•  677
    Paul Grice and the philosophy of language
    Linguistics and Philosophy 15 (5). 1992.
    The work of the late Paul Grice (1913–1988) exerts a powerful influence on the way philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists think about meaning and communication. With respect to a particular sentence φ and an “utterer” U, Grice stressed the philosophical importance of separating (i) what φ means, (ii) what U said on a given occasion by uttering φ, and (iii) what U meant by uttering φ on that occasion. Second, he provided systematic attempts to say precisely what meaning is by providing…Read more
  •  484
    Slingshots and boomerangs
    with Josh Dever
    Mind 106 (421): 143-168. 1997.
    A “slingshot” proof suggested by Kurt Gödel (1944) has been recast by Stephen Neale (1995) as a deductive argument showing that no non-truthfunctional sentence connective can permit the combined use, within its scope, of two truth-functionally valid inference principles involving defi- nite descriptions. According to Neale, this result provides indirect support for Russell’s Theory of Descriptions and has broader philosophical repercussions because descriptions occur in non-truth-functional const…Read more
  •  422
    Descriptions
    MIT Press. 1990.
    When philosophers talk about descriptions, usually they have in mind singular definite descriptions such as ‘the finest Greek poet’ or ‘the positive square root of nine’, phrases formed with the definite article ‘the’. English also contains indefinite descriptions such as ‘a fine Greek poet’ or ‘a square root of nine’, phrases formed with the indefinite article ‘a’ (or ‘an’); and demonstrative descriptions (also known as complex demonstratives) such as ‘this Greek poet’ and ‘that tall woman’, fo…Read more
  •  196
  •  183
    The Place of Language
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94. 19934.
    This paper attempts to raise a question for the everyday view that language is a means of communication, a system of marks or sounds which we use to convey thoughts and describe the world. It first isolates the assumptions behind this everyday view before raising questions about them.
  •  153
    This, That, and the Other
    In Anne Bezuidenhout & Marga Reimer (eds.), Descriptions and Beyond, Oxford University Press. pp. 68-182. 2004.
  •  146
    Term limits revisited
    Philosophical Perspectives 22 (1): 375-442. 2008.
    No Abstract
  •  119
    A Century Later
    Mind 114 (456): 809-871. 2005.
    This is the introductory essay to a collection commemorating the 100th anniversary of the publication in Mind of Bertrand Russell’s paper ‘On Denoting’.
  •  119
    Grain and content
    Philosophical Issues 9 353-358. 1998.
    lt is widely held that entertaining a belief or forming a judgement involves the exercise of conceptual capacities; and to this extent the representational content of a belief or judgement is said to be "con— ceptual". According to Gareth Evans (1980), not all psychological states have conceptual content in this sense. In particular, perceptual states have non—conceptual content; it is not until one forms a judgement on the basis of a perceptual experience that one touches the realm of conceptua…Read more
  •  97
    Descriptive pronouns and donkey anaphora
    Journal of Philosophy 87 (3): 113-150. 1990.
  •  93
    Facing Facts
    Clarendon Press. 2001.
    This book is an original examination of attempts to dislodge a cornerstone of modern philosophy: the idea that our thoughts and utterances are representations ...
  •  93
    Term limits
    Philosophical Perspectives 7 89-123. 1993.
  •  90
    Coloring and composition
    In Kumiko Murasugi & Robert Stainton (eds.), Philosophy and Linguistics, Westview Press. pp. 35--82. 1999.
    The idea that an utterance of a basic (nondeviant) declarative sentence expresses a single true-or-false proposition has dominated philosophical discussions of meaning in this century. Refinements aside, this idea is less of a substantive theses than it is a background assumption against which particular theories of meaning are evaluated. But there are phenomena (noted by Frege, Strawson, and Grice) that threaten at least the completeness of classical theories of meaning, which associate with an…Read more
  •  79
    Events and “logical form”
    Linguistics and Philosophy 11 (3). 1988.
  •  77
    On a Milestone of empiricism
    In A. Orenstein & Petr Kotatko (eds.), Knowledge, Language and Logic: Questions for Quine, Kluwer Academic Print On Demand. pp. 237--346. 2000.
  •  65
    Heavy Hands, Magic, and Scene-Reading Traps
    European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (2): 77-132. 2007.
    This is one of a series of articles in which I examine errors that philosophers of language may be led to make if already prone to exaggerating the rôle compositional semantics can play in explaining how we communicate, whether by expressing propositions with our words or by merely implying them. In the present article, I am concerned less with “pragmatic contributions” to the propositions we express—contributions some philosophers seem rather desperate to deny the existence or ubiquity of—than …Read more
  •  47
    Pragmatism and Binding
    In Zoltan Gendler Szabo (ed.), Semantics Versus Pragmatics, Clarendon Press. pp. 165-285. 2005.
    Names, descriptions, and demonstratives raise well-known logical, ontological, and epistemological problems. Perhaps less well known, amongst philosophers at least, are the ways in which some of these problems not only recur with pronouns but also cross-cut further problems exposed by the study in generative linguistics of morpho-syntactic constraints on interpretation. These problems will be my primary concern here, but I want to address them within a general picture of interpretation that is r…Read more
  •  47
    Meaning, Grammar, and Indeterminacy
    Dialectica 41 (4): 301-319. 1987.
    SummaryIt is a mistake to think that Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation reduces to the claim that théories are under‐determined by evidence. The theory of meaning is subject to an indeterminacy that is qualitatively different from the under‐determination of scientific théories. However, there is no reason to believe that the indeterminacy thesis extends beyond translation and meaning, and hence no construal of the thesis prevents one from being a realist about grammars, construed…Read more
  •  36
    Genre
    BFI Publishing. 1980.
    No Marketing Blurb.
  •  31
    What is logical form?
    In Dag Prawitz & Dag Westerståhl (eds.), Logic and Philosophy of Science in Uppsala, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 583--598. 1994.
  •  20
    Persistence, polarity, and plurality
    In Klaus von Heusinger & Urs Egli (eds.), Reference and Anaphoric Relations, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 147--153. 2000.
  •  17
    Descriptive Pronouns and Donkey Anaphora
    Journal of Philosophy 87 (3): 113-150. 1990.
  •  15
    Papers from the 1993 Joint Session: The Place of Language
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94 (1): 215-228. 1994.
    Michael Morris, Stephen Neale; Papers from the 1993 Joint Session: The Place of Language, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 19.
  •  15
    Gramatická forma, logická forma a neúplné symboly
    Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 11 (3): 294-334. 2005.
  •  14
    The Place of Language
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 67 (1): 153-174. 1993.
    This paper attempts to raise a question for the everyday view that language is a means of communication, a system of marks or sounds which we use to convey thoughts and describe the world. It first isolates the assumptions behind this everyday view before raising questions about them.
  •  13
    Right to life: reply to Simms
    Journal of Medical Ethics 13 (3): 166-167. 1987.
  •  12
    Informed dissent: a further response
    Journal of Medical Ethics 13 (1): 53-54. 1987.