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613Discourse and logical form: pronouns, attention and coherenceLinguistics and Philosophy 40 (5): 519-547. 2017.Traditionally, pronouns are treated as ambiguous between bound and demonstrative uses. Bound uses are non-referential and function as bound variables, and demonstrative uses are referential and take as a semantic value their referent, an object picked out jointly by linguistic meaning and a further cue—an accompanying demonstration, an appropriate and adequately transparent speaker’s intention, or both. In this paper, we challenge tradition and argue that both demonstrative and bound pronouns ar…Read more
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414Against Metaphorical MeaningTopoi 29 (2): 165-180. 2010.The commonplace view about metaphorical interpretation is that it can be characterized in traditional semantic and pragmatic terms, thereby assimilating metaphor to other familiar uses of language. We will reject this view, and propose in its place the view that, though metaphors can issue in distinctive cognitive and discourse effects, they do so without issuing in metaphorical meaning and truth, and so, without metaphorical communication. Our inspiration derives from Donald Davidson’s critical…Read more
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392Meaning and DemonstrationReview of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (1): 69-97. 2015.In demonstration, speakers use real-world activity both for its practical effects and to help make their points. The demonstrations of origami mathematics, for example, reconfigure pieces of paper by folding, while simultaneously allowing their author to signal geometric inferences. Demonstration challenges us to explain how practical actions can get such precise significance and how this meaning compares with that of other representations. In this paper, we propose an explanation inspired by Da…Read more
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132Anscombe on expression of intentionIn Constantine Sandis (ed.), New Essays on the Explanation of Action, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.Of course in every act of this kind, there remains the possibility of putting this act into question – insofar as it refers to more distant, more essential ends.... For example the sentence which I write is the meaning of the letters I trace, but the whole work I wish to produce is the meaning of the sentence. And this work is a possibility in connection with which I can feel anguish; it is truly my possibility...tomorrow in relation to it my freedom can exercise its nihilating power
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105Pointing things out: in defense of attention and coherenceLinguistics and Philosophy 43 (2): 139-148. 2020.Nowak and Michaelson have done us the service of presenting direct and clear worries about our account of demonstratives. In response, we use the opportunity to engage briefly with their remarks as a useful way to clarify our view.
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97The Will and Human Action: From Antiquity to the Present Day (edited book)Routledge. 2003.What is the will? And what is its relation to human action? Throughout history, philosophers have been fascinated by the idea of "the will": the source of the drive that motivates human beings to act. However, there has never been a clear consensus as to what the will is and how it relates to human action. Some philosophers have taken the will to be based firmly in reason and rational choice, and some have seen it as purely self-determined. Others have replaced the idea of the human will with a …Read more
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55Freedom and Force: Essays on Kant’s Legal Philosophy (edited book)Bloomsbury. 2017.This collection of essays takes as its starting point Arthur Ripstein's Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy, a seminal work on Kant's thinking about law, which also treats many of the contemporary issues of legal and political philosophy. The essays offer readings and elucidations of Ripstein's thought, dispute some of his claims and extend some of his themes within broader philosophical contexts, thus developing the significance of Ripstein's ideas for contemporary legal an…Read more
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53Slurs and ToneIn Annalisa Coliva, Paolo Leonardi & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Eva Picardi on Language, Analysis and History, Palgrave. pp. 205-217. 2018.Two claims that are hard to deny are that slurs can be offensive, and that not all uses of language are communicative. It’s therefore perplexing why no one has considered the possibility that slurs might be offensive not because of what they communicate but rather because of interpretive effects their uses might exact. In what follows, we intend to argue just that, namely, that confrontations with slurs can set in motion a kind of imaginative engagement that rouses objectionable psychological st…Read more
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48Figures of speechThe Philosophers' Magazine 56 (56): 31-41. 2012.We cannot explain our diverse practices for engaging with imagery through general pragmatic mechanisms. There is no general mechanism behind practices like metaphor and irony. Metaphor works the way it works; irony works the way it works.
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42The breadth of semantics: reply to criticsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (2): 195-206. 2016.In our 2015 book Imagination and Convention, we explore the scope and limits of linguistic knowledge in semantics and pragmatics for natural language. We draw heavily on the notion of coordination from David Lewis' book on conventions. To the extent that the account we develop is right, general principles like Grice's cooperative principle and the maxims of conversation have little to say about about interpretation. Three commentators—Anne Bezuidenhout, Laurence Horn, and Zoltan Gendler Szabo—di…Read more
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41Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in LanguageOxford University Press. 2014.How do hearers manage to understand speakers? And how do speakers manage to shape hearers' understanding? Lepore and Stone show that standard views about the workings of semantics and pragmatics are unsatisfactory. They advance an alternative view which better captures what is going on in linguistic communication.
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40Philosophical Investigations into Figurative Speech Metaphor and IronyProtoSociology 31 75-87. 2014.This paper surveys rich and important phenomena in language use that theorists study from a wide range of perspectives. And according to us, there is no unique and general mechanism behind our practices of metaphor and irony. Metaphor works in a particular way, by prompting the specific kind of analogical thinking And, irony works in its own particular way, by prompting new appreciation of the apparent contribution, speaker or perspective of an utterance exhibited for effect. Or so we will argue…Read more
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35Declaration as Disavowal: The Politics of Race and Empire in the Universal Declaration of Human RightsPolitical Theory 47 (1): 57-81. 2019.This article argues that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by claiming certain inheritances from eighteenth-century American and French rights declarations, simultaneously disavowed others, reshaping the genre of the rights declaration in ways amenable to forms of imperial and racial domination. I begin by considering the rights declaration as genre, arguing that later participants can both inherit and disavow aspects of what came before. Then, drawing on original archival research, I c…Read more
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29Semantics, Coherence, and Intentions: Reply to Carston, Collins and HawthorneMind and Language 31 (5): 646-654. 2016.
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29Listening to what cannot be said: Broken narratives and the lived bodyArts and Humanities in Higher Education 17 (1): 20-31. 2018.The core of this special issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education emerged from the Broken Narratives and the Lived Body conference held in 2016. The ‘Broken Narrative’ essays included in this issue open up a critical space for understanding and theorising illness narratives that defy a conventional cognitive ordering of the self as a bounded spatial and temporal entity. Here, we discuss how narratives might be ‘broken’ by discourse, trauma, ‘ill’ lived bodies and experiences that exceed …Read more
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20David Lewis on ConventionIn 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
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20The changing face of the enemy in fascist italyConstellations 15 (3): 332-350. 2008.No Abstract
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17Problems and Perspectives on the Limits of Pragmatics: Reply to CriticsPolish Journal of Philosophy 10 (1): 117-126. 2016.
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15Dynamic Discourse Referents for Tense and ModalsIn Harry Bunt & Reinhard Muskens (eds.), Computing Meaning, Kluwer. pp. 302-321. 1999.
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14Book Review: Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism, by Alex Zamalin (review)Political Theory 49 (4): 700-705. 2021.
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9The Will and Human Action: From Antiquity to the Present Day (edited book)Routledge. 2003.What is the will? And what is its relation to human action? Throughout history, philosophers have been fascinated by the idea of 'the will': the source of the drive that motivates human beings to act. However, there has never been a clear consensus as to what the will is and how it relates to human action. Some philosophers have taken the will to be based firmly in reason and rational choice, and some have seen it as purely self-determined. Others have replaced the idea of the human will with a …Read more
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7Flagellar export apparatus and ATP synthetase: Homology evidenced by synteny predating the Last Universal Common AncestorBioessays 43 (7): 2100004. 2021.We report evidence further supporting homology between proteins in the F1FO‐ATP synthetase and the bacterial flagellar motor (BFM). BFM proteins FliH, FliI, and FliJ have been hypothesized to be homologous to FO‐b + F1‐δ, F1‐α/β, and F1‐γ, with similar structure and interactions. We conduct a further test by constructing a gene order dataset, examining the order offliH,fliI, andfliJgenes across the phylogenetic breadth of flagellar and nonflagellar type 3 secretion systems, and comparing this to…Read more
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6Anscombe on expression of intention : an exegesisIn Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby & Frederick Stoutland (eds.), Essays on Anscombe's Intention, Harvard University Press. 2011.
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4Amnesty International and Human RightsIn Jonathan Gilmore & Lydia Goehr (eds.), A Companion to Arthur C. Danto, Wiley. 2022.Arthur Danto was quite engaged in the world, through campus activism at Columbia and as an early member of Amnesty International USA. Danto's line seems to betray a deeply felt humanism that guided his practical politics. Danto's work with Amnesty was motivated in part by a brief glimpse into France's violence during the war in Algeria. He writes about being in Paris during the 1961 October Massacre and seeing the bodies of Algerian protesters, killed by police, floating in the Seine. The ethic …Read more
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2Levinas, ethics and LawEdinburgh University Press. 2016.Introduction : the law's other -- The ethics of Emmanuel Levinas -- Can law be ethical? -- Adjudication, obligation and human rights : applying Levinas's Ethics -- The law of the same : Levinas and the biopolitical limits of liberalism -- Law, ethics and political subjectivity.