•  226
    In the opening to his late essay, Der Gedanke, Frege asserts without qualification that the word "true" points the way for logic. But in a short piece from his Nachlass entitled "My Basic Logical Insights", Frege writes that the word true makes an unsuccessful attempt to point to the essence of logic, asserting instead that "what really pertains to logic lies not in the word "true" but in the assertoric force with which the sentence is uttered". Properly understanding what Frege takes to be at i…Read more
  •  182
    On Ascribing Beliefs
    Journal of Philosophy 95 (7): 323-353. 1998.
  •  80
    Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects (review)
    Philosophical Review 102 (4): 608-611. 1993.
  •  69
    Referring to Oneself
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 15 (4). 1985.
    In her influential paper, ‘The First Person,’ Elizabeth Anscombe brings together a number of considerations which, she believes, lead to the startling conclusion that the first person pronoun is not a referring expression — that ‘I’ is never used to refer. This is startling, because if we consider even superficially the logical properties of first person statements, nothing could, prima facie, seem more obvious than that in any such statement, the first person pronoun functions logically as a si…Read more
  •  52
    Context and Content (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 100 (2): 98-108. 2003.
  •  45
    On Belief Content and That-Clauses
    Mind and Language 10 (3): 274-298. 1995.
    This paper is about the relations between the contents of our beliefs and the contents of the sentences used in the that‐clauses of our belief ascriptions. Loar has argued that any inference from sameness or difference of correct belief ascription to sameness or difference of belief content is illegitimate. In contrast, I defend a requirement (the Logic Requirement) that the logical properties of the sentence embedded in a belief ascription should, on that occasion of use, match the logical prop…Read more
  •  33
    Thought and Reference by Kent Bach (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 87 (1): 38-45. 1990.
  •  3
    On sense and reference. A critical reception
    In Michael Potter Tom Ricketts (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Frege, Cambridge University Press. pp. 293-341. 2010.
  • Studies Toward a Theory of Indexical Reference
    Dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University. 1983.
    The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the deep and inherent inadequacy of any descriptionist or traditionally Fregean approaches to the semantics of indexical expressions. In the first study I argue that an illuminating truth-theory, capable of serving in a theory of meaning, must represent the semantic value of indexical sentences as relative to the satisfaction of explicitly pragmatic conditions. Introducing a notion of speaker's reference, I show that the semantic reference or denotation o…Read more