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138NominalismIn Michael J. Loux & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), The Oxford handbook of metaphysics, Oxford University Press. 2003.…entities? 2. How to be a nominalist 2.1. “Speak with the vulgar …” 2.2. “…think with the learned” 3. Arguments for nominalism 3.1. Intelligibility, physicalism, and economy 3.2. Causal..
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24Internalist Semantics: Comments on Paul Pietroski, Conjoining MeaningsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (3): 745-751. 2023.
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Semantic ExplanationsIn Ernest Lepore & David Sosa (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language Volume 1., Oxford University Press. pp. 240-275. 2019.
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21Logical Form through AbstractionDisputatio 12 (58): 251-263. 2020.In a recent book, Logical Form: between Logic and Natural Language, Andrea Iacona argues that semantic form and logical form are distinct. The semantic form of a sentence is something that (together with the meanings of its parts) determines what it means; the logical from of a sentence is something that (all by itself) determines whether it is a logical truth. Semantic form does not depend on context but logical form does: for example, whether ‘This is this’ is a logical truth depends on whethe…Read more
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107The Goal of ConversationAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 94 (1): 57-86. 2020.Dickie (2020) presents an argument against the traditional, broadly Gricean view of conversation. She argues that speakers must sometimes be more specific than required for sharing knowledge on a topic of common concern. Her proposed solution is to claim that the goal of conversation is not just sharing knowledge but also sharing cognitive focus. In response, I argue that her proposal faces both conceptual and empirical difficulties, and that the traditional view can handle the problem of non-sp…Read more
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166Bare QuantifiersPhilosophical Review 120 (2): 247-283. 2011.We design new languages, by and large, in order to bypass complexities and limitations within the languages we already have. But when we are concerned with language itself we should guard against projecting the simple and powerful syntax and semantics we have concocted back into the sentences we encounter. For some of the features of English, French, or Ancient Greek we routinely abstract away from in the process of formalization might be linguistic universals – the very features that set human …Read more
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558Epistemic comparativism: a contextualist semantics for knowledge ascriptionsPhilosophical Studies 168 (2): 491-543. 2014.Knowledge ascriptions seem context sensitive. Yet it is widely thought that epistemic contextualism does not have a plausible semantic implementation. We aim to overcome this concern by articulating and defending an explicit contextualist semantics for ‘know,’ which integrates a fairly orthodox contextualist conception of knowledge as the elimination of the relevant alternatives, with a fairly orthodox “Amherst” semantics for A-quantification over a contextually variable domain of situations. Wh…Read more
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37Christopher Gauker. Universal instantiation: a study of the role of context in logic. Erkenntnis, vol. 46 , pp. 185–214 (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 63 (4): 1610-1611. 1998.
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19Philosophy of LanguageCambridge University Press. 2018.This unique textbook introduces linguists to key issues in the philosophy of language. Accessible to students who have taken only a single course in linguistics, yet sophisticated enough to be used at the graduate level, the book provides an overview of the central issues in philosophy of language, a key topic in educating the next generation of researchers in semantics and pragmatics. Thoroughly grounded in contemporary linguistic theory, the book focus on the core foundational and philosophica…Read more
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116What is a quantifier?Analysis 78 (3): 463-472. 2018.I argue that standard definitions of quantifiers are inadequate and offer a new one. The new definition categorizes expressions as quantifiers in accordance with our pre-theoretical judgments, it is broadly applicable to both formal and natural languages, and it eschews unnecessary theoretical commitments about the details of the syntax and semantics of these expressions.
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4Eugen Fischer, Linguistic Creativity: Exercises in 'Philosophical Therapy' (review)Philosophy in Review 22 (5): 320-323. 2002.
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Andrew Brook and Robert Stainton, Knowledge and Mind: A Philosophical Introduction (review)Philosophy in Review 21 (4): 239-242. 2001.
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51In Defense of Indirect CommunicationInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (2): 163-174. 2016.In Imagination and Convention, Ernest Lepore and Matthew Stone claim that there are no conversational implicatures. They argue that the scope of the conventional is wider and the scope of communication narrower than followers of Grice tend to assume, and so, there is simply no room for the sort of indirect communication based on reasoning about intentions conversational implicatures are supposed to exemplify. This way they seek to rehabilitate the old Lockean model of linguistic communication. I…Read more
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44The Loss of UniquenessMind 114 (456): 1185-1222. 2005.Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of ‘On Denoting’ are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are sco…Read more
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144Sententialism and Berkeley's master argumentPhilosophical Quarterly 55 (220). 2005.Sententialism is the view that intensional positions in natural languages occur within clausal complements only. According to proponents of this view, intensional transitive verbs such as 'want', 'seek' or 'resemble' are actually propositional attitude verbs in disguise. I argue that 'conceive' cannot fit this mould: conceiving-of is not reducible to conceiving-that. I offer a new diagnosis of where Berkeley's 'master argument' goes astray, analysing what is odd about saying that Hylas conceives…Read more
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56Definite descriptions without uniqueness: A reply to Abbott (review)Philosophical Studies 114 (3). 2003.
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83The loss of uniquenessMind 114 (456). 2005.Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of ‘On Denoting’ are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are sco…Read more
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118Structure and conventions (review)Philosophical Studies 137 (3). 2008.Wayne Davis’s Meaning, Expression and Thought argues that linguistic meaning is conventional use to express ideas. An obvious problem with this proposal is that complex expressions that have never been used are nonetheless meaningful. In response to this concern, Davis associates conventions of use not only with linguistic expressions but also with the modes in which such expressions can combine into larger expressions. I argue that such constructive conventions are in conflict with the principl…Read more
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72Prospective interpretationPhilosophical Studies 174 (6): 1605-1616. 2017.Semantic and pragmatic theories tend to deal with context-change in two radically opposing ways. Some view it as theoretically irrelevant, interpreting each sentence relative to the context as it happens to be at the moment of its utterance. Others view it as theoretically fundamental, proposing to view context-change as the very subject-matter of the theory of interpretation. Robert Stalnaker’s book Context steers a middle course between the extremes–to keep the semantics mostly static while le…Read more
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31Knowledge of Meaning (review)Philosophical Review 106 (1): 122-124. 1997.To the best of my knowledge, no one in recent decades has written a book of this magnitude about the semantics of natural language. Certainly, nothing available today matches this volume in depth, precision, and coherence. The authors present classical and recent results of linguistic semantics within the framework of interpretative T-theories and defend the philosophical foundations of their approach by showing how it fits into the larger enterprise of cognitive linguistics. The book also inclu…Read more
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74I present two challenges to fictionalism. According to the first, the reasons fictionalists offer for acceptance without belief often warrant a somewhat different attitude. According to the second, the possibility of fictionalist acceptnace rests on the poorly supported hypothesis that there is a clear distinction between philsophical and ordinary contexts. This is forthcoming in Noûs
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70Against logical formIn Gerhard Preyer (ed.), Donald Davidson on truth, meaning, and the mental, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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