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22Internalist 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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20Logical 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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105The 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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164Bare 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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552Epistemic 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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31Christopher 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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16Philosophy 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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114What 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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49In 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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39The 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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140Sententialism 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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69Against logical formIn Gerhard Preyer (ed.), Donald Davidson on truth, meaning, and the mental, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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234The determination of contentPhilosophical 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
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46Review of Scott Soames, Philosophy of Language (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (2). 2011.
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505NominalismIn 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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115Expressions and their representationsPhilosophical 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
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107When 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.
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206Semantics 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
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