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258The logic of perceptual reports: An extensional alternative to situation semanticsJournal of Philosophy 80 (February): 100-127. 1983.
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179Speaking of events (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2000.The idea that an adequate semantics of ordinary language calls for some theory of events has sparked considerable debate among linguists and philosophers. On the one hand, so many linguistic phenomena appear to be explained if (and, according to some authors, only if) we make room for logical forms in which reference to or quantification over events is explicitly featured. Examples include nominalization, adverbial modification, tense and aspect, plurals, and singular causal statements. On the o…Read more
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167On linguistics in philosophy, and philosophy in linguisticsLinguistics and Philosophy 25 (5-6): 573-584. 2002.After reviewing some major features of theinteractions between Linguistics and Philosophyin recent years, I suggest that the depth and breadthof current inquiry into semanticshas brought this subject into contact both with questionsof the nature of linguistic competence and with modern andtraditional philosophical study of the nature ofour thoughts, and the problems of metaphysics.I see this development as promising for thefuture of both subjects.
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139Expression, truth, predication, and context: Two perspectivesInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (4). 2008.In this article I contrast in two ways those conceptions of semantic theory deriving from Richard Montague's Intensional Logic (IL) and later developments with conceptions that stick pretty closely to a far weaker semantic apparatus for human first languages. IL is a higher-order language incorporating the simple theory of types. As such, it endows predicates with a reference. Its intensional features yield a conception of propositional identity (namely necessary equivalence) that has seemed to …Read more
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107Visions and Revisions: A Critical Notice of Noam Chomsky’s The Minimalist ProgramMind and Language 13 (2). 1998.
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106Sententialism: The thesis that complement clauses refer to themselvesPhilosophical Issues 16 (1). 2006.
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102Remembering, imagining, and the first personIn Alex Barber (ed.), Epistemology of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 496--533. 2003.
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73Languages and idiolects: their language and oursIn Barry C. Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 140--50. 2006.An idiolectal conception of language is compatible with a substantive role for external things — objects, including other people — in the characterization of idiolects. Illustrations of this role are not hard to come by. The point of looking outward from the individual is pretty evident for the case of reference to perceptually encountered objects: had the world been significantly different, a person with the same molecular history would have acquired, and called by the same familiar names, diff…Read more
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68Tensed ThoughtsMind and Language 10 (3): 226-249. 1995.: Consider mental states of the type that relate a subject to a content expressed by a sentence. I propose that some of these states necessarily include as constituents of their contents the states themselves. These reflexive states arise when one locates a content as belonging, for example, to one's own present or past. That content is then a tense% thought, ordering one's present state with respect to the content. Anaphoric cross‐reference between an event or state and a constituent of its own…Read more
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68Jackendoff's conceptualismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (6): 680-681. 2003.In this commentary, I concentrate upon Ray Jackendoff's view of the proper foundations for semantics within the context of generative grammar. Jackendoff (2002) favors a form of internalism that he calls “conceptualism.” I argue that a retreat from realism to conceptualism is not only unwarranted, but even self-defeating, in that the issues that prompt his view will inevitably reappear if the latter is adopted.
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53Is Semantics Necessary?Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 88 (1): 219-242. 1988.James Higginbotham; XIII*—Is Semantics Necessary?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 88, Issue 1, 1 June 1988, Pages 219–242, https://doi.org/10.1.
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42Why is sequence of tense obligatory?In Gerhard Preyer Georg Peter (ed.), Logical Form and Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 207--227. 2002.
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37Truth and Reference as the Basis of MeaningIn Michael Devitt & Richard Hanley (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. 2006.This chapter contains sections titled: Beginning with Frege Davidson's Program The Constitution of Meaning Theoretical Prospects.
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