• Editorial Letter for Volume 52 (2024)
    Philosophia 52 (1): 1-4. 2024.
  • William Lycan on Mind, Meaning, and Method (edited book)
    with Michel Jan
    Palgrave Macmillan. forthcoming.
  •  186
    G. E. Moore observed that to assert, 'I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did' would be 'absurd'. Over half a century later, such sayings continue to perplex philosophers. In the definitive treatment of the famous paradox, Green and Williams explain its history and relevance and present new essays by leading thinkers in the area
  •  9
    Should Speech Act Theory Eschew Propositions?
    In Laura Caponetto & Paolo Labinaz (eds.), Sbisà on Speech as Action, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 2147483647-2147483647. 2023.
    In articles such as “Speech Acts without Propositions?” (2006), Marina Sbisà advocates a “strong” conception of speech acts as means by which speakers modify their own and others’ deontic statuses, including their rights, obligations, and commitments. On this basis Sbisà challenges an influential approach to speech acts as typically if not universally possessing propositional contents. Sbisà argues that such an approach leads to viewing speech acts as primarily aimed at communicating proposition…Read more
  •  13
    Speech Acts
    In Timothy O'Connor & Constantine Sandis (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Speech Acts, Acts of Speech, and Performatives Acts and Their Contents Speech Acts, What is Said, and Speaker Meaning Misfires, Abuses, and How Saying Makes It So Illocutions, Perlocutions, and Implicature Direct and Indirect Speech Acts References Further reading.
  •  6
    The Rationality of the Emotions
    In Ernie Lepore & Kirk Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson, Wiley. 2013.
    This chapter examines Davidson's treatment of emotions as complexly bound up with cognitive states such as belief, rather than as being essentially opposed to such states. Emotions on Davidson's view can be justified, and can be both causes of and reasons for action. We also consider Davidson's elucidation and defense of David Hume's analysis of pride and similar affective states. Objections to that elucidation and defense are discussed, and it is explained how Davidson could rebut those objecti…Read more
  •  10
    Upon Entering a Second Half-Century with Philosophia
    Philosophia 51 (1): 1-3. 2023.
  •  10
    II—Mitchell Green: Perceiving Emotions
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (1): 45-61. 2010.
    I argue that it is possible literally to perceive the emotions of others. This account depends upon the possibility of perceiving a whole by perceiving one or more of its parts, and upon the view that emotions are complexes. After developing this account, I expound and reply to Rowland Stout's challenge to it. Stout is nevertheless sympathetic with the perceivability-of-emotions view. I thus scrutinize Stout's suggestion for a better defence of that view than I have provided, and offer a refinem…Read more
  •  23
    After briefly laying out a cultural-evolutionary approach to speech acts (Sects. 1–2), I argue that the notion of commitment at play in assertion and related speech acts comprises multiple dimensions (Sect. 3). Distinguishing such dimensions enables us to hypothesize evolutionary precursors to the modern practice of assertion, and facilitates a new way of posing the question whether, and if so to what extent, speech acts are conventional (Sect. 4). Our perspective also equips us to consider how …Read more
  •  81
    Fiction and Epistemic Value: State of the Art
    British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (2): 273-289. 2022.
    We critically survey prominent recent scholarship on the question of whether fiction can be a source of epistemic value for those who engage with it fully and appropriately. Such epistemic value might take the form of knowledge (for ‘cognitivists’) or understanding (for ‘neo-cognitivists’). Both camps may be sorted according to a further distinction between views explaining fiction’s epistemic value either in terms of the author’s engaging in a form of telling, or instead via their showing some …Read more
  •  45
    What Might Machines Mean?
    Minds and Machines 32 (2): 323-338. 2022.
    This essay addresses the question whether artificial speakers can perform speech acts in the technical sense of that term common in the philosophy of language. We here argue that under certain conditions artificial speakers can perform speech acts so understood. After explaining some of the issues at stake in these questions, we elucidate a relatively uncontroversial way in which machines can communicate, namely through what we call verbal signaling. But verbal signaling is not sufficient for th…Read more
  •  91
    Assertion: a (partly) social speech act
    Journal of Pragmatics 181 (August 2021): 17-28. 2021.
    In a series of articles (Pagin, 2004, 2009), Peter Pagin has argued that assertion is not a social speech act, introducing a method (which we baptize ‘the P-test’) designed to refute any account that defines assertion in terms of its social effects. This paper contends that Pagin's method fails to rebut the thesis that assertion is social. We show that the P-test is both unreliable (because it overgenerates counterexamples) and counterproductive (because it ultimately provides evidence in favor …Read more
  •  944
    Assertion and convention
    In Goldberg Sanford (ed.), Oxford Handbook on Assertion, Oxford University Press. 2020.
  •  20
  •  343
    From Signaling and Expression to Conversation and Fiction
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 96 (3): 295-315. 2019.
