David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Ideas originate in experience; belief in necessary connections is unjustified; arguments over liberty and necessity are merely verbal disagreements.

Francis Jeffrey Pelletier and Richmond H. Thomason, "Twenty Five Years of Linguistics and Philosophy"

Surveys the history of interaction between linguistics and philosophy; focuses on the development in linguistics of Strawson's sortal predicates and of studies of causality and becoming.

C.G. New, "A Plea for Linguistics"

Argues that Austin's claims about when we would say that someone did something deliberately in "A Plea for Excuses" are mistaken; recommends a more assiduous gathering of linguistic data before any claims about "what we say" are made.

Tom McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature

Tintin is the guardian of that which makes literature possible. Or something.

Michel de Montaigne, "On Experience"

An account of the things that Montaigne has learned by experience. We should pursue our natural inclinations, informed by wisdom, as Socrates did.

Michel de Montaigne, "On Physiognomy"

It is okay to have opinions based on authority and trust. We know who to trust, in part, by observation--by looking at someone's face, for example. But beauty and ugliness are not guides to a good nature (Socrates had the best human nature, but had an ugly face).

The Structure of a Semantic Theory

Explains what semantics should and should not try to explain and sketches the interaction of dictionary entries and projection rules. Semantics should be concerned with explaining ambiguity, anomalousness and paraphraseability. It should not be concerned with giving rules for how interpretations of sentences are settled in context.

David Velleman, "The Centered Self"

Our drive to know what we're doing makes it possible for us to have effective intentions and to give others reliable reasons to think that we will do what we say we will. This helps explain how mutual declarations of intention can help us escape the prisoner's dilemma.

Galen Strawson, "Against Narrativity"

Human beings do not, and should not, understand themselves in narrative terms.

Amir D. Aczel, Descartes's Secret Notebook

Descartes had ties with the Rosicrucians (if he wasn't one himself), and he made discoveries in topology that he has only recently been credited with.

David Velleman, "Self to Self"

Draws a distinction between a psychological notion of self and the metaphysical notion of a person. What we're interested in in splitting cases is not survival, but psychological continuity of a special kind.

For a more detailed commentary on this article, see the philosophy of mind workshop.

Crispin Wright, "Rule-Following, Objectivity and the Theory of Meaning"

Asks whether a Davidson-style t-theory for a language is compatible with Wittgenstein's reflections on rule-following. Answers that it is, so long as it is a description of a part of the language knowledge of which would enable someone to participate in that part of the language.

Friedrich Waismann, "Verifiability"

No set of observation sentences entails a material object sentence. This is partly due to the "open texture" of material object sentences: rules for their application are not bounded on all sides, but are porous, leaving some applications open, not yet decided.

Jeff King, "Context Dependent Quantifiers and Donkey Anaphora"

Explains the basic motivation for context dependent quantifiers, applies them to donkey anaphora, and argues that the CDQ approach has certain methodological advantages over its competitors.

Michael Brady and Duncan Pritchard, "Epistemological Contextualism: Problems and Prospects"

An overview of the history and current state of play in debates about epistemological contextualism.

Keith deRose, "Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions"

Defends contextualism about knowledge ascriptions against the criticism that it seems absurd to say that one can truly say in context 1 that one knows that one saw zebras at the zoo, and then in context 2 truly say that one didn't (doesn't?) know that one saw zebras at the zoo by insisting that knowledge ascriptions function like indexicals. One can truly say, in context 1, that one knows, and then truly say in context 2 that one didn't know without contradicting oneself.

Comment: This seems more plausible when there IS a difference in some kind of indexical element, like the tense---it sounds better (though not great) to say, "I knew then that that I saw a zebra" and "Now I don't know whether I saw a zebra or just a painted mule".

Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore, "On an Alleged Connection Between Indirect Speech and the Theory of Meaning"

The mistaken assumption (MA) shared by almost all semantics is that indirect reports of what is said are relevant to the semantic content of sentences. Reports of what is said are deeply context sensitive (both to features of the context of utterance and to features of the reporting context), whereas semantic content is supposed to reflect context-invariant features of linguistic activity.

Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

Sensible but unsurprising and slightly pretentious guide to how architecture and design can influence our lives for good or ill.

John Perry, "Reflexivity, Indexicality and Names"

There is not a single propreitary notion of content or truth conditions; there are many different notions that are useful for different purposes.

Ian Rumfitt, "Truth Conditions and Communication"

Neither communication-intention nor truth-conditional semantic approaches to understanding meaning are sufficient; adopting a hybrid account that incorporates elements of both traditions is essential to giving an account of the basic act of putting a thought forward, or understanding a thought expressed by a declarative utterance.

Francois Recanati, "Predelli and Carpintero on Literal Meaning"

Recanati's primary opponent in Literal Meaning is the minimalist, who argues that the only role of context in the determination of truth conditional content is to give values to conventionally, linguistically encoded sentence elements (indexicals, e.g.); he tries to show that that isn't enought to account for all the uses of sentences with intuitive truth conditional contents (loosening, metonymy, semantic extension, etc.).

Michael Pelczar, "Wittgensteinian Semantics"

The family resemblance of philosophical expressions like 'knows' or 'causes' can be explained in terms of a conjunction of 'topical indexicality', which is a characteristic of terms with a single meaning but variable contents depending on the situations in which they are used, and 'semantic openness', which is a characteristic of expressions that leave room for discretion in their application. If philosophical expressions are topically indexical, then the method of finding counterexamples for analyses of 'knows', for example, is a completely wrongheaded approach to doing philosophy (as is the activity of refining analyses).

Jonathan Berg, "Is Semantics Still Possible?"

The standard view of semantics, that every disambiguated sentence has a determinate semantic content, relative to an assignment of contexts to its indexical expressions, and not necessarily identical to what may be conveyed (pragmatically) by its utterance, is not threatened by contextualist attacks; semantics may be concerned with a "strict notion" of what is said, whereas the contextualists are concerned with a "loose notion". Showing that the loose notion is contextually sensitive does not show that the strict notion is. The only real threat to traditional semantics would be an alternative theory that explains semantic phenomena better.

Siobhan Chapman, "In Defense of a Code: Linguistic Meaning and Propositionality in Verbal Communication"

Criticisizes unclarity in standard accounts of the domain of semantics; recommends a minimalist approach to truth conditions, where minimal truth conditions are encoded by linguistic meaning, and these very broad truth conditions constrain the truth conditions of what is expressed in an utterance of a sentence by requiring the truth conditions of the uttered sentence to be a subset of the worlds in which the linguistically encoded proposition is true.

Donald Davidson, "On Saying That"

Davidson points out the traditional problems caused by indirect reports of speech. On one hand, we want to retain our "semantic innocence" with regard to the sentences coming after "that" clauses--we want them to mean, and refer to the things they normally mean and refer to. They shouldn't, pace Frege, refer to their ordinary senses, for example. On the other hand, the indirect report of speech does not have the substitutional/inferential properties of the unembedded sentence itself. It won't stay true when co-referential expressions are intersubstituted, for example. So what's going on? How do we reconcile these two important, undeniable features of indirect reports of speech? Davidson's suggestion is ingenious. He suggests that indirect reports should be understood as compoundings of two distinct sentences. So when you report that "Galileo said that the Earth moves", you are actually uttering two sentences: "Galileo said that" and "The Earth moves". The second sentence retains all of its normal features. The first sentence is true just in case the two-place predicate "said" is true of Galileo and that, where "that" is a demonstrative that refers to the following sentence. The "said" predicate is a primitive predicate, which picks out the "samesaying" relation. There is no semantic relation that makes my saying of "The Earth moves" and Galileo's correspond (not synonomy, e.g.). It is the primitive samesaying relation that does so. So it is a mistake to think that the compound sentence will reflect any of the properties of the unembedded sentence by itself--the first part ("Galileo said that") will have a truth value that varies with changes in the demonstrated object--the second sentence.

Gareth Evans, "Understanding Demonstratives"

Evans has multiple projects in this paper. First is a reply to Perry's criticism of Frege on Demonstratives that involves denying that Frege is limited to descriptive senses. Evans thinks that Perry's argument requires the assumption that Frege is only entitled to such senses. Second, Evans sketches a view of object-dependent, non-descriptive Fregean senses in order to make good on his claim that Frege is entitled to such things. Third, Evans introduces the notion of a dynamic thought, which can persist through changes in time and linguistic expression. Fourth, Evans claims that Perry's account of the objects of the propositional attitudes (roughly, Russellian propositions apprehended under linguistic roles) is just a "notational variant" of Frege's proposal (or the proposal that Evans attributes to Frege). Fifth, Evans says that we need to embed our understanding of "ways of being presented" with an object in a general theory of thought, which will explain the special way subjects apprehend themselves in first-personal thought, or how they think about time, or about a place. Perry, he claims, fails to give such an account when he claims that the linguistic, token-reflexive rule governing uses of "I" or "here" or "now" gives us a way of thinking about how the objects these terms pick out are presented to us.

