, if these solutions are to work, they must incorporate an implicit assumption about presupposition accommodation, namely that accommodation does not interfere with existing qualitative or probabilistic independencies. We show, however, that this assumpti…Read more
  •  310
    At the threshold of knowledge
    with Levi Spectre
    Philosophical Studies 175 (2): 449-460. 2018.
    We explore consequences of the view that to know a proposition your rational credence in the proposition must exceed a certain threshold. In other words, to know something you must have evidence that makes rational a high credence in it. We relate such a threshold view to Dorr et al.’s :277–287, 2014) argument against the principle they call fair coins: “If you know a coin won’t land tails, then you know it won’t be flipped.” They argue for rejecting fair coins because it leads to a pervasive sk…Read more
  •  299
    Connectives without truth tables
    with Nathan Klinedinst
    Natural Language Semantics 20 (2): 137-175. 2012.
    There are certain uses of and and or that cannot be explained by their normal meanings as truth-functional connectives, even with sophisticated pragmatic resources. These include examples such as The cops show up, and a fight will break out (‘If the cops show up, a fight will break out’), and I have no friends, or I would throw a party (‘I have no friends. If I did have friends, I would throw a party.’). We argue that these uses are indeed distinct from the more ordinary uses of and and or, but …Read more
  •  75
    The elusive scope of descriptions
    Philosophy Compass 2 (6). 2007.
    (1) Every miner went to a meeting. It seems that (1) can mean either that there was one meeting that every miner went to, or that every miner went to at least one meeting with no guarantee that they all went to the same meeting. In the language of first-order logic we can represent these two readings as a matter of the universal and existential quantifiers having different scope with respect to each other.
  •  57
    Understanding the pattern by which complex sentences inherit the presuppositions of their parts (presupposition projection) has been a major topic in formal pragmatics since the 1970s. Heim’s classic paper “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions” (1983) proposed a replacement of truth-conditional semantics with a dynamic semantics that treats meanings as instructions to update the common ground. Heim’s system predicts the basic pattern of presupposition projection quite accurately. The cl…Read more
  •  96
    Conditionals and Propositions in Semantics
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 44 (6): 781-791. 2015.
    IntroductionThe project of giving an account of meaning in natural languages goes largely by assigning truth-conditional content to sentences. I will call the view that sentences have truth-conditional content propositionalism as it is common to identify the truth-conditional content of a sentence with the proposition it expresses. This content plays an important role in our explanations of the speech-acts, attitude ascriptions, and the meaning of sentences when they appear as parts of longer se…Read more
  •  61
    The argument is directed at the view that scientific knowledge is just knowledge of the structure of the natural world and not knowledge of its intrinsic nature. The origin of the view is the post-Galilean conception of modern science, which views science as yielding a picture of nature stripped of all color, explaining all physical processes purely in terms of space-time, particles, fields, forces and the like, the intrinsic natures of which are never themselves analyzed. It is safe to say that t…Read more
  •  250
    Presuppositions and scope
    Journal of Philosophy 104 (2): 71-106. 2007.
    This paper discusses the apparent scope ambiguities between definite descriptions and modal operators. I argue that we need the theory of presupposition to explain why these ambiguities are not always present, and that once that theory is in hand, Kripke’s modal argument loses much of its force.
  •  79
    Explaining Presupposition Projection with Dynamic Semantics
    Semantics and Pragmatics 4 (3): 1-43. 2011.
    Presents a version of dynamic semantics for a language with presuppositions that predicts basic facts about presupposition projection in a non-stipulative way.
  •  1
    Proceedings of Workshop on New Directions in the Theory of Presuppositions (edited book)
    with Nathan Klinedist
    Essli 2009. 2009.
  •  107
    Three notions of dynamicness in language
    Linguistics and Philosophy 39 (4): 333-355. 2016.
    We distinguish three ways that a theory of linguistic meaning and communication might be considered dynamic in character. We provide some examples of systems which are dynamic in some of these senses but not others. We suggest that separating these notions can help to clarify what is at issue in particular debates about dynamic versus static approaches within natural language semantics and pragmatics.
  •  49
    A downward-entailing context has the property that the replacement of the predicate in the context by a stronger predicate preserves truth. So, for instance, presuppositions aside, the context after “every” in (1) where the NPI “ever” appears is downward entailing.
  •  170
    Capturing the relationship between conditionals and conditional probability with a trivalent semantics
    Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics 24 (1-2): 144-152. 2014.
    (2014). Capturing the relationship between conditionals and conditional probability with a trivalent semantics. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 24, Three-Valued Logics and their Applications, pp. 144-152. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2014.911535
  •  131
  •  80
  • This paper is about pragmatic explanations of certain linguistic phenomenon based on Grice’s theory of conversational implicature. According to Grice’s theory, audiences draw inferences about what the speaker is trying to convey based on the idea that the speaker is following certain maxims governing conversation. Such explanations of the inferences audiences make about the speaker play a central role in many parts of philosophy of language and linguistics.
  •  728
    A Puzzle about Knowing Conditionals
    Noûs 52 (2): 473-478. 2018.
    We present a puzzle about knowledge, probability and conditionals. We show that in certain cases some basic and plausible principles governing our reasoning come into conflict. In particular, we show that there is a simple argument that a person may be in a position to know a conditional the consequent of which has a low probability conditional on its antecedent, contra Adams’ Thesis. We suggest that the puzzle motivates a very strong restriction on the inference of a conditional from a disjunct…Read more
  •  765
    Belief is weak
    Philosophical Studies 173 (5): 1393-1404. 2016.
    It is tempting to posit an intimate relationship between belief and assertion. The speech act of assertion seems like a way of transferring the speaker’s belief to his or her audience. If this is right, then you might think that the evidential warrant required for asserting a proposition is just the same as the warrant for believing it. We call this thesis entitlement equality. We argue here that entitlement equality is false, because our everyday notion of belief is unambiguously a weak one. Be…Read more
  •  38
    “Be Articulate: A Pragmatic Theory of Presupposition Projection” is a remarkable paper in at least two respects: First, it is the only broadly Gricean treatment of presuppositions that generates precise and accurate predictions about the pattern of presupposition projection. Schlenker proposes that presuppositions arise as a result of a pragmatic prohibition against using one short construction to express two independent meanings. This basic idea is quite an old one.1 But no one has ever elabora…Read more
  •  59
    The argument here comes from consideration of a certain sort of linguistic expression called negative polarity items (NPIs). These are expressions such as “any,” “at all” and “ever.” NPIs are of particular interest for semantics because they can only be used in contexts with a certain rather abstract semantic feature. However, the precise characterization of the feature is itself a matter of some controversy. For those interested in the semantics of natural language it is worthwhile to figure out…Read more