Avner Baz, "Who Knows"

Contextualism fails to appreciate the insights of ordinary language philosophy and so does not advance our understanding of what knowledge is.

Witold Rybczynski, Looking Around: A Journey Through Architecture

Essays on the changing structure of the American house and on the need for high quality but non-monumental "background" architecture that emphasize eclecticism and attention to how people actually live.

Timothy Schroeder, "Donald Davidson's Theory of Mind Is Non-Normative"

Normativity requires (1) a categorization scheme, and (2) a force-maker. Davidson's interpretationist theory of mind has (1), but doesn't have (2). So Davidson's theory of mind is non-normative.

Bernard Williams, "The Self and the Future"

The idea of persons "switching bodies" is not straightforward. It is plausible to think that what is typically regarded as a case of a person switching bodies is actually a case of two persons undergoing massive psychological change.

Donald Davidson, "Representation and Interpretation"

Interpretation of thought and action involves normative concepts; normative concepts "have no role in the understanding of a syntactically specified program"; so a syntactically specified program cannot be interpreted as thinking or acting.

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, Ch.10, "The Speaker-Hearer Scheme of Communication"

Both the formal semantic approach and the communication-intention (speech-act) approach to the study of language find a distinction between conventional meaning and speaker meaning; that distinction is rejected by Segerdahl. And both approaches involve abstracting away from details fo concrete use. Segerdahl says that a proper appreciation of Wittgensein's notion of family resemblance can serve as a corrective to the dominant approaches to the study of language.

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, Ch.9, "Formal Pragmatics"

Language can be represented by a formal system, but that doesn't mean "that actual language use is based on tacit calculations" in the formal system. The meanings of the parts of a sentence play no role in the actual process of the determination of meaning.

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, Ch.8, "Rationality as a Basis for Language Use"

Grice's cooperative maxims and conception of the rational norms governing conversation are meant to explain our ordinary practices of understanding sentences; but the maxims and conversational norms themselves depend on those very practices for their intelligibility. For example, the notion of cooperation requires some particular, concrete practice (like work in a repair shop) in order to have any content. It doesn't make sense to say that there is some general, practice-independent notion of cooperativeness that governs our understanding of speakers' utterances.

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, Ch.6, "Literal Meaning"

Literal meaning is a function of use. Use is fundamental and cannot itself be explained. Semantic approaches to the explanation of meaning presuppose what they are trying to explain, because the paraphrases given by the semantic theory themselves, if they are to be meaningful, have their meanings determined by particular uses.

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, Ch.3, "Context Dependence"

The meaning of a sentence is not determined by the meanings of its component words, it is determined by how it is used. Systemaic variations in the meanings of sentences should be explained in terms of variation in use, not in variation in their component parts. It is wrong to think that there are isolable linguistic items like words and sentences; a demonstrative like "this book", for example, includes the book as part of the symbol. The question of what must be added to a linguistic item, like "this book", to deliver a unique reference is confused. It is confused because it treats language as separated from the world.

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, "Deixis" (Ch2)

An essential feature of the pragmatic approach to studying linguistic phenomena is the treatment of linguistic meaning as "general directions" (Strawson) for use. These general directions are supposed not to require any contextual features for their use (otherwise they wouldn't do any explanatory work[?]). But the general directions do require contextual features for their use, no less than words like "I" and "you". So giving the meaning of "I" as "the speaker of the context of utterance" is in fact no explanation at all. And it is only the conception of language as an autonomous system that makes the meaning of words like "I" and "you" seem problematic and in need of explanation in the first place.

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, "Language and Context" (Ch1)

Pragmatics incorrectly assumes that only the meaning of special sentences (like those containing indexicals) must be explained in terms of the context of use. Instead, every sentence (for example, those including expressions like '9:45am') has a meaning only as a result of our linguistic and non-linguistic practices involving the sentence. Meaning is not primarily a property of linguistic expressions, but of our practices.

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, "Introduction"

The "pragmatic approach" to language is an attempt to defend the autonomous "calculus conception" of language against apparent problems. The pragmatic approach attempts to handle those problems in the following ways: (1) Indexicality, (2) Speaker meaning; (3) Speech Acts; (4) Presupposition. The basic problem with the pragmatic approach is that it is circular--its application depends on those facts it attempts to explain.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

The elder Hamlet's ghost tells Hamlet to seek revenge for his murder; Hamlet frets; he kills Polonius by accident; he indirectly causes Ophelia's death; he has Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed; he kills Laertes and Claudius in a fencing match and inadvertently kills Gertrude by not drinking the poisoned wine intended for him; he is in turn killed by Laertes.

Lars Hertzberg, "The Sense is Where You Find It"

We make sense of particular utterances in particular contexts; our understanding of an utterance and our understanding of the context are mutually dependent.