•  2876
    The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics
    Oxford University Press. 2011.
    Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...
  •  1482
    Peter Ludlow shows how word meanings are much more dynamic than we might have supposed, and explores how they are modulated even during everyday conversation. The resulting view is radical, and has far-reaching consequences for our political and legal discourse, and for enduring puzzles in the foundations of semantics, epistemology, and logic.
  •  915
    Cheap contextualism
    Philosophical Issues 18 (1): 104-129. 2008.
    No Abstract
  •  731
    The arguments presented in this comprehensive collection have important implications for the philosophy of mind and the study of consciousness.
  •  699
    Language, Form, and Logic: In Pursuit of Natural Logic's Holy Grail
    with Saso Živanović
    Oxford University Press. 2022.
    This book explores the idea that all of logic can be reduced to two very simple rules that are sensitive to logical polarity. The authors show that this idea has profound consequences for our understanding of the nature of human inferential capacities, and for some of the key issues in contemporary linguistics.
  •  372
    Implicit comparison classes
    Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (4). 1989.
  •  277
    Interpreted Logical Forms
    with Richard K. Larson
    Synthese 95 (3). 1993.
  •  196
  •  171
    The Myth of Human Language
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 6 (3): 385-400. 2006.
    The author argues that the standard view about language, seen as fairly stable abstract system of communication, is a myth. Standard view is badly mistaken and the alternative picture is offered in which there is a core part of our linguistic competence that is fixed by biology and this provides a basic skeleton which is fleshed out in different ways on a conversion-by-conversation basis. Why certain people communicate with each other? The answer to this question is not because they speak the sa…Read more
  •  162
  •  141
    Cognitive Dynamics: Red Queen Semantics Versus the Story of O
    Belgrade Philosophical Annual 35 (2): 53-67. 2022.
    It appears that indexicals must have fine-grained senses for us to explain things involving human action and emotions, and we typically identify these different senses with different modes of expression. On the other hand, we also express the very same thought in very different ways. The first problem is the problem of cognitive significance. The second problem is what Branquinho (1999) has called the problem of cognitive dynamics. The question is how we can solve both of those problems at the s…Read more
  •  138
    Ignorance of Language
    Philosophical Review 118 (3): 393-402. 2009.
  •  128
    Descriptions
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
  •  85
    Tense, the Dynamic Lexicon, and the Flow of Time
    Topoi 34 (1): 137-142. 2015.
    One of the most gripping intuitions that people have about time is that it, in some sense “flows.” This sense of flow has been articulated in a number of ways, ranging from us moving into the future or the future rushing towards us, and there has been no shortage of metaphors and descriptions to characterize this sense of passage. Despite the many forms of the metaphor and its widespread occurrence, it has been argued that there is a deep conceptual problem in any assumption that time “passes” o…Read more
  •  82
    The Social Furniture of Virtual Worlds
    Disputatio 11 (55): 345-369. 2019.
    David Chalmers argues that virtual objects exist in the form of data structures that have causal powers. I argue that there is a large class of virtual objects that are social objects and that do not depend upon data structures for their existence. I also argue that data structures are themselves fundamentally social objects. Thus, virtual objects are fundamentally social objects.
  •  75
    Readings in the Philosophy of Language (edited book)
    MIT Press. 1997.
    A central theme of this collection is that the philosophy of language, at least a core portion of it, has matured to the point where it is now being spun off ...
  •  59
    Having Linguistic Rules and Knowing Linguistic Facts
    The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 5 8
    'Knowledge' doesn't correctly describe our relation to linguistic rules. It is too thick a notion. On the other hand, 'cognize', without further elaboration, is too thin a notion, which is to say that it is too thin to play a role in a competence theory. One advantage of the term 'knowledge'-and presumably Chomsky's original motivation for using it-is that knowledge would play the right kind of role in a competence theory: Our competence would consist in a body of knowledge which we have and whi…Read more
  •  54
    Incorporation and Alleged Epistemic Modals
    Topoi 36 (1): 155-159. 2017.
    Part of what makes working with modals such a tricky business is that apparent modal forms are deployed in all sorts of ways in language. In this paper I explore an interesting example of an apparent modal—the Blofeld case—which was introduced by Gilles and von Fintel as part of their argument against context of assessment accounts of epistemic modals. I argue that the example is subtle, and that the apparent modal may not be an epistemic modal at all—it could be a scalar modifier that merges or…Read more
  •  49
    _The Philosophy of Mind_ remains the only sourcebook of primary readings offering in-depth coverage of both historical works and contemporary controversies in philosophy of mind. This second edition provides expanded treatment of classical as well as current topics, with many additional readings and a new section on mental content. The writers included range from Aristotle, Descartes, and William James to such leading contemporary thinkers as Noam Chomsky, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and Jaegw…Read more
  •  41
    Referential Semantics for I‐Languages?
    In Louise M. Antony & Norbert Hornstein (eds.), Chomsky and His Critics, Blackwell. 2003.
    This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Some Important Distinctions Are Referential Semantics for I‐languages Possible? Language/World Isomorphism Chomsky's Arguments against LWI Aspects of the World Conclusion.