•  112
    The character of natural language semantics
    In Alex Barber (ed.), Epistemology of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 217--256. 2003.
    Paul M. Pietroski, University of Maryland I had heard it said that Chomsky’s conception of language is at odds with the truth-conditional program in semantics. Some of my friends said it so often that the point—or at least a point—finally sunk in.
  •  224
    Causing Actions
    with Georg Theiner and Timothy O’Connor
    Philosophical Review 111 (2): 291-294. 2002.
    Review of Paul Pietroski, Causing Actions
  •  78
    Causing Actions (review)
    Mind and Language 18 (4): 440-446. 2003.
    Paul Pietroski presents an original philosophical theory of actions and their mental causes. We often act for reasons, deliberating and choosing among options, based on our beliefs and desires. But because bodily motions always have biochemical causes, it can seem that thinking and acting are biochemical processes. Pietroski argues that thoughts and deeds are in fact distinct from, though dependent on, underlying biochemical processes within persons
  •  20
    Psycholinguistic evidence for restricted quantification
    with Tyler Knowlton, Alexander Williams, Justin Halberda, and Jeffrey Lidz
    Natural Language Semantics 31 (2): 219-251. 2023.
    Quantificational determiners are often said to be devices for expressing relations. For example, the meaning of _every_ is standardly described as the inclusion relation, with a sentence like _every frog is green_ meaning roughly that the green things include the frogs. Here, we consider an older, non-relational alternative: determiners are tools for creating restricted quantifiers. On this view, determiners specify how many elements of a restricted domain (e.g., the frogs) satisfy a given condi…Read more
  •  8
    Chomsky on Meaning and Reference
    In Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.
    Noam Chomsky offered a fruitful conception of the languages that children regularly acquire and use in human speech. In discussions of meaning, Chomsky often emphasizes complexities of usage and warns against theories that identify word meanings with sets of things that the words are allegedly “true of.” While syntactic structure plays an important role in determining the conditions on reference that complex expressions impose, Chomsky denied that the semantic role of syntax is adequately charac…Read more
  •  1
    Event Variables and Their Values
    In Ernie Lepore & Kirk Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson, Wiley. 2013.
    We can use language to say what people did, often describing the same action in different complex ways. Davidson offered an illuminating analysis of action reports like “Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard with a dagger in the library,” which involve adverbial modifiers. Part of the challenge here is to say how such modifiers are semantically related to the rest of the sentence. Building on the ancient observation that verbs are often used to describe what happened, Davidson argued that an acti…Read more
  •  22
    Precis of Conjoining Meanings
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (3): 730-734. 2023.
  •  26
    Replies to Critics
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (3): 752-764. 2022.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
  •  17
    Paul M. Pietroski presents an ambitious new account of human languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. He argues that meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions; meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort.
  •  33
    The mental representation of universal quantifiers
    with Tyler Knowlton, Justin Halberda, and Jeffrey Lidz
    Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (4): 911-941. 2022.
    A sentence like every circle is blue might be understood in terms of individuals and their properties or in terms of a relation between groups. Relatedly, theorists can specify the contents of universally quantified sentences in first-order or second-order terms. We offer new evidence that this logical first-order vs. second-order distinction corresponds to a psychologically robust individual vs. group distinction that has behavioral repercussions. Participants were shown displays of dots and as…Read more
  •  27
    Précis of Conjoining Meanings
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 20 (3): 271-282. 2020.
    In Conjoining Meanings, I argue that meanings are composable instructions for how to build concepts of a special kind. In this summary of the main line of argument, I stress that proposals about what linguistic meanings are should make room for the phenomenon of lexical polysemy. On my internalist proposal, a single lexical item can be used to access various concepts on different occasions of use. And if lexical items are often “conceptually equivocal” in this way, then some familiar arguments f…Read more
  •  50
    A narrow path from meanings to contents
    Philosophical Studies 178 (9): 3027-3035. 2020.
    In this comment on Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne's illuminating book, Narrow Content, I address some issues related to externalist conceptions of linguistic meaning.
  •  31
    Responses to comments on Conjoining meanings
    Mind and Language 35 (2): 266-273. 2020.
    After some brief introductory remarks, I respond to the three commentaries on Conjoining meanings that appear in this issue.
  •  28
    Fostering Liars
    Topoi 40 (1): 5-25. 2020.
    Davidson conjectured that suitably formulated Tarski-style theories of truth can “do duty” as theories of meaning for the spoken languages that humans naturally acquire. But this conjecture faces a pair of old objections that are, in my view, fatal when combined. Foster noted that given any theory of the sort Davidson envisioned, for a language L, there will be many equally true theories whose theorems pair endlessly many sentences of L with very different specifications of whether or not those …Read more
  •  57
    Function and concatenation
    In Georg Peter & Gerhard Preyer (eds.), Logical Form and Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 91--117. 2002.
    Paul M. Pietroski, University of Maryland For any sentence of a natural language, we can ask the following questions: what is its meaning; what is its syntactic structure; and how is its meaning related to its syntactic structure? Attending to these questions, as they apply to sentences that provide evidence for Davidsonian event analyses, suggests that we reconsider some traditional views about how the syntax of a natural sentence is related to its meaning.
  •  16
    Describing I-junction
    ProtoSociology 31 121-137. 2014.
    The meaning of a noun phrase like ‘brown cow’, or ‘cow that ate grass’, is somehow conjunctive. But conjunctive in what sense? Are the meanings of other phrases—e.g, ‘ate quickly’, ‘ate grass’, and ‘at noon’—similarly conjunctive? I suggest a possible answer, in the context of a broader conception of natural language semantics. But my main aim is to highlight some underdiscussed questions and some implications of our ignorance.
  • Causing Actions
    Philosophy 78 (303): 128-132. 2000.
  •  250
    Intentionality and teleological error
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 73 (3): 267-82. 1992.
    Theories of content purport to explain, among other things, in virtue of what beliefs have the truth conditions they do have. The desire for such a theory has many sources, but prominent among them are two puzzling facts that are notoriously difficult to explain: beliefs can be false, and there are normative constraints on the formation of beliefs.2 If we knew in virtue of what beliefs had truth conditions, we would be better positioned to explain how it is possible for an agent to believe that …Read more
  •  52
    Euthyphro and the semantic
    Mind and Language 15 (2-3): 341-349. 2000.
  •  394
    When Other Things Aren’t Equal: Saving Ceteris Paribus Laws from Vacuity
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (1): 81-110. 1995.
    A common view is that ceteris paribus clauses render lawlike statements vacuous, unless such clauses can be explicitly reformulated as antecedents of ?real? laws that face no counterinstances. But such reformulations are rare; and they are not, we argue, to be expected in general. So we defend an alternative sufficient condition for the non-vacuity of ceteris paribus laws: roughly, any counterinstance of the law must be independently explicable, in a sense we make explicit. Ceteris paribus laws …Read more
  •  99
    Actions, adjuncts, and agency
    Mind 107 (425): 73-111. 1998.
    The event analysis of action sentences seems to be at odds with plausible (Davidsonian) views about how to count actions. If Booth pulled a certain trigger, and thereby shot Lincoln, there is good reason for identifying Booths' action of pulling the trigger with his action of shooting Lincoln; but given truth conditions of certain sentences involving adjuncts, the event analysis requires that the pulling and the shooting be distinct events. So I propose that event sortals like 'shooting' and 'pu…Read more
  •  405
    Nature, nurture, and universal grammar
    Linguistics and Philosophy 24 (2): 139-186. 2001.
    In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved is logically underdetermined by experience. This view highlights the cues that are available in the inp…Read more
  •  29
    On Explaining That
    Journal of Philosophy 97 (12): 655. 2000.
  •  19
    Logical Form and LF
    In Ernest Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 822--841. 2006.
    We can use sentences to present arguments, some of which are valid. This suggests that premises and conclusions, like sentences, have structure. This in turn raises questions about how logical structure is related to grammar, and how grammatical structure is related to thought and truth.
  •  48
    Framing Event Variables
    Erkenntnis 80 (1): 31-60. 2015.
    Davidsonian analyses of action reports like ‘Alvin chased Theodore around a tree’ are often viewed as supporting the hypothesis that sentences of a human language H have truth conditions that can be specified by a Tarski-style theory of truth for H. But in my view, simple cases of adverbial modification add to the reasons for rejecting this hypothesis, even though Davidson rightly diagnosed many implications involving adverbs as cases of conjunct-reduction in the scope of an existential quantifi…Read more
  •  48
    Character before content
    In Judith Jarvis Thomson (ed.), Content and Modality: Themes From the Philosophy of Robert Stalnaker, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 34--60. 2006.
    Speakers can use sentences to make assertions. Theorists who reflect on this truism often say that sentences have linguistic meanings, and that assertions have propositional contents. But how are meanings related to contents? Are meanings less dependent on the environment? Are contents more independent of language? These are large questions, which must be understood partly in terms of the phenomena that lead theorists to use words like ‘meaning’ and ‘content’, sometimes in nonstandard ways. Oppo…Read more
  •  122
    The meaning of 'most': Semantics, numerosity and psychology
    with Jeffrey Lidz, Tim Hunter, and Justin Halberda
    Mind and Language 24 (5): 554-585. 2009.
    The meaning of 'most' can be described in many ways. We offer a framework for distinguishing semantic descriptions, interpreted as psychological hypotheses that go beyond claims about sentential truth conditions, and an experiment that tells against an attractive idea: 'most' is understood in terms of one-to-one correspondence. Adults evaluated 'Most of the dots are yellow', as true or false, on many trials in which yellow dots and blue dots were displayed for 200 ms. Displays manipulated the ea…Read more