-
22EssentialismIn Bob Hale, Crispin Wright & Alexander Miller (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. 1997.The term 'essentialism' in its popular usage is usually qualified in some way, as in 'biological essentialism', 'gender essentialism' and 'social essentialism'. The essentialist theses were defended on the grounds that denying them leads, under plausible assumptions, to pairs of worlds containing objects which are intrinsic and spatio‐temporal duplicates and yet which are numerically distinct. This chapter outlines some technical difficulties in getting the definitions of 'essential property' an…Read more
-
6On Some Examples of Chomsky’sIn Richard Schantz (ed.), Prospects for Meaning, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 121-142. 2012.
-
3Skepticism and Semantic KnowledgeIn Alexander Miller & Crispin Wright (eds.), Rule-Following and Meaning, Mcgill-queen's University Press. pp. 16-27. 2002.
-
7Meaning-Postulates, Inference,and the Relational/Notional AmbiguityFacta Philosophica 5 (1): 49-74. 2003.
-
141Is There a Problem About Persistence?Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 61 (1): 107-156. 1987.
-
41Content and Theme in Attitude AscriptionsIn Alex Grzankowski & Michelle Montague (eds.), Non-Propositional Intentionality, Oxford University Press. pp. 114-133. 2018.This paper is about a substitution-failure in attitude ascriptions, but not the one you think. A standard view about the semantic shape of ‘that’-clause attitude ascriptions is that they are fundamentally relational. The attitude verb expresses a binary relation whose extension, if not empty, is a collection of pairs each of which consists in an individual and a proposition, while the ‘that’-clause is a term for a proposition. One interesting problem this view faces is that, within the scope of …Read more
-
18Review of Jaszczolt (2000): The Pragmatics of Propositional Attitude Reports (review)Pragmatics and Cognition 9 (2): 372-380. 2001.
-
6An Investigation of a Gricean Account of Free-Choice orIn Keith Allan, Jay David Atlas, Brian E. Butler, Alessandro Capone, Marco Carapezza, Valentina Cuccio, Denis Delfitto, Michael Devitt, Graeme Forbes, Alessandra Giorgi, Neal R. Norrick, Nathan Salmon, Gunter Senft, Alberto Voltolini & Richard Warner (eds.), Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 1 From Theory to Practice, Springer Verlag. pp. 65-79. 2018.Free-choice disjunction manifests itself in complements of comparatives, existential modals, and related contexts. For example, “Socrates is older than Plato or Aristotle” is usually understood to mean “older than each”, not “older than at least one”. Normally, to get an “at least one” reading, a wh-rider has to be appended, e.g., “whichever is younger” or “but I don’t remember which”. Similarly, “Socrates could have been a lawyer or a banker” usually means “Socrates could have been a lawyer and…Read more
-
26Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 1 From Theory to Practice (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2018.This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more em…Read more
-
Realism and Skepticism: Brains in a Vat RevisitedIn Keith DeRose & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Skepticism: a contemporary reader, Oxford University Press. 1999.
-
15Richard L. Epstein. The semantic foundations of logic. Volume 1: Propositional logics. With the assistance and collaboration of Walter A. Carnielli, Itala M. L. D'Ottaviano, Stanisław Krajewski, and Roger D. Maddux. Nijhoff international philosophy series, vol. 35. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Boston, and London, 1990, xxii + 386 pp (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 56 (4): 1499-1500. 1991.
-
265The metaphysics of modalityClarendon Press. 1985.Analytic philosophy has recently demonstrated a revived interest in metaphysical problems about possibility and necessity. Graeme Forbes here provides a careful description of the logical background of recent work in this area for those who may be unfamiliar with it, moving on to d discuss the distinction between modality de re and modality de dicto and the ontological commitments of possible worlds semantics. In addition, Forbes offers a unified theory of the essential properties of sets, organ…Read more
-
38Book Review: Ruth Barcan Marcus. Modalities (review)Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 36 (2): 336-339. 1995.
-
42Cognitive Architecture and the Semantics of BeliefMidwest Studies in Philosophy 14 (1): 84-100. 1989.
-
206Does the new route reach its destination?Mind 115 (458): 367-374. 2006.A New Route to the Necessity of Origin’, Guy Rohrbaugh and Louis deRossett argue for the Necessity of Origin in a way that they believe avoids use of any kind of transworld constitutional sufficiency principle. In this discussion, we respond that either their arguments do imply a sufficiency principle, or else they entirely fail to establish the Necessity of Origin.
Boulder, Colorado, United States of America