•  3
    Linguistic Conventions or Open-Ended Reasoning
    Croatian 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 context
    In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in philosophy: knowledge, meaning, and truth, Oxford University Press. 2005.
  • Book Reviews (review)
    with M. Scanlan, M. De Mora Charles, I. Grattan-Guinness, Ole Immanuel Franksen, Jan Woleński, John Bigelow, Albert C. Lewis, Francisco A. Rodriguez-Consuegra, Desmond Paul Henry, L. Albertazzi, E. J. Lowe, G. H. Helman, Gerardo Tango, Robert W. Bruch, P. Thom, John Divers, and Roberto Poli
    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
  •  6
    Indeterminacy of Translation
    In Gilbert Harman & Ernie Lepore (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley. 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
  •  97
  • Intersubjective externalism
    In 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 Translation
    In Gilbert Harman & Ernest Lepore (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.
  • Compositionality
    with Dag Westersã̃hl
    In Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: foundations, history and methods, De Gruyter. 2019.
  • The force of assumptions and self-attributions
    In Justin Vlasits & Katja Maria Vogt (eds.), Epistemology after Sextus Empiricus, Oxford University Press. 2020.
  •  87
    Assertion
    Stanford 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 Holism
    In Ernest Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. 2006.
  •  48
    Compositionality, Computability, and Complexity
    Review 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
  •  28
    Radical Interpretation and the Principle of Charity
    In Ernie Lepore & Kirk Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 225-246. 2013.
    Handbook article about Radical interpretation and the principle of charity in Donald Davidson's philosophy.
  •  12
    Compositionality
    In 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
  •  5
    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.
  •  57
    Propositional content by Peter Hanks (review) (review)
    Language 95 (2): 377-380. 2019.
  •  69
    Compositionality in Davidson’s Early Work
    Journal 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
  •  18
    Radical Interpretation and Pragmatic Enrichment
    Argumenta 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
  •  25
    De 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
  •  24
    Constructing the World and Locating Oneself
    Review 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
  •  157
    Sensation Terms
    Dialectica 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
  •  30
    By means of ‘means that’ and propositional quantification, we can define a truth predicate. This also allows the construction of liar sentences, either by self-reference or by means of quantification. In order to avoid inconsistency, restrictions on expressive power must be imposed, and the question is how far such restrictions will limit our ability to say of what is intuitively described as ‘‘meaningful’’ that it is precisely meaningful.
  •  72
    This paper develops an idea of saving ordinary uses of vague predicates from the Sorites by means of domain restriction. A tolerance level for a predicate, along a dimension, is a difference with respect to which the predicate is semantically insensitive. A central gap for the predicate+dimension in a domain is a segment of an associated scale, larger than this difference, where no object in the domain has a measure, and such that the extension of the predicate has measures on one side of the ga…Read more
  •  17
    Interpreting Davidson (edited book)
    with Petr Kot̓átko and Gabriel Segal
    Center for the Study of Language and Inf. 2001.
    Donald Davidson is, arguably, the most important philosopher of mind and language in recent decades. His articulation of the position he called "anomalous monism" and his ideas for unifying the general theory of linguistic meaning with semantics for natural language both set new agendas in the field. _Interpreting Davidson_ collects original essays on his work by some of his leading contemporaries, with Davidson himself contributing a reply to each and an original paper of his own
  •  95
    Tolerance and higher-order vagueness
    Synthese 194 (10): 3727-3760. 2017.
    The idea of higher-order vagueness is usually associated with conceptions of vagueness that focus on the existence of borderline cases. What sense can be made of it within a conception of vagueness that focuses on tolerance instead? A proposal is offered here. It involves understanding ‘definitely’ not as a sentence operator but as a predicate modifier, and more precisely as an intensifier, that is, an operator that shifts the predicate extension along a scale. This idea is combined with the aut…Read more
  •  101
    Information and Assertoric Force
    In Jessica Brown & Herman Cappelen (eds.), Assertion: New Philosophical Essays, Oxford University Press. 2011.