•  4
    Churchland on state space semantics
    with J. Fodor
    In Robert N. McCauley (ed.), The Churchlands and their critics, Blackwell. pp. 145--158. 1996.
  •  603
    Under what conditions are two utterances utterances of the same word? What are words? That these questions have not received much attention is rather surprising: after all, philosophers and linguists frequently appeal to considerations about word and sentence identity in connection with a variety of puzzles and problems that are foundational to the very subject matter of philosophy of language and linguistics.1 Kaplan’s attention to words is thus to be applauded. And there is no doubt that his d…Read more
  • Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language, 3 (edited book)
    with David Sosa
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
  •  8
    The relation between Quine and Davidson
    In Glock, Hans Johann (2014). The relation between Quine and Davidson. In: Harman, Gilbert; Lepore, Ernest. A Companion to W. V. O. Quine. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 526-551, . pp. 526-551. 2014.
  •  14
    Quine and Davidson
    with Hans Johann Glock and Kirk Ludwig
    In Glock, Hans Johann (2013). Quine and Davidson. In: Ludwig, Kirk; Lepore, Ernest. A Companion to Donald Davidson. New York: Wiley, 567-587, . pp. 567-587. 2013.
  •  99
    What is Logical Form?
    In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Logical Form and Language, Clarendon Press. 2002.
    This paper articulates and defends a conception of logical form as semantic form revealed by a compositional meaning theory. On this conception, the logical form of a sentence is determined by the semantic types of its primitive terms and their mode of combination as it relates to determining under what conditions it is true. We develop this idea in the framework of truth-theoretic semantics. We argue that the semantic form of a declarative sentence in a language L is revealed by a (canonical) p…Read more
  •  39
    Holism: A Consumer Update (edited book)
    with Jerry Fodor
    Rodopi. 1993.
  •  1
    Words don’t come easy
    The Philosophers' Magazine 43 67-71. 2008.
    Most linguists think that there are infinitely many sentences, that languages are productive and systematic. Maybe the most remarkable achievement of our lives is that we learn this thing with infinite power. But the whole thing hangs on those sentences being built up out of their components, which are words. So it’s not even clear what one of the more striking theses in the development of linguistics over the last half century signifies or means without an account of the atoms, so to speak, out…Read more
  • The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Language (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
  •  55
    Truth in the Theory of Meaning
    In Ernie Lepore & Kirk Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson, Wiley. 2013.
    In this chapter, we defend the view that Davidson aimed not to replace the theory of meaning with the theory of truth, or to capture only certain features of the ordinary notion of meaning for certain theoretical purposes, but rather to pursue the traditional project of explaining in the broadest terms “what it is for words to mean what they do” through a clever bit of indirection, namely, by exploiting the recursive structure of a Tarskian‐style truth theory, which meets certain constraints in …Read more
  •  15
    David Lewis on Convention
    In Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A Companion to David Lewis, Wiley. 2015.
    This chapter presents an overview of Lewis's theory of convention, and explores its implications for linguistic theory, and especially for problems at the interface of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. It discusses Lewis's understanding of coordination problems, emphasizing how coordination allows for a uniform characterization of practical activity and of signaling in communication. The chapter introduces Lewis's account of convention and shows how he uses it to make sense of th…Read more
  •  10
    Symbolic Logic and Natural Language
    with Emma Borg
    In Dale Jacquette (ed.), A Companion to Philosophical Logic, Blackwell. 2006.
    This chapter contains sections titled: What are the Constraints on Formal Representations? What is the Relationship between a Natural Language Sentence and its Formal Representation?
  •  1
    Quine, Analyticity, and Transcendence
    In Gilbert Harman & Ernie Lepore (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley. 2013.
    Martin Gustafsson: Quine's Conception of Explication – and Why It Isn't Carnap's: This chapter clarifies Quine's conception of explication and identifies its place in his overall view of the aims and methods of philosophy. It does so by way of comparing his conception with Carnap's, Carnap being the philosopher from whom Quine got the notion of explication to begin with. In contravention of Quine's own suggestion, and against the view of some commentators, it is argued that Quine's and Carnap's …Read more
  •  1
    Donald Davidson (1917–)
    In A. P. Martinich & David Sosa (eds.), A Companion to Analytic Philosophy, Blackwell. 2001.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Reasons and causes Events and causation Anomalous monism Theory of meaning and compositionality Radical interpretation Adverbial modification The method of truth in metaphysics Against facts Truth and correspondence Animal thought Alternative conceptual schemes Anti‐skepticism Anti‐Cartesianism and first person authority The rejection of empiricism.
  •  3
    Meaning and Ontology
    with Francis Jeffry Pelletier
    In Richard Schantz (ed.), Prospects for Meaning, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 399-434. 2012.
  •  50
    The making of a modern master
    The Philosophers' Magazine 25 (25): 15-16. 2004.
  •  24
    The Heresy of Paraphrase: When the Medium Really Is the Message
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33 (1): 177-197. 2009.
  •  29
    Words don’t come easy
    The Philosophers' Magazine 43 67-71. 2008.
    Most linguists think that there are infinitely many sentences, that languages are productive and systematic. Maybe the most remarkable achievement of our lives is that we learn this thing with infinite power. But the whole thing hangs on those sentences being built up out of their components, which are words. So it’s not even clear what one of the more striking theses in the development of linguistics over the last half century signifies or means without an account of the atoms, so to speak, out…Read more
  •  3
    Saying and Agreeing
    with Adam Sennet
    Mind and Language 25 (5): 583-601. 2010.
    No semantic theory is complete without an account of context sensitivity. But there is little agreement over its scope and limits even though everyone invokes intuition about an expression's behavior in context to determine its context sensitivity. Minimalists like Cappelen and Lepore identify a range of tests which isolate clear cases of context sensitive expressions, such as ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’, to the exclusion of all others. Contextualists try to discredit the tests and supplant them with…Read more
  •  25
  •  19
    Semantics and What is Said
    In Alessandro Capone, Una Stojnic, Ernie Lepore, Denis Delfitto, Anne Reboul, Gaetano Fiorin, Kenneth A. Taylor, Jonathan Berg, Herbert L. Colston, Sanford C. Goldberg, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Cliff Goddard, Anna Wierzbicka, Magdalena Sztencel, Sarah E. Duffy, Alessandra Falzone, Paola Pennisi, Péter Furkó, András Kertész, Ágnes Abuczki, Alessandra Giorgi, Sona Haroutyunian, Marina Folescu, Hiroko Itakura, John C. Wakefield, Hung Yuk Lee, Sumiyo Nishiguchi, Brian E. Butler, Douglas Robinson, Kobie van Krieken, José Sanders, Grazia Basile, Antonino Bucca, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri & Kobie van Krieken (eds.), Indirect Reports and Pragmatics in the World Languages, Springer Verlag. pp. 21-38. 2018.
    A once commonplace view is that only a semantic theory that interprets sentences of a language according to what their utterances intuitively say can be correct. The rationale is that only by requiring a tight connection between what a sentence means and what its users intuitively say can we explain why, normally, those linguistically competent with a language upon hearing its sentences uttered can discern what they say. More precisely, this approach ties the semantic content of a sentence to in…Read more
  •  1
    The making of a modern master
    The Philosophers' Magazine 25 15-16. 2004.
  •  30
    Sartre, J.-P., 322
    with R. Kirk, P. Kitcher, S. Kripke, C. LaCasse, D. Lenat, R. Lewontin, Mackie Jl, D. Marr, and A. Marras
    In Don Ross, Andrew Brook & David L. Thompson (eds.), Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment, Mit Press. 2000.
  • Quine, Analyticity, and Transcendence
    In Gilbert Harman & Ernest Lepore (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.
  • Semantics for a module
    In Roberto G. De Almeida & Lila R. Gleitman (eds.), On Concepts, Modules, and Language: Cognitive Science at its Core, Oup Usa. 2017.
  •  1
    Rejections on Holism
    Enrahonar: Quaderns de Filosofía 25 41. 1996.
  •  14
    Donald Davidson's Truth-theoretic semantics
    with Kirk Ludwig
    Oxford University Press. 2007.
    This book is an examination of the foundations and applications of the program of truth-theoretic semantics for natural languages introduced in 1967 by Donald Davidson in his classic paper “Truth and Meaning.” This is the second of two books on Donald Davidson’s central philosophical project. The first, Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), dealt with the basic framework of Davidson’s truth-theoretic approach to providing a meaning theory…Read more