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903Pragmatic Interpretation and Signaler-Receiver Asymmetries in Animal CommunicationIn Kristin Andrews & Jacob Beck (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds, Routledge. pp. 291-300. 2017.Researchers have converged on the idea that a pragmatic understanding of communication can shed important light on the evolution of language. Accordingly, animal communication scientists have been keen to adopt insights from pragmatics research. Some authors couple their appeal to pragmatic aspects of communication with the claim that there are fundamental asymmetries between signalers and receivers in non-human animals. For example, in the case of primate vocal calls, signalers are said to p…Read more
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816These summary notes on Ruth Millikan’s latest book Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (OUP, 2017) were prepared by Dorit Bar-On for a discussion group that met in Summer 2018. The notes have been lightly edited by Millikan and prepared for online publication with the help of Drew Johnson.
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712How to do things with nonwords: pragmatics, biosemantics, and origins of language in animal communicationBiology and Philosophy 36 (6): 1-25. 2021.Recent discussions of animal communication and the evolution of language have advocated adopting a ‘pragmatics-first’ approach, according to which “a more productive framework” for primate communication research should be “pragmatics, the field of linguistics that examines the role of context in shaping the meaning of linguistic utterances”. After distinguishing two different conceptions of pragmatics that advocates of the pragmatics-first approach have implicitly relied on, I argue that neither…Read more
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329Ethical neo-expressivismIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume 4, Oxford University Press. pp. 132-65. 2009.A standard way to explain the connection between ethical claims and motivation is to say that these claims express motivational attitudes. Unless this connection is taken to be merely a matter of contingent psychological regularity, it may seem that there are only two options for understanding it. We can either treat ethical claims as expressing propositions that one cannot believe without being at least somewhat motivated (subjectivism), or we can treat ethical claims as nonpropositional and as…Read more
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265(How) Is Ethical Neo-Expressivism a Hybrid View?In Guy Fletcher & Michael Ridge (eds.), Having It Both Ways: Hybrid Theories and Modern Metaethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 223-247. 2014.According to ethical neo-expressivism, all declarative sentences, including those used to make ethical claims, have propositions as their semantic contents, and acts of making an ethical claim are properly said to express mental states, which (if motivational internalism is correct) are intimately connected to motivation. This raises two important questions: (i) The traditional reason for denying that ethical sentences express propositions is that these were thought to determine ways the world c…Read more
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246Varieties of ExpressivismPhilosophy Compass 8 (8): 699-713. 2013.After offering a characterization of what unites versions of ‘expressivism’, we highlight a number of dimensions along which expressivist views should be distinguished. We then separate four theses often associated with expressivism – a positive expressivist thesis, a positive constitutivist thesis, a negative ontological thesis, and a negative semantic thesis – and describe how traditional expressivists have attempted to incorporate them. We argue that expressivism in its traditional form may b…Read more
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208Externalism and self-knowledge: Content, use, and expressionNoûs 38 (3): 430-55. 2004.Suppose, as I stare at a glass in front of me, I say or think: There
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202Avowals and first-person privilegePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2): 311-35. 2001.When people avow their present feelings, sensations, thoughts, etc., they enjoy what may be called “first-person privilege.” If I now said: “I have a headache,” or “I’m thinking about Venice,” I would be taken at my word: I would normally not be challenged. According to one prominent approach, this privilege is due to a special epistemic access we have to our own present states of mind. On an alternative, deflationary approach the privilege merely reflects a socio-linguistic convention governing…Read more
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189The use of force against deflationism: Assertion and truthIn Dirk Greimann & Geo Siegwart (eds.), Truth and Speech Acts: Studies in the Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 61--89. 2007.
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174Indeterminacy of Translation—Theory and PracticePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (4): 781-810. 1993.To an ordinary translator, the idea that there are too many perfect translation schemes between any two languages would come as a surprise. Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation expresses just this idea. It implies that most of the 'implicit canons' actual translators use in their assessment of translations lack objective status. My dissertation is an attempt to present a systematic challenge to Quine's view of language and to support the idea that one could develop an objective the…Read more
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165Origins of Meaning: Must We ‘Go Gricean’?Mind and Language 28 (3): 342-375. 2013.The task of explaining language evolution is often presented by leading theorists in explicitly Gricean terms. After a critical evaluation, I present an alternative, non‐Gricean conceptualization of the task. I argue that, while it may be true that nonhuman animals, in contrast to language users, lack the ‘motive to share information’ understoodà laGrice, nonhuman animals nevertheless do express states of mind through complex nonlinguistic behavior. On a proper, non‐Gricean construal of expressi…Read more
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154Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-KnowledgeOxford University Press UK. 2004.Dorit Bar-On develops and defends a novel view of avowals and self-knowledge. Drawing on resources from the philosophy of language, the theory of action, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, she offers original and systematic answers to many long-standing questions concerning our ability to know our own minds. We are all very good at telling what states of mind we are in at a given moment. When it comes to our own present states of mind, what we say goes; an avowal such as "I'm feeling so a…Read more
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153Précis of Dorit Bar-On’s Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge (review)Acta Analytica 25 (1): 1-7. 2010.In my reply to Boyle, Rosenthal, and Tumulty, I revisit my view of avowals’ security as a matter of a special immunity to error, their character as intentional expressive acts that employ self-ascriptive vehicles, Moore’s paradox, the idea of expressing as contrasting with reporting and its connection to showing one’s mental state, and the ‘performance equivalence’ between avowals and other expressive acts.
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150First-Person Authority: Dualism, Constitutivism, and Neo-ExpressivismErkenntnis 71 (1): 53-71. 2009.What I call “Rorty’s Dilemma” has us caught between the Scylla of Cartesian Dualism and the Charybdis of eliminativism about the mental. Proper recognition of what is distinctively mental requires accommodating incorrigibility about our mental states, something Rorty thinks materialists cannot do. So we must either countenance mental states over and above physical states in our ontology, or else give up altogether on the mental as a distinct category. In section 2, “Materialist Introspectionism—…Read more
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141Avowals: Expression, security, and knowledge: Reply to Matthew Boyle, David Rosenthal, and Maura Tumulty (review)Acta Analytica 25 (1): 47-63. 2010.In my reply to Boyle, Rosenthal, and Tumulty, I revisit my view of avowals’ security as a matter of a special immunity to error, their character as intentional expressive acts that employ self-ascriptive vehicles (without being grounded in self-beliefs), Moore’s paradox, the idea of expressing as contrasting with reporting and its connection to showing one’s mental state, and the ‘performance equivalence’ between avowals and other expressive acts.
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140Transparency, expression, and self-knowledgePhilosophical Explorations 18 (2): 134-152. 2015.Contemporary discussions of self-knowledge share a presupposition to the effect that the only way to vindicate so-called first-person authority as understood by our folk-psychology is to identify specific “good-making” epistemic features that render our self-ascriptions of mental states especially knowledgeable. In earlier work, I rejected this presupposition. I proposed that we separate two questions: How is first-person authority to be explained? What renders avowals instances of a privileged …Read more
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131Crude Meaning, Brute ThoughtJournal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 7 (2): 29-46. 2019.I address here the question what sense to make of the idea that there can be thought prior to language. I begin by juxtaposing two familiar and influential philosophical views, one associated with the work of Paul Grice, the other associated with the work of Donald Davidson. Grice and Davidson share a broad, rationalist perspective on language and thought, but they endorse conflicting theses on the relation between them. Whereas, for Grice, thought of an especially complex sort is a precondition…Read more
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131Anti-realism and speaker knowledgeSynthese 106 (2). 1996.Dummettian anti-realism repudiates the realist's notion of verification-transcendent truth. Perhaps the most crucial element in the Dummettian attack on realist truth is the critique of so-called realist semantics, which assigns verification-transcendent truth-conditions as the meanings of (some) sentences. The Dummettian critique charges that realist semantics cannot serve as an adequate theory of meaning for a natural language, and that, consequently, the realist conception of truth must be re…Read more
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130Expressive Communication and Continuity SkepticismJournal of Philosophy 110 (6): 293-330. 2013.
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124Avowals and First‐Person PrivilegePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2): 311-335. 2001.When people avow their present feelings, sensations, thoughts, etc., they enjoy what may be called “first‐person privilege.” If I now said: “I have a headache,” or “I'm thinking about Venice,” I would be taken at my word: I would normally not be challenged. According to one prominent approach, this privilege is due to a special epistemic access we have to our own present states of mind. On an alternative, deflationary approach the privilege merely reflects a socio‐linguistic convention governing…Read more
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120Expressing as ‘showing what's within’: On Mitchell green's, self‐expression oup 2007Philosophical Books 51 (4): 212-227. 2010.
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108Scepticism: The external world and meaningPhilosophical Studies 60 (3). 1990.In this paper, I compare and contrast two kinds of scepticism, Cartesian scepticism about the external world and Quinean scepticism about meaning. I expose Quine's metaphysical claim that there are no facts of the matter about meaning as a sceptical response to a sceptical problem regarding the possibility of our knowledge of meanings. I argue that this sceptical response is overkill; for the sceptical problem about our knowledge of meanings may receive a treatment similar to the naturalistic tr…Read more
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81Semantic verificationism, linguistic behaviorism, and translationPhilosophical Studies 66 (3). 1992.
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77Varieties of DeflationismIn Ernest Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. 2006.There is a core metaphysical claim shared by all deflationists: truth is not a genuine, substantive property. But anyone who denies that truth is a genuine property must still make sense of our pervasive truth talk. In addressing questions about the meaning and function of ‘true’, deflationists engage in a linguistic or semantic project, a project that typically goes hand-in-hand with a deflationary account of the concept of truth. A thoroughgoing deflationary account of truth will go beyond the…Read more
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73Is there such a thing as a language?Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (2): 163-190. 1992.‘There is no such thing as a language,’ Donald Davidson tells us. Though this is a startling claim in its own right, it seems especially puzzling coming from a leading theorizer about language. Over the years, Davidson’s important essays have sparked the hope that there is a route to a positive, nonskeptical theory of meaning for natural languages. This hope would seem to be dashed if there are no natural languages. Unless Davidson’s radical claim is a departure from his developed views, the Dav…Read more
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61Review of Akeel Bilgrami, Self-Knowledge and Resentment (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (9). 2007.
Dorit Bar-On
University of Connecticut
University Of Connecticut, Storrs
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University Of Connecticut, StorrsPhilosophy, University Of Connecticut, StorrsProfessor Of Philosophy
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Storrs, Connecticut, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Epistemology |
Pragmatics |
Truth |
Philosophy of Linguistics |
Areas of Interest
2 more
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Epistemology |
Linguistics |
Cognitive Sciences, Misc |
Psychology |