•  139
    What Frege’s Theory of Identity is Not
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (1): 41-48. 2012.
    The analysis of identity as coreference is strongly associated with Frege ; it is the view in Begriffsschrift, and, some have argued, henceforth throughout his work. This thesis is incorrect: Frege never held that identity is coreference. The case is made not by interpretation of “proof-quotes”, but rather by exploring how Frege actually deploys the concept. Two cases are considered. The first, from Grundgesetze, are the definitions of the core concepts, zero and truth; the second, from Begriffs…Read more
  •  37
    The Inconsistency of the Identity Thesis
    ProtoSociology 31 113-120. 2014.
    In theorizing about racial pejoratives, an initially attractive view is that pejoratives have the same reference as their “neutral counterparts”. Call this the identity thesis. According to this thesis, the terms “kike” and “Jew”, for instance, pick out the same set of people. To be a Jew just is to be a kike, and so to make claims about Jews just is to make claims about kikes. In this way, the two words are synonymous, and so make the same contribution to the truth-conditions of sentences conta…Read more
  •  175
    Moral and Semantic Innocence
    Analytic Philosophy 54 (3): 293-313. 2013.
  •  428
    The Birth of Semantics
    with Richard Kimberly Heck
    Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 8 (6): 1-31. 2020.
    We attempt here to trace the evolution of Frege’s thought about truth. What most frames the way we approach the problem is a recognition that hardly any of Frege’s most familiar claims about truth appear in his earliest work. We argue that Frege’s mature views about truth emerge from a fundamental re-thinking of the nature of logic instigated, in large part, by a sustained engagement with the work of George Boole and his followers, after the publication of Begriffsschrift and the appearance of c…Read more
  •  31
    Logic as Science
    In Annalisa Coliva, Paolo Leonardi & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Eva Picardi on Language, Analysis and History, Palgrave. pp. 113-160. 2018.
  • Logical Form as a Level of Linguistic Representation
    Indiana University Linguistics Club. 1983.
  •  976
    Frege's Other Program
    Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 46 (1): 1-17. 2005.
    Frege's logicist program requires that arithmetic be reduced to logic. Such a program has recently been revamped by the "neologicist" approach of Hale and Wright. Less attention has been given to Frege's extensionalist program, according to which arithmetic is to be reconstructed in terms of a theory of extensions of concepts. This paper deals just with such a theory. We present a system of second-order logic augmented with a predicate representing the fact that an object x is the extension of a…Read more
  •  28
    Names and Expressions
    Journal of Philosophy 95 (8): 377. 1998.
  •  232
    Pejoratives as Fiction
    In David Sosa (ed.), Bad Words: Philosophical Perspectives on Slurs, Oxford University Press. 2018.
    Fictional terms are terms that have null extensions, and in this regard pejorative terms are a species of fictional terms: although there are Jews, there are no kikes. That pejoratives are fictions is the central consequence of the Moral and Semantic Innocence (MSI) view of Hom et al. (2013). There it is shown that for pejoratives, null extensionality is the semantic realization of the moral fact that no one ought to be the target of negative moral evaluation solely in virtue of their group memb…Read more
  •  1
    The papers in this volume are contributions to a comparative semantics, understood in the context of the theory of Logical Form as a branch of comparative syntax. In contrastively exploring a wide range of languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Navajo, Spanish and Toba Batak, the authors provide new insights into our understanding of the nature of quantificational, WH and anaphoric phenomena, and into the form of constraints, including subjacency and ECP, on…Read more
  •  1222
    Frege's new science
    Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 41 (3): 242-270. 2000.
    In this paper, we explore Fregean metatheory, what Frege called the New Science. The New Science arises in the context of Frege’s debate with Hilbert over independence proofs in geometry and we begin by considering their dispute. We propose that Frege’s critique rests on his view that language is a set of propositions, each immutably equipped with a truth value (as determined by the thought it expresses), so to Frege it was inconceivable that axioms could even be considered to be other than true…Read more
  •  77
    The LOGICAL FORM of a sentence (or utterance) is a formal representation of its logical structure; that is, of the structure which is relevant to specifying its logical role and properties. There are a number of (interrelated) reasons for giving a rendering of a sentence's logical form. Among them is to obtain proper inferences (which otherwise would not follow; cf. Russell's theory of descriptions), to give the proper form for the determination of truth-conditions (e.g. Tarski's method of truth…Read more
  •  915
    1. Nathan Salmon paper is entitled with a question: are general terms rigid? He asks this question in way of engaging the issue of the extension of the notion of rigidity beyond the domain of singular terms. While singular terms has been the province of most of the discussion of this rigidity since Naming and Necessity, it is well known that Kripke saw the notion extending to at least certain general terms such as terms for natural kinds. Scott Soames has recently weighed in on this issue in the…Read more
  •  4680
    Frege's contribution to philosophy of language
    In Barry C. Smith & Ernest Lepore (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 3-39. 2006.
