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43The Knower's Paradox and Representational Theories of AttitudesJournal of Symbolic Logic 53 (2): 666. 1988.
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1Grammaticality and meaning shiftIn Gil Sagi & Jack Woods (eds.), The Semantic Conception of Logic : Essays on Consequence, Invariance, and Meaning, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
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218Modality, morality, and belief: essays in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1995.Modality, morality and belief are among the most controversial topics in philosophy today, and few philosophers have shaped these debates as deeply as Ruth Barcan Marcus. Inspired by her work, a distinguished group of philosophers explore these issues, refine and sharpen arguments and develop new positions on such topics as possible worlds, moral dilemmas, essentialism, and the explanation of actions by beliefs. This 'state of the art' collection honours one of the most rigorous and iconoclastic…Read more
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32Bias in semantic and discourse interpretationLinguistics and Philosophy 45 (3): 393-429. 2022.In this paper, we show how game theoretic work on conversation combined with a theory of discourse structure provides a framework for studying interpretive bias and how bias affects the production and interpretation of linguistic content. We model the influence of author bias on the discourse content and structure of the author’s linguistic production and interpreter bias on the interpretation of ambiguous or underspecified elements of that content and structure. Interpretive bias is an essentia…Read more
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Modality, Morality and Belief: Essays in Honor of Ruth Barcan MarcusPhilosophy 71 (275): 167-172. 1996.
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What Some Generic Sentences MeanIn Greg N. Carlson & Francis Jeffry Pelletier (eds.), The Generic Book, University of Chicago Press. pp. 300--339. 1995.
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Roundtable discussionIn Philip P. Hanson (ed.), Information, Language and Cognition, University of British Columbia Press. pp. 198--216. 1990.
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Verbal Information, Interpretation, and AttitudesIn Philip P. Hanson (ed.), Information, Language and Cognition, University of British Columbia Press. pp. 29-56. 1990.
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29Strategic Conversations Under Imperfect Information: Epistemic Message Exchange GamesJournal of Logic, Language and Information 27 (4): 343-385. 2018.This paper refines the game theoretic analysis of conversations in Asher et al. by adding epistemic concepts to make explicit the intuitive idea that conversationalists typically conceive of conversational strategies in a situation of imperfect information. This ‘epistemic’ turn has important ramifications for linguistic analysis, and we illustrate our approach with a detailed treatment of linguistic examples.
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171Supervaluations debuggedMind 118 (472): 901-933. 2009.Supervaluational accounts of vagueness have come under assault from Timothy Williamson for failing to provide either a sufficiently classical logic or a disquotational notion of truth, and from Crispin Wright and others for incorporating a notion of higher-order vagueness, via the determinacy operator, which leads to contradiction when combined with intuitively appealing ‘gap principles’. We argue that these criticisms of supervaluation theory depend on giving supertruth an unnecessarily central…Read more
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52A logic of intentions and beliefsJournal of Philosophical Logic 22 (5). 1993.Intentions are an important concept in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. We present a formal theory of intentions and beliefs based on Discourse Representation Theory that captures many of their important logical properties. Unlike possible worlds approaches, this theory does not assume that agents are perfect reasoners, and gives a realistic view of their internal architecture; unlike most representational approaches, it has an objective semantics, and does not rely on an ad hoc la…Read more
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18A Large View Of Linguistic ContentPragmatics and Cognition 15 (1): 17-39. 2007.This essay lays out a view of linguistic content in which discourse context plays an essential role. It provides a role for sentential content by using underspecification but argues that discourse level phenomena are essential not only to determining content but even grammaticality judgments in certain cases. It is thus argued that the traditional view which separates very strictly the areas of semantics — a context insensitive notion of meaning — and pragmatics — a non linguistic notion of spea…Read more
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277Generics and defaultsIn Handbook of Logic and Language, . 1996.1: Linguistic and Epistemological Background 1 . 1 : Generic Reference vs. Generic Predication 1 . 2 : Why are there any Generic Sentences at all? 1 . 3 : Generics and Exceptions, Two Bad Attitudes 1 . 4 : Exceptions and Generics, Some Other Attitudes 1 . 5 : Generics and Intensionality 1 . 6 : Goals of an Analysis of Generic Sentences 1 . 7 : A Little Notation 1 . 8 : Generics vs. Explicit Statements of Regularities..
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77The interpretation of questions in dialogueProceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung, Vol. 13, No. 1. 2009.A semantic framework for interpreting dialogue should provide an account of the content that is mutually accepted by its participants. The acceptance by one agent of another’s contribution crucially involves the theory of what that contribution means; A’s acceptance of B’s contribution means that the content of B’s contribution must be integrated into A’s extant commitments.1 For assertions, traditionally assumed to express a proposition formalised as a set of possible worlds, it was clear how t…Read more
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164Temporal interpretation, discourse relations and commonsense entailmentLinguistics and Philosophy 16 (5). 1993.This paper presents a formal account of how to determine the discourse relations between propositions introduced in a text, and the relations between the events they describe. The distinct natural interpretations of texts with similar syntax are explained in terms of defeasible rules. These characterise the effects of causal knowledge and knowledge of language use on interpretation. Patterns of defeasible entailment that are supported by the logic in which the theory is expressed are shown to un…Read more
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93Order independent and persistent typed default unificationLinguistics and Philosophy 19 (1). 1996.We define an order independent version of default unification on typed feature structures. The operation is one where default information in a feature structure typed with a more specific type, will override default information in a feature structure typed with a more general type, where specificity is defined by the subtyping relation in the type hierarchy. The operation is also able to handle feature structures where reentrancies are default. We provide a formal semantics, prove order independ…Read more
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32Preference ChangeJournal of Logic, Language and Information 24 (3): 267-288. 2015.Most models of rational action assume that all possible states and actions are pre-defined and that preferences change only when beliefs do. But several decision and game problems lack these features, calling for a dynamic model of preferences: preferences can change when unforeseen possibilities come to light or when there is no specifiable or measurable change in belief. We propose a formally precise dynamic model of preferences that extends an existing static model. Our axioms for updating pr…Read more
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76Philosophy of linguistics (edited book)North Holland. 2012.Philosophy of Linguistics investigates the foundational concepts and methods of linguistics, the scientific study of human language. This groundbreaking collection, the most thorough treatment of the philosophy of linguistics ever published, brings together philosophers, scientists and historians to map out both the foundational assumptions set during the second half of the last century and the unfolding shifts in perspective in which more functionalist perspectives are explored. The opening cha…Read more
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1The semantics and pragmatics of metaphorIn Pierrette Bouillon & Federica Busa (eds.), The Language of Word Meaning, Cambridge University Press. pp. 262--289. 2001.
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121Questions in dialogueLinguistics and Philosophy 21 (3): 237-309. 1998.In this paper we explore how compositional semantics, discourse structure, and the cognitive states of participants all contribute to pragmatic constraints on answers to questions in dialogue. We synthesise formal semantic theories on questions and answers with techniques for discourse interpretation familiar from computational linguistics, and show how this provides richer constraints on responses in dialogue than either component can achieve alone
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9Temporal modificationIn Kasia M. Jaszczolt & Louis de Saussure (eds.), Time: Language, Cognition & Reality, Oxford University Press. pp. 1--15. 2013.
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Meaning |
Pragmatics |
Truth |
Areas of Interest
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Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Other Academic Areas |
Philosophy of Language |
Meaning |
Pragmatics |
Truth |