Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
PhD, 1995
New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics
Philosophy of Language
  •  713
    On Quantifier Domain Restriction
    Mind and Language 15 (2-3): 219--61. 2000.
    In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the space of possible analyses of the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction, together with a set of considerations which militate against all but our own proposal. Among the many accounts we consider and reject are the ‘explicit’ approach to quantifier domain restric‐tion discussed, for example, by Stephen Neale, and the pragmatic approach to quantifier domain restriction proposed by Kent Bach. Our hope is that the exhaustive discussion o…Read more
  •  544
    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
  •  482
    Nominalism
    In 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..
  •  258
    Modals with a Taste of the Deontic
    with Joshua Knobe
    Semantics and Pragmatics 6 (1): 1-42. 2013.
    The aim of this paper is to present an explanation for the impact of normative considerations on people’s assessment of certain seemingly purely descriptive matters. The explanation is based on two main claims. First, a large category of expressions are tacitly modal: they are contextually equivalent to modal proxies. Second, the interpretation of predominantly circumstantial or teleological modals is subject to certain constraints which make certain possibilities salient at the expense of other…Read more
  •  242
    Believing in things
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (3). 2003.
    I argue against the standard view that ontological debates can be fully described as disagreements about what we should believe to exist. The central thesis of the paper is that believing in Fs in the ontologically relevant sense requires more than merely believing that Fs exist. Believing in Fs is not even a propositional attitude; it is rather an attitude one bears to the term expressed by 'Fs'. The representational correctness of such a belief requires not only that there be Fs, but also that…Read more
  •  231
    The determination of content
    Philosophical Studies 148 (2). 2010.
    I identify a notion of compositionality at the intersection of the different notions philosophers, linguists, and psychologists are concerned with. The notion is compositionality of expression content: the idea that the content of a complex expression in a context of its utterance is determined by its syntactic structure and the contents of its constituents in the contexts of their respective utterances. Traditional arguments from productivity and systematicity cannot establish that the contents…Read more
  •  205
    Semantics vs. pragmatics (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2005.
    Leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics present brand-new papers on a major topic at the intersection of the two fields, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Anyone engaged with this issue in either discipline will find much to reward their attention here. Contributors: Kent Bach, Herman Cappelen, Michael Glanzberg, Jeffrey C. King, Ernie Lepore, Stephen Neale, F. Recanati, Nathan Salmon, Mandy Simons, Scott Soames, Robert J. Stainton, Jason Stanle…Read more
  •  192
    The Compositionality Papers
    Mind 113 (450): 340-344. 2004.
  •  155
    Bare Quantifiers
    Philosophical 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
  •  141
    Descriptions and uniqueness
    Philosophical Studies 101 (1): 29-57. 2000.
  •  130
    Sententialism and Berkeley's master argument
    Philosophical 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
  •  114
    Compositionality
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
  •  113
    Structure 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
  •  108
    Compositionality as supervenience
    Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (5): 475-505. 2000.
  •  108
    What 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.
  •  107
    When we utter sentences containing quantifiers, typically we are not to be taken to speak about absolutely everything there is. Suppose Mary has invited her friend John to a party to which she is going. If, upon entering the party, Mary turns to Jack and utters (1), it would be rather odd of Jack to object by pointing out that John in fact knows several people who are not present.
  •  102
    The Goal of Conversation
    Aristotelian 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
  •  101
    On Qualification
    Philosophical Perspectives 17 (1): 385-414. 2003.
  •  99
    Expressions and their representations
    Philosophical Quarterly 49 (195). 1999.
    It is plausible to think that our knowledge of linguistic types can bejustified by what we know about the tokens of these types. But one then hasto explain what it is about the relation a type bears to its tokens that makespossible the move from knowledge of the concrete to knowledge of theabstract. I argue that the standard solution to this difficulty, that the relevant relation is instantiation and that the transition is inductive generalization, is inadequate. I propose an alternative, accord…Read more
  •  97
    Reply to Bach and Neale
    with Jason Stanley
    Mind and Language 15 (2-3): 295-298. 2000.
  •  92
    Sensitivity Training
    Mind and Language 21 (1): 31-38. 2006.
  •  92
    Major Parts of Speech
    Erkenntnis 80 (1): 3-29. 2015.
    According to the contemporary consensus, when reaching in the lexicon grammar looks for items like nouns, verbs, and prepositions while logic sees items like predicates, connectives, and quantifiers. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a single lexical category contemporary grammar and logic both make use of. I hope to show that while a perfect match between the lexical categories of grammar and logic is impossible there can be a substantial overlap. I propose semantic definitions for all the majo…Read more
  •  91
    Fictionalism and Moore’s Paradox
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (3): 293-307. 2001.
    A fictionalist attitude towards an area of discourse encourages us to assent to certain sentences of that discourse without believing that they are true. Prima facie, this amounts to a suggestion that we should also assent to sentences of the form 'S but I don't believe that S'. Traditional versions of fictionalism have an answer to this challenge, but I argue that the answer is unavailable for a currently popular type of fictionalism. This is bad news for fictionalism in general because the cur…Read more
  •  78
    Things in progress
    Philosophical Perspectives 22 (1): 499-525. 2008.
    No Abstract
  •  75
    The loss of uniqueness
    Mind 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
  •  74
    I 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
  •  71
    A Subject with no Object
    Philosophical Review 108 (1): 106. 1999.
    This is the first systematic survey of modern nominalistic reconstructions of mathematics, and for this reason alone it should be read by everyone interested in the philosophy of mathematics and, more generally, in questions concerning abstract entities. In the bulk of the book, the authors sketch a common formal framework for nominalistic reconstructions, outline three major strategies such reconstructions can follow, and locate proposals in the literature with respect to these strategies. The …Read more