•  59
    Arguing about language (edited book)
    with Max Kölbel
    Routledge. 2010.
    Arguing About Language presents a comprehensive selection of key readings on fundamental issues in the philosophy of language. It offers a fresh and exciting introduction to the subject, addressing both perennial problems and emerging topics. Classic readings from Frege, Russell, Kripke, Chomsky, Quine, Grice, Lewis and Davidson appear alongside more recent pieces by philosophers or linguists such as Robyn Carston, Delia Graff Fara, Frank Jackson, Ernie Lepore & Jerry Fodor, Nathan Salmon, Zoltá…Read more
  •  25
    Anti-individualism and Phenomenal Content
    Erkenntnis 86 (6): 1733-1755. 2020.
    The paper addresses a prima facie tension between two popular views about concepts. The first is the doctrine that some concepts are constitutively perceptual/experiential, so that they can be possessed only by suitably experienced subjects. This is a classic empiricist theme, but its most conspicuous recent appearance is in literature on phenomenal concepts. The second view is anti-individualism: here, the view that concept possession depends not only on a thinker’s internal states and relation…Read more
  •  62
    Gardiner on Anti-Realism: A Defence of Dummett
    Dialogue 43 (1): 3-. 2004.
    The first half of Mark Quentin Gardiner’s recent book, Semantic Challenges to Realism: Dummett and Putnam, is a sustained, systematic, and, for the most part, novel attempt to demolish the case against semantic realism instigated by Michael Dummett. In this article I reply on the anti-realist’s be-half. I aim to demonstrate that none of Gardiner’s main anti-Dummettian arguments are successful, and moreover that his errors are, in the main, consequences of serious misconstruals of vital aspects o…Read more
  •  109
    Compositionality and the Manifestation Challenge
    Synthese 144 (1): 101-136. 2005.
    I address the question whether Dummetts manifestation challenge to semantic realism can be disarmed by reflection on the compositionality of meaning. Building on work of Dummett and Wright, I develop in §§12 what I argue to be the most formidable version of the manifestation challenge. Along the way I review attempts by previous authors to deploy considerations about compositionality in realisms favour, and argue that they are unsuccessful. The formulation of the challenge I develop renders expl…Read more
  •  95
    Critical Notices: Horwich's Semantic Deflationism
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8 (3): 371-391. 2000.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  49
    A priori justification
    Philosophical Books 48 (3): 241-251. 2007.
  •  70
    Do phenomenal concepts misrepresent?
    Philosophical Psychology 29 (5): 669-678. 2016.
    Many contemporary physicalists concede to dualists that conscious subjects have distinctive “phenomenal concepts” of the phenomenal qualities of their experiences. Indeed, they contend that idiosyncratic characteristics of these concepts facilitate responses to influential anti-physicalist arguments. Like some some other critics of this approach, James Tartaglia maintains that phenomenal concepts express contents that conflict with physicalism, but as a physicalist, the moral he distinctively dr…Read more
  •  60
    The 'compositional rigidity' of recognitionality
    Philosophical Papers 33 (2): 147-169. 2004.
    Abstract Empiricist philosophers of mind have long maintained that the possession conditions of many concepts include recognitional abilities. One of Jerry Fodor's recent attacks on empiricist semantics proceeds by attempting to demonstrate that there are no such, ?recognitional? concepts. His argument is built on the claim that if there were such concepts, they would not compose: i.e., they would exhibit properties which are not in general ?inherited? by complex concepts of which they are compo…Read more