-
18Assertion, Assumption, and DeductionIn Antonio Piccolomini D'Aragona (ed.), Perspectives on Deduction: Contemporary Studies in the Philosophy, History and Formal Theories of Deduction, Springer Verlag. pp. 211-232. 2024.This paper concerns the connection between speech act theory, especially the theory of assertion, and deduction, especially Natural Deduction.From a very abstract point of view, an assertion of a content p can be described as the ascription of the property of being p to the actual index, or point of evaluation. This is the abstract characterization of assertoric force. Let’s assume that the actual index is a possible world, namely the actual world. Thus, the conclusion of a closed argument, as a…Read more
-
6Linguistic Conventions or Open-Ended ReasoningCroatian Journal of Philosophy 23 (69): 261-274. 2023.This short paper has the character of a critical notice of Una Stojnić’s book Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence (Stojnić 2021). It is mainly concerned with Stojnić’s strong claim that linguistic phenomena related to prominence and coherence, in particular the interpretation of pronouns, are governed by linguistic conventions and are not pragmatic in nature. On these matters, my views are opposite to Stojnić’s.
-
Compositionality and contextIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in philosophy: knowledge, meaning, and truth, Oxford University Press. 2005.
-
Book Reviews (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 13 (2): 225-260. 1992.N. Denyer, Language, thought and falsehood in ancient Greek philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. xi + 222 pp. £35.00 Luis Vega, La trama de la demostración.. Madrid: 1990, Alianza Editorial, 413 pp. No price stated Daniel D. Merrill, Augustus De Morgan and the logic of relations. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990. xi + 259 pp. Dfl. 185/$ 114.00/£64.00 Georg Cantor, Briefe. Edited by Herbert Meschkowski and Winfried Nilson. Berlin, etc: Springer‐Verlag, 1991, viii + 535 pp. DM 158. The selecte…Read more
-
16Indeterminacy of TranslationIn Ernie Lepore & Gilbert Harman (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.Peter Hylton: Quine's Naturalism Revisited: Naturalism is Quine's overarching view. In thinking about the world, we must begin where we are; for Quine, that means within a system of knowledge which, as developed and improved, becomes natural science. There is no distinctively philosophical standpoint outside this system. So the philosopher draws on the results of science, which show, for example, that our knowledge of the world comes from stimulation of our sensory nerves. But the philosopher's …Read more
-
120Monism, Pluralism and Relativism: New Essays on the Status of LogicErkenntnis 79 (S2): 201-210. 2014.
-
Intersubjective externalismIn Tomáš Marvan (ed.), What determines content?: the internalism/externalism dispute, Cambridge Scholars Press. 2006.
-
Is compositionality compatible with holism?In Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Arguing about language, Routledge. 2010.
-
Indeterminacy of TranslationIn Gilbert Harman & Ernest LePore (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.
-
CompositionalityIn Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: foundations, history and methods, De Gruyter. 2019.
-
When does communication succeed? The case of general termsIn Teresa Marques & Åsa Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability, Oxford University Press. 2020.
-
The force of assumptions and self-attributionsIn Justin Vlasits & Katja Maria Vogt (eds.), Epistemology after Sextus Empiricus, Oxford University Press. 2020.
-
31Belief, Introspection, and Constituted Kinds. Selected Papers from the Fifth Philosophy of Language and Mind ConferenceReview of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (1): 1-5. 2022.
-
98AssertionStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021.Asserting is the act of claiming that something is the case—for instance, that oranges are citruses, or that there is a traffic congestion on Brooklyn Bridge (at some time). We make assertions to share information, coordinate our actions, defend arguments, and communicate our beliefs and desires. Because of its central role in communication, assertion has been investigated in several disciplines. Linguists, philosophers of language, and logicians rely heavily on the notion of assertion in theori…Read more
-
Meaning HolismIn Ernest Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. 2006.
-
56Compositionality, Computability, and ComplexityReview of Symbolic Logic 14 (3): 551-591. 2021.This paper starts from the observation that the standard arguments for compositionality are really arguments for the computability of semantics. Since computability does not entail compositionality, the question of what justifies compositionality recurs. The paper then elaborates on the idea of recursive semantics as corresponding to computable semantics. It is then shown by means of time complexity theory and with the use of term rewriting as systems of semantic computation, that syntactically …Read more
-
31Radical Interpretation and the Principle of CharityIn Ernie Lepore & Kurt Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson, Blackwell. pp. 225-246. 2013.Handbook article about Radical interpretation and the principle of charity in Donald Davidson's philosophy.
-
14CompositionalityIn Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, De Gruyter. pp. 96-123. 2011.This article is concerned with the principle of compositionality, i.e. the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its parts and its mode of composition. After a brief historical background, a formal algebraic framework for syntax and semantics is presented. In this framework, both syntactic operations and semantic functions are partial. Using 20 the framework, the basic idea of compositionality is given a precise statement, and several variants, both …Read more
-
8Compositionality, Complexity, and EvolutionIn Francisco Lacerda (ed.), Proceedings: Symposium on Language Acquisition and Language Evolution, . pp. 51-62. 2013.Is there a reason to believe that the evolution of language leads to compositional semantics? A proposal from Henry Brighton is presented and criticized. As an alternative, the role of compositionality for the complexity of semantic interpretation is emphasized.
-
98Compositionality in Davidson’s Early WorkJournal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 7 (2): 76-89. 2019.Davidson’s 1965 paper, “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages”, has invariably been interpreted, by others and by myself, as arguing that natural languages must have a compositional semantics, or at least a systematic semantics, that can be finitely specified. However, in his reply to me in the Żegleń volume, Davidson denies that compositionality is in any need of an argument. How does this add up? In this paper I consider Davidson’s first three meaning theoretic papers from this perspecti…Read more
-
23Radical Interpretation and Pragmatic EnrichmentArgumenta 3 (1): 87-107. 2017.I consider a problem from pragmatics for the radical interpretation project, relying on the principle of charity. If a speaker X in a context c manifests the attitude of holding a sentence s true, this might be because of believing, not the content of s in c, but what results from a pragmatic enrichment of that content. In this case, the connection between the holding-true attitude and the meaning of s might be too loose for charity to confirm the correct interpretation hypothesis. To solve this…Read more
-
29De se communication: centered or uncentered?In Manuel García-Carpintero & Stephan Torre (eds.), About Oneself: De Se Thought and Communication, Oxford University Press. 2016.It was pointed out, first by Robert Stalnaker, then also by Andy Egan, that David Lewis’s model of centered-worlds contents has undesired consequences for communication of de se contents. The recent years have seen a number of attempts to save the model by amending it to handle de se communication. Proposals include the appeal to sequences of individuals in the centers, to ersatz classical propositions, and to operations of “re-centering”. The authors are Dilip Ninan and Stephan Torre, Sarah Mos…Read more
-
31Constructing the World and Locating OneselfReview of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (4): 827-852. 2017.In Our Knowledge of the Internal World, Robert Stalnaker describes two opposed perspectives on the relation between the internal and the external. According to one, the internal world is taken as given and the external world as problematic, and according to the other, the external world is taken as given and the internal world as problematic. Analytic philosophy moved from the former to the latter, from problems of world-construction to problems of self-locating beliefs. I argue in this paper th…Read more
-
163Sensation TermsDialectica 54 (3): 177-199. 2000.Are sensation ascriptions descriptive, even in the first person present tense? Do sensation terms refer to, denote, sensations, so that truth and falsity of sensation ascriptions depend on the properties of the denoted sensations? That is, do sensation terms have a denotational semantics? As I understand it, this is denied by Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein rejects the idea of a denotational semantics for public language sensation terms, such as‘pain’. He also rejects the idea that speakers can recog…Read more
-
105Reply to ForbesAnalysis 72 (2): 298-303. 2012.In earlier work (Glüer, K. and P. Pagin. 2006. Proper names and relational modality. Linguistics & Philosophy 29: 507–35; Glüer, K. and P. Pagin. 2008. Relational modality. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 17: 307–22), we developed a semantics for (metaphysical) modal operators that accommodates Kripkean intuitions about proper names in modal contexts even if names are not rigid designators. Graeme Forbes (2011. The problem of factives for sense theories. Analysis 71: 654–62.) criticiz…Read more
-
208Is compositionality compatible with holism?Mind and Language 12 (1): 11-33. 1997.Peter Pagin Is the principle of semantic compositionality compatible with the principle of semantic holism? The question is of interest, since both principles have a lot that speaks for them, and since they do seem to be in conflict. The view that natural languages have compositional structure is almost unavoidable, since linguistic communication by means of new combinations of words would be virtually incomprehensible otherwise. And holism too seems generally plausible, since the meaning of an …Read more
-
In Michael Dummett’s manifestability challenge to truth conditional semantics, it is argued that the meaning of sentence cannot be its truth conditions, for then a speaker’s knowledge of the meaning would not in all cases be manifestable. In those cases, the speaker would not know how to find out whether the truth conditions are satisfied or not. By contrast, knowledge of what counts as a proof of a sentence would pass the manifestability test, since a speaker is supposed always to be capable of d…Read more
-
63Editorial: Compositionality: Current issues (review)Journal of Logic, Language and Information 10 (1): 1-5. 2001.
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
PhilPapers Editorships
Compositionality |