-
Semantic typology and compositionIn Derek Ball & Brian Rabern (eds.), The Science of Meaning: Essays on the Metatheory of Natural Language Semantics, Oxford University Press. 2018.
-
234Causing ActionsPhilosophical Review 111 (2): 291-294. 2002.Review of Paul Pietroski, Causing Actions
-
112The character of natural language semanticsIn 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.
-
80Causing 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
-
31Psycholinguistic evidence for restricted quantificationNatural 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
-
11Chomsky on Meaning and ReferenceIn 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
-
5Event Variables and Their ValuesIn Ernie Lepore & Kurt Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson, Blackwell. 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
-
The character of natural language semanticsIn Alex Barber (ed.), Epistemology of language, Oxford University Press. 2003.
-
37Replies to CriticsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (3): 752-764. 2022.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
-
33Conjoining Meanings: Semantics Without Truth ValuesOxford University Press. 2018.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.
-
40The mental representation of universal quantifiersLinguistics 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
-
29Précis of Conjoining MeaningsCroatian 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
-
60A narrow path from meanings to contentsPhilosophical 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.
-
41Responses to comments on Conjoining meaningsMind 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.
-
34Fostering LiarsTopoi 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
-
65Function and concatenationIn 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.
-
25Describing I-junctionProtoSociology 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.
-
260Intentionality and teleological errorPacific 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
-
37Natural number concepts: No derivation without formalizationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (6): 666-667. 2008.The conceptual building blocks suggested by developmental psychologists may yet play a role in how the human learner arrives at an understanding of natural number. The proposal of Rips et al. faces a challenge, yet to be met, faced by all developmental proposals: to describe the logical space in which learners ever acquire new concepts
-
139Brass tacks in linguistic theory: Innate grammatical principlesIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 1--175. 2005.In the normal course of events, children manifest linguistic competence equivalent to that of adults in just a few years. Children can produce and understand novel sentences, they can judge that certain strings of words are true or false, and so on. Yet experience appears to dramatically underdetermine the com- petence children so rapidly achieve, even given optimistic assumptions about children’s nonlinguistic capacities to extract information and form generalizations on the basis of statistica…Read more
-
83Systematicity via MonadicityCroatian Journal of Philosophy 7 (3): 343-374. 2007.Words indicate concepts, which have various adicities. But words do not, in general, inherit the adicities of the indicated concepts. Lots of evidence suggests that when a concept is lexicalized, it is linked to an analytically related monadic concept that can be conjoined with others. For example, the dyadic concept CHASE(_,_) might be linked to CHASE(_), a concept that applies to certain events. Drawing on a wide range of extant work, and familiar facts, I argue that the (open class) lexical i…Read more
-
32.1 patterns of reason and traditional grammarIn Barry C. Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 822. 2006.
-
95Believing in languagePhilosophy 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
New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language |
Cognitive Sciences |
Areas of Interest
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |