•  224
    Causing Actions
    with Georg Theiner and Timothy O’Connor
    Philosophical Review 111 (2): 291-294. 2002.
    Review of Paul Pietroski, Causing Actions
  •  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.
  •  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
  •  77
    Believing in language
    Philosophy of Science 63 (3): 338-373. 1996.
    We propose that the generalizations of linguistic theory serve to ascribe beliefs to humans. Ordinary speakers would explicitly (and sincerely) deny having these rather esoteric beliefs about language--e.g., the belief that an anaphor must be bound in its governing category. Such ascriptions can also seem problematic in light of certain theoretical considerations having to do with concept possession, revisability, and so on. Nonetheless, we argue that ordinary speakers believe the propositions e…Read more
  •  17
    Mind and World (review)
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (4): 613-636. 1996.
  •  175
    Innate ideas
    with Stephen Crain
    In James A. McGilvray (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky, Cambridge University Press. pp. 164--181. 2005.
    Here's one way this chapter could go. After defining the terms 'innate' and 'idea', we say whether Chomsky thinks any ideas are innate -- and if so, which ones. Unfortunately, we don't have any theoretically interesting definitions to offer; and, so far as we know, Chomsky has never said that any ideas are innate. Since saying that would make for a very short chapter, we propose to do something else. Our aim is to locate Chomsky, as he locates himself, in a rationalist tradition where talk of in…Read more
  •  72
    Events and semantic architecture
    Oxford University Press. 2005.
    A study of how syntax relates to meaning by a leader of the new generation of philosopher-linguists.
  •  148
    Fregean Innocence
    Mind and Language 11 (4): 338-370. 1996.
    Frege's account of opacity is based on two attractive ideas: every meaningful expression has a sense (Sinn) that determines the expression's semantic value (Bedeutung); and the semantic value of a‘that’‐clause is the thought expressed by its embedded sentence. Considerations of compositionality led Frege to a more problematic view: inside ‘that’‐clauses, an expression does not have its customary Bedeutung. But contrary to initial appearances, compositionality does not entail a familiar substitut…Read more
  •  68
    Semantic monadicity with conceptual polyadicity
    In Wolfram Hinzen, Edouard Machery & Markus Werning (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality, Oxford University Press. 2012.
    Many concepts, which can be constituents of thoughts, are somehow indicated with words that can be constituents of sentences. But this assumption is compatible with many hypotheses about the concepts lexicalized, linguistic meanings, and the relevant forms of composition. The lexical items simply label the concepts they lexicalize, and that composition of lexical meanings mirrors composition of the labeled concepts, which exhibit diverse adicities. If a phrase must be understood as an instructio…Read more
  •  43
  •  106
    On explaining that
    Journal of Philosophy 97 (12): 655-662. 2000.
    How can a speaker can explain that P without explaining the fact that P, or explain the fact that P without explaining that P, even when it is true (and so a fact) that P? Or in formal mode: what is the semantic contribution of 'explain' such that 'She explained that P' can be true, while 'She explained the fact that P' is false (or vice versa), even when 'P' is true? The proposed answer is that 'explained' is a semantically monadic predicate, satisfied by events of explaining. But 'the fact tha…Read more