    This essay ties together some main strands of the author’s research spanning the last quarter-century. Because of its broad scope and space limitations, he prescinds from detailed arguments and instead intuitively motivates the general points which are supported more fully in other publications to which he provides references. After an initial delineation of several distinct notions of meaning, the author considers such a notion deriving from the evolutionary biology of communication that he ter…Read more
  •  39
    Extreme Intentionalism Modestly Modified
    British Journal of Aesthetics 59 (2): 197-201. 2019.
    1. On at least one usage of ‘mean’, performing an action that leads someone else to think that P, is not, on its own, sufficient for meaning that P. Nor is performing an action that is intended to get someone to think this. Instead one must make one’s intention overt. Grice’s way of developing this overtness requirement requires audience-directed intentions: for an agent, on this approach, to mean that P, she must perform a publicly accessible action with the intention of producing in an address…Read more
  •  1
    Narrative Fiction as a Source of Knowledge
    In Paula Olmos (ed.), Narration as Argument, Springer Verlag. 2017.
  •  23
    Illocution and Empathy
    Philosophia 45 (3): 881-893. 2017.
    Slote has argued that empathy plays a crucial role in such speech acts as questions and assertions. After clarifying some of the aims and limitations of speech act theory, providing an account of empathy and its potential epistemic value, and sketching the role that some speech acts play in expressing psychological states, we consider Slote’s argument for the place of empathy in questions and assertions. We show that the most that Slote has established is that some cases of questioning and asser…Read more
  •  60
    Philosophy in High Schools
    Teaching Philosophy 36 (3): 213-215. 2013.
  •  1
    Illocutions and Attitudes
    Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1993.
    Thinking is a convention-involving process in that just as there are certain activities that count as touchdowns or checkmates, so too there are certain activities that count as presuming or supposing for the sake of argument. The activities that are constitutive of mental states are often overt acts of speech, and thus felicitous utterance of a sentence such as 'I presume that A' is, to borrow a term from J. L. Austin, a performative. The performativity of attitude avowals in turn implies that …Read more
  •  169
    On the autonomy of linguistic meaning
    Mind 106 (422): 217-243. 1997.
    Frege and many following him, such as Dummett, Geach, Stenius and Hare, have envisaged a role for illocutionary force indicators in a logically perpspicuous notation. Davidson has denied that such expressions are even possible on the ground that any putative force indicator would be used by actors and jokers to heighten the drama of their performances. Davidson infers from this objection a Thesis of the Autonomy of Linguistic Meaning: symbolic representation necessarily breaks any close tie with…Read more
  •  67
    Implicature (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (1): 241-244. 2002.
    I recall reading a critical notice of Grices’ Studies in the Way of Words, in which the author remarked that while Grice’s analysis of speaker meaning is the subject of considerable controversy, Grice’s account of conversational implicature is, “…money in the philosophical bank.” This assessment was optimistic at best: Grice’s remarks on implicature offer a program not a theory, and in relation to the amount of discussion it has received in philosophy and allied disciplines such as linguistics a…Read more
  • Introduction
    with John N. Williams
    In Mitchell S. Green & John N. Williams (eds.), Moore's Paradox: New Essays on Belief, Rationality, and the First Person, Oxford University Press. 2007.
  •  115
    Direct reference and implicature
    Philosophical Studies 91 (1): 61-90. 1998.
    On some formulations of Direct Reference the semantic value, relative to a context of utterance, of a rigid singular term is just its referent. In response to the apparent possibility of a difference in truth value of two sentences just alike save for containing distinct but coreferential rigid singular terms, some proponents of Direct Reference have held that any two such sentences differ only pragmatically. Some have also held, more specifically, that two such sentences differ by conveying dis…Read more
  •  84
    A major theme in rap lyrics is that the only way to survive is to use your head, be aware, know what’s going on around you. That simple idea packs a lot of background. The most obvious ideas about knowledge turn out if you look at them close up to be pretty questionable. For example: How do we get knowledge about the world? A natural and ancient answer to this question is that much if not all of our knowledge comes from our senses. So for example the nose gives us knowledge of what things smell …Read more
  •  34
    Purporting to show how Frege's contributions to philosophy of language and philosophical logic were developed with the aim of furthering his logicist programme, the author construes him as more systematic than is often recognized. Centrally, the notion of sense as espoused in Frege's monumental articles of the Nineties had only an ostensible justification as an account of the informativeness of a posteriori identity statements. In fact its rationale was to help articulate the thesis that arithme…Read more
  •  81
    Moore's many paradoxes
    Philosophical Papers 28 (2): 97-109. 1999.
    Over the last two decades J.N. Williams has developed an account of the absurdity of such utterances as Its raining but I dont believe it that is both intuitively plausible and applicable to a wide variety of forms that this so-called Moorean absurdity can take. His approach is also noteworthy for making only minimal appeal to principles of epistemic or doxastic logic in its account of such absurdity. We first show that Williams places undue emphasis upon assertion and belief: It is similarly ab…Read more