James Higginbotham, "A Perspective on Truth and Meaning"

Argues against Horwich's account of semantic theory; knowing what it states would not suffice for understanding.

Paul M. Pietroski, "The Character of Natural Language Semantics"

Natural language semantics should give up the assumption that it is to provide truth conditions for sentences, because the truth of a sentence is a massive interaction effect of sentence meaning and a host of worldly factors. Travis is right that predicates aren't functions to extensions, and there are other, Chomskyish reasons to doubt that the truth conditions of sentences are compositional. NLS should be a purely internal, non-truth-involving theory.

Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear

Hunter S. Thompson's last book, where he describes pushing an enormous mailbox in the path of an oncoming bus, firing a parachute flare at Jack Nicholson's house in the middle of the night, jumping a Ducati superbike sideways over some train tracks, running for sherriff of Aspen, and having a mountain lion fall in the back of his convertible near Big Sur.

Kent Bach, "Seemingly Semantic Intuitions"

Gibbs and Moise's tests for what is said are faulty; the best test for whether something is (semantically) said or something that is pragmatically contributed is whether it is cancellable or not--if not, it is what is said.

Raymond Gibbs and Jessica Moise, "Pragmatics in Understanding What Is Said"

Subjects identify "what is said" by a sentence as something that is pragmatically enriched, rather than a minimal proposition; they can distinguish what is said from what is implicated; and they can recognize minimal propositions as what is said when those sentences are embedded in context-setting narratives.

Thomas Kuhn, "Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability"

Translation must preserve sense or intension, not just reference; portions of two languages are incommensurable when they canot be intertranslated without residue or loss.

Karl-Otto Apel, "The A Priori of Communication and the Foundation of the Humanities"

The humanities and the sciences are engaged in two different activities: the sciences aim to explain and predict phenomena using laws, and the humanities aim at interpersonal understanding.

Elisabeth Camp, "Why Isn't Sarcasm Semantic, Anyway?"

Sarcasm passes the standard tests that mark a linguistic phenomenon as semantic, but that means that we should take the tests with a grain of salt rather than conclude that sarcasm is genuinely semantic.

D.J. Napoli, Language Matters

Sensible, democratic answers to common questions about language.

Jerry Fodor, "Some Notes on What Linguistics Is About"

Linguistics should not have a domain of inquiry that is delimited a priori; any empirical evidence is potentially relevant to deciding between competing linguistic theories.

P.F. Strawson, "Meaning and Truth"

In the Homeric struggle that is the theory of meaning, communication-intention theorists have the edge over the formal semanticists.

Baker and Hacker, Language, Sense and Nonsense

Iconoclastic assault on all aspects of truth-conditional semantics.

Donald Davidson, "Moods and Performances"

The semantic significance of the moods of sentences (indicative, interrogative, optative, imperative) is explained in terms of a "mood-setting" sentence coupled with an indicative sentence: "Put on your hat" becomes "My next sentence is imperatival in force" and "You will put on your hat".

John Haugeland, Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea

Introduction to the problems and prospects of GOFAI from a skeptical point of view.

Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds

Consciousness is not an all or nothing affair.

Stephen Ambrose, Pegasus Bridge

Elite British gliderborne unit trains for two years to capture French canal bridge, captures it and defends it against German counterattack.

Dave Hickey, Air Guitar

Art should not be protected from the marketplace; academics are crypto-aristocrats; rock and roll and jazz are the great 20th century art forms.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Flight to Arras

Autobiographical story by the author of the Little Prince involving a near-suicidal reconnaissance flight over parts of occupied French territory in a Bloch MB-170.

John Collins, "Language: A Dialogue"

A quick introduction to philosophical issues surrounding Chomsky's Universal Grammar: (1) The poverty of stimulus argument; (2) argument for idiolects over public language; (3) Rejection of communication as of central importance for understanding language.

David Lewis, "Scorekeeping in a Language Game"

Gives various "rules of accommodation" governing language games; includes contextualist claims about the differing truth of utterances in conversations with different standards.

Ernest Lepore, "What Model Theoretic Semantics Cannot Do"

Model Theoretic Semantics (MTS) does not constitute a substantial advance over Structured Semantics (SS), because knowledge of MTS doesn't suffice for knowledge of the meaning of sentences of the target language. Supplementing MTS with knowledge of which world is the actual world would suffice for knowing the meaning of target language sentences, but knowing which world is the actual world is beyond the ken of speakers of a language.

David Lewis, "General Semantics"

Proposes a categorial grammar as the basis for understanding the meaning of languages and proposes a performative analysis of mood.

Emma Borg, Minimal Semantics

Defends formal semantics against contextualist attacks by delimiting a circumscribed domain for semantic knowledge compatible with modularity, and relegating all non-modular forms of knowledge (communication, etc.) to pragmatics.

Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations

Reflections on and techniques for perspicuous presentation of information.

Michael Dummett, "What Do I Know When I Know a Language?"

A speaker has implicit knowledge of a meaning theory for a language he knows.

Crispin Wright, "Theories of Meaning and Speakers' Knowledge"

Semantic theory need not be a part of an empirical inquiry into what speakers actually know when they understand a language; instead, semantic theory can be an a priori investigation of how it is possible for speakers to understand a language.

Scott Soames, "Semantics and Semantic Competence"

Knowledge of truth conditions, in the sense of knowing the theorems of a semantic theory for a language, is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding a language.

Donald Davidson, "Radical Interpretation"

What could we know that would enable us to understand what someone's words mean? A theory of interpretation for the speaker's language.

Rudolf Carnap, Introduction to Semantics

Introduction to "pure" semantics and syntax.

Stefano Predelli, Contexts

Clarification and defence of "traditional" semantics against contextualist attacks, and a criticism of standard ways of representing contexts of utterance.

Emmon Bach, Informal Lectures on Formal Semantics

Conversational introduction to Montague semantics.

Charles Travis, "Are Belief Ascriptions Opaque?"

Belief ascriptions are not opaque, they are occasion-sensitive.

Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees

Three ways of practicing Moretti's "distant reading" of literature, conducted via visual representations of quantitative data.

Franco Moretti, An Atlas of the European Novel: 1800-1900

Uses quantitative methods and lots of maps to explain changes and differences in the form and consumption of varieties of European literature.

Barbara Partee, "The Development of Formal Semantics"

A brief history of the rise of Montague grammar and a taste of the diversity of contemporary approaches to the study of natural language.

H.P. Grice and P.F. Strawson, "In Defense of a Dogma"

Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction relies on an unacceptable standard of clarity; accepting the standard would rule out all kinds of useful concepts like "means the same as".

Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars

Story of revolutions and counter-revolutions in linguistics, centering on Chomsky and generative semantics.

Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore, Insensitive Semantics

Sustained attack on moderate and radical contextualism, plus exposition of C&L's pluralistic minimalism.

Henriette de Swart, Introduction to Natural Language Semantics

Exactly what it says it is: a quick overview of a range of topics in natural language semantics--most interesting is the chapter on dynamic semantics and donkey anaphora.

Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore, "Shared Content"

Contextualism makes it difficult to understand how inter-contextual communication is possible; semantic minimalism and speech-act pluralism explain both our intuitions about contextual variation in what is said as well as our intuitions that we can share content across contexts.

Peter Geach, "Time", in Truth, Love, and Immortality

Expresses qualified agreement with Dummett's defense of McTaggart's argument; but concludes that McTaggart is wrong that time is unreal.

Michael Dummett, "A Defense of McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality of Time"

McTaggart's argument doesn't in fact establish that time is unreal; instead, it establishes that there is no absolute conception of reality, since reality contains temporal facts--facts only available from particular temporal points of view.

Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

Parallel lives of two "James Corrigans"--one visiting his father in present day Michigan and the other suffering through life with his father at the time of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

J.L. Austin, "Unfair to Facts"

Strawson makes a spurious inference from a limited range of grammatical examples to the conclusion that facts aren't "in the world".

John Haugeland, "An Overview of the Frame Problem"

The frame problem is a genuine problem for classic AI. But some version of a scale model of a relevant situation in the mind might help solve it.

Kent Bach, "Quantification, Qualification and Context: A Reply to Stanley and Szabo"

Stanley and Szabo claim that the context-sensitivity of quantified expressions is best explained by positing hidden variables at the level of logical form. Bach argues that so-called "domain restriction" is best explained pragmatically, in terms of implicit qualification.

Jason Stanley, "Nominal Restriction"

Associating hidden function and argument variables with nominal expressions helps explain three apparently different kinds of context-sensitivity: quantifier domain restriction; comparative adjectives; and mass expressions.

G.H. Bradley, "Reality and Thought"

Either thought is less than absolute, and therefore false, or it is absolute and ceases to be thought at all.

Jason Stanley, "Context and Logical Form"

Everything that context contributes to truth conditions (except metonymy, and Travis/Searle type context-sensitivity) must be represented at the level of logical form.

Adolf Loos, "The Poor Little Rich Man"

Happy rich man has his apartment turned into art; his life is thereby ruined.

William Upski Wimsatt, Bomb the Suburbs!

Hip hop manifesto and prescription for revolution in everyday life.

Gregory McCulloch, "Scientism, Mind and Meaning"

A defense of the explanatory value of folk psychology.

Martin Gustafsson, "Semantic Meaning and Linguistic Diversity: The Place of Meaning-Theories in Davidson's Later Philosophy"

Criticizes Davidson's view in "Nice Derangement" that understanding involves a multiplicity of systematic meaning-theories.

Ian Hacking, "The Parody of Conversation"

Criticism of Davidson's "Nice Derangement": recursivity is inconsistent with the structure of one-off, "passing" theories.

King and Stanley, "Semantics, Pragmatics, and the Role of Semantic Content"

Overview of three ways of drawing the semantics-pragmatics distinction: (1) Semantic skepticism: semantic content is a feature of sentence types; (2) Semantic modesty: semantic content is a property of sentence types + some severly limited range of contextual features, determined by "automatic" indexicals; (3) Semantic content is determined by sentence type + a more expansive conception of context, which includes speaker intentions. K&S argue that (3) is preferable to (1) and (2).

Karen Green, "What Do We Know When We Understand a Language?" in Michael Dummett

Language is a shared social institution that we can have better and worse knowledge of; Davidson's arguments based on malapropisms don't show that language doesn't have a shared structure.

Jerrold Katz, "Literal Meaning and Logical Theory"

Searle's argument against context-independent literal meaning assumes that issues of linguistic competence and understanding involve broad issues of use, but Katz rejects that assumption, claiming that there is a narrow conception of linguistic competence that is sharply distinguished from linguistic performance.

John Searle, "Literal Meaning"

The received view that the literal meaning of a sentence is its context-free truth conditions (once ambiguity, indexicality, etc. have been settled) is mistaken; sentences have meanings (truth conditions) only against a background of assumptions; variations in background assumptions produce variations in truth conditions.

Charles Travis, The True and the False: The Domain of the Pragmatic, Chapter 5

The predicate "is true" is characterized by the same kind of occasion-sensitivity as other predicates, like "is green".

Bill Brewer, "Compulsion by Reason"

The way to avoid brute dispositionalism on one hand and a regress of explicit rules on the other is to develop a conception of acting according to a reason that takes perceptual access to the world as its model.

Charles Travis, The True and the False: The Domain of the Pragmatic, Chapters 1-2

Examines reasons for rejecting "translational" theories of meaning; argues that semantics should concern meaning, and meaning does not involve truth conditions.

David Kaplan, "Words"

We should abandon the idea of types and tokens of words, and replace it with an idea of words as temporal continuants that depend for their continued existence on speaker intentions to reproduce them.

Tom Lockhart, "The Insufficiency of Neo-Fregean Logical Segmentation"

The Scottish Neo-Logicists fail to provide syntactic tests that suffice to yield singular terms when applied to natural language.

Carl Hempel, "Aspects of Scientific Explanation", Section 10

Explanation is subsumption under laws of nature; it is deductive and necessary; an explanans specifies conditions that necessitate the event or condition specified by the expanandum, thus showing why it was to be expected, thereby enabling us to understand why it happened.

Richard Heck, "Do Demonstratives Have Senses?"

The naive conception of communication--that speaker and addressee have to share the same thought to successfully communicate--is indefensible; it should be replaced with a conception of communication that involves speaker and addressee sharing appropriately related thoughts.

Henry Jackman, "We Live Forwards But We Understand Backwards: Linguistic Practices and Future Behavior"

If you accept content externalism of the Kripke/Putnam/Burge variety, then you should also accept that future usage can 'settle' what the contents of our thoughts and utterances are.

Stefano Predelli, "Painted Leaves, Context, and Semantic Analysis"

Traditional semantics can handle the variability in truth-conditions argued for by the contextualist; the contextualist is right that meaning alone does not determine truth conditions, but this is hardly surprising, and already accounted for in traditional semantics.

Jerrold M. Sadock, "On Testing for Conversational Implicature"

Grice's tests for whether something counts as conversational implicature vs. conventional implicature--calculability, cancellability, and detachability--are not singly or jointly sufficient to determine whether an implicature is conversational.