    An investigation of Frege’s various contributions to the study of language, focusing on three of his most famous doctrines: that concepts are unsaturated, that sentences refer to truth-values, and that sense must be distinguished from reference
  •  67
    Interpreting logical form
    Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (4). 1989.
  •  3
    Questions, Quantifiers and Crossing
    with Higginbotham and James
    Linguistic Review 1 41--80. 1981.
  •  602
    Interpreted logical forms: a critique
    Rivista Di Linguistica 8 (2): 349-373. 1996.
    Interpreted Logical Forms are objects composed of a syntactic structure annotated with the semantic values of each node of the structure. We criticize the view that ILFs are the objects of propositional attitude verbs such as believe, as this is developed by Larson and Ludlow. Our critique arises from a tension in the way that sen-
  •  92
    Chapter. 1. Logical. Form. as. a. Level. of. Linguistic. Representation. What is the relation of a sentence's syntactic form to its logical form? This issue has been of central concern in modern inquiry into the semantic properties of natural ...
  •  1132
    Frege on indexicals
    Philosophical Review 115 (4): 487-516. 2006.
    It is a characteristically Fregean thesis that the sense expressed by an expression is the linguistic meaning of that expression. Sense can play this role for Frege since it meets fundamental desiderata for meaning, that it be universal and invariantly expressed and objectively the same for everyone who knows the language. It has been argued,1 however, that, as a general thesis about natural languages, the identi cation of sense and meaning cannot be sustained since it is in con ict with another…Read more
  •  1148
    The Composition of Thoughts
    Noûs 45 (1): 126-166. 2010.
    Are Fregean thoughts compositionally complex and composed of senses? We argue that, in Begriffsschrift, Frege took 'conceptual contents' to be unstructured, but that he quickly moved away from this position, holding just two years later that conceptual contents divide of themselves into 'function' and 'argument'. This second position is shown to be unstable, however, by Frege's famous substitution puzzle. For Frege, the crucial question the puzzle raises is why "The Morning Star is a planet" and…Read more
  •  202
    The Invariance of Sense
    Journal of Philosophy 103 (3): 111-144. 2006.
    How many senses can a given name have, with its reference held fixed? One, more than one? One answer that most would agree to is that sense is unique for each utterance of a name, that is, that a name can have no more than one sense on any given occasion. But is sense unique in any stronger sense than this? The answer that is typically attributed to Frege is that there is not, that, as Tyler Burge puts it, 1 Frege “treats proper names as having different senses while applying to the same person.…Read more
  •  629
    Syntax, in its most general sense, is the study of the structure of sentences in natural language. In this course, we will approach syntax from the perspective of generative transformational grammar, as pioneered through the work of Noam Chomsky, and developed over the past four decades. Our goals are three-fold. First, to understand the nature of language as viewed from the structural perspective, and to understand the sort of insight about language this perspective affords. Second, to understa…Read more
  •  623
    “Choose your words wisely,” my mother used to say, “because you never know who’s listening.” Oddly, this is something about which my dear mother and Mark Richard apparently would agree. They both seem to think that the words you use say something about who you are, and if you use bad words, then you are a bad person. About this, I have no doubt that they are right - those who use slurs, at least in the context of many assertive utterances, are surely racists, anti-Semites or whatever. But MR in …Read more
  •  34
    Identity Statements
    In Gerhard Preyer Georg Peter (ed.), Logical Form and Language, Clarendon Press. pp. 169--203. 2002.
  •  476
    The topic of this seminar will be the notion of language as it is employed in the philosophy of language. The seminar will be divided into two parts, of somewhat unequal length. The first part will be devoted to the change in the conception of language that marked the transition from structural linguistics to generative linguistics (the so-called "Chomskian revolution"). We will approach this not only as a chapter in the philosophy of language, but also as an important chapter in the philosophy …Read more
  •  539
    The Function is Unsaturated
    In Michael Beaney (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2013.
    An investigation of what Frege means by his doctrine that functions (and so concepts) are 'unsaturated'. We argue that this doctrine is far less peculiar than it is usually taken to be. What makes it hard to understand, oddly enough, is the fact that it is so deeply embedded in our contemporary understanding of logic and language. To see this, we look at how it emerges out of Frege's confrontation with the Booleans and how it expresses a fundamental difference between Frege's approach to logic a…Read more
  • Anaphora and Identity
    In Shalom Lappin (ed.), The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, Blackwell. pp. 117--144. 1996.