•  23
    E. E. Constance Jones on the dualism of practical reason
    with Amanda Favia
    British 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...
  •  29
    Pleonastic propositions and de re belief
    Philosophical 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
  •  44
    Cruelty and kinds: Scalia and Dworkin on the constitutionality of capital punishment
    Inquiry: 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
  •  53
    Structured propositions and the logical form of predication
    Synthese 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
  • Reference and Indexicality
    Dissertation, 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
  •  137
    A problem for Russellian theories of belief
    Philosophical 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
  •  34
  •  86
    Two aspects of propositional unity
    Canadian 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
  •  252
    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
  •  378
    Review of Kit Fine, Semantic Relationism (review)
    Austrlasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (2): 345-9. 2009.
  •  93
    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
  •  135
    The 'Gödel' effect
    Philosophical 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
  •  73
    Review 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.
  •  88
    Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011.