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28E. E. Constance Jones on the dualism of practical reasonBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (2): 327-342. 2021.E. E. Constance Jones, a regular contributor to Mind and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and the author of several textbooks and a monograph, worked in both philosophical l...
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46Pleonastic propositions and de re beliefPhilosophical Studies 177 (11): 3529-3547. 2020.In The Things We Mean, Stephen Schiffer defends a novel account of the entities to which belief reports relate us and to which their that-clauses refer. For Schiffer, the referred-to entities—propositions—exist in virtue of contingencies of our linguistic practices, deriving from “pleonastic restatements” of ontologically neutral discourse. Schiffer’s account of the individuation of propositions derives from his treatment of that -clause reference. While that -clauses are referential singular te…Read more
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64Cruelty and kinds: Scalia and Dworkin on the constitutionality of capital punishmentInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (4): 422-443. 2018.I here revisit a debate between Antonin Scalia and Ronald Dworkin concerning the constitutionality of capital punishment. As is well known, Scalia maintained that the consistency of capital punishment with the Eighth Amendment can be established on purely textualist principles; Dworkin denied this. There are, Dworkin maintained, two readings of the Eighth Amendment available to the textualist. But only on one of these readings is the constitutionality of capital punishment secured; on the other,…Read more
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67Structured propositions and the logical form of predicationSynthese 196 (4): 1475-1499. 2019.Jeffrey King, Scott Soames, and others have recently challenged the familiar identification of a Russellian proposition, such as the proposition that Brutus stabbed Caesar, with an ordered sequence constructed out of objects, properties, and relations. There is, as they point out, a surplus of candidate sequences available that are each equally serviceable. If so, any choice among these candidates will be arbitrary. In this paper, I show that, unless a controversial assumption is made regarding …Read more
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Reference and IndexicalityDissertation, City University of New York. 1994.The dissertation attempts to provide a treatment of belief reports and definite descriptions consistent with a directly referential semantic theory. By the latter I mean a theory according to which that-clauses are singular terms that have as their referents structured propositions. Part I defends the claim that belief reports, sentences of the form 'A believes that S', make explicit reference to a proposition and implicit, context-sensitive reference to the manner in which the subject represent…Read more
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40Review of Scott Soames, Philosophical Essays, Volume 1: Natural Language: What It Means and How We Use It (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (7). 2010.
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46In the Realm of Sense [review of Gideon Makin, The Metaphysicians of Meaning: Russell and Frege on Sense and Denotation ] (review)Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 21 (2): 167-75. 2001.
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37Review of Keefe, Theories of Vagueness (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 23 (4): 291-2. 2002.
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71Critical Study Julian Dodd. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Noûs 46 (2): 355-374. 2012.
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93Two aspects of propositional unityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (5): 518-533. 2013.(2013). Two aspects of propositional unity. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, Essays on the Nature of Propositions, pp. 518-533
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1Quine and RussellIn Ernie Lepore & Gilbert Harman (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 403-431. 2013.
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274Has the problem of incompleteness rested on a mistake?Mind 114 (456): 889-913. 2005.A common objection to Russell's theory of descriptions concerns incomplete definite descriptions: uses of (for example) ‘the book is overdue’ in contexts where there is clearly more than one book. Many contemporary Russellians hold that such utterances will invariably convey a contextually determined complete proposition, for example, that the book in your briefcase is overdue. But according to the objection this gets things wrong: typically, when a speaker utters such a sentence, no facts about…Read more
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394Review of Kit Fine, Semantic Relationism (review)Austrlasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (2): 345-9. 2009.
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105Definite Descriptions: A ReaderMIT Press. 1998.Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions sparked an ongoing debate concerning the proper logical and linguistic analysis of definite descriptions. While it is now widely acknowledged that, like the indexical expressions 'I', 'here', and 'now', definite descriptions in natural language are context-sensitive, there is significant disagreement as to the ultimate challenge this context-sensitivity poses to Russell's theory.This reader is intended both to introduce students to the philosoph…Read more
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149The 'Gödel' effectPhilosophical Studies 166 (1): 65-82. 2013.In their widely discussed paper, “Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style”, Machery et al. argue that Kripke’s Gödel–Schmidt case, generally thought to undermine the description theory of names, rests on culturally variable intuitions: while Western subjects’ intuitions conflict with the description theory of names, those of East Asian subjects do not. Machery et al. attempt to explain this discrepancy by appealing to differences between Western and East Asian modes of categorization, as identified in a…Read more
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87Review of Anne Bezuidenhout (ed.), Marga Reimer (ed.), Descriptions and Beyond (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (8). 2005.
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83Review of Fine, Kit, Semantic Relationism, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007, pp. vii + 160, US$74.95 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (2): 345-349. 2009.
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74Review of Robert Fiengo, Robert may, De Lingua Belief (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (9). 2007.
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91Review of Jason Stanley, Language in Context: Selected Essays (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (5). 2008.
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152A problem for Russellian theories of beliefPhilosophical Studies 146 (2). 2008.Russellianism is characterized as the view that ‘that’-clauses refer to Russellian propositions, familiar set-theoretic pairings of objects and properties. Two belief-reporting sentences, S and S*, possessing the same Russellian content, but differing in their intuitive truthvalue, are provided. It is argued that no Russellian explanation of the difference in apparent truthvalue is available, with the upshot that the Russellian fails to explain how a speaker who asserts S but rejects S* can be i…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |