The Bibliography

Norman Malcolm, "Defending Common Sense"

2008-06-09T13:06:00.000-07:00

Moore's reply to the skeptic, to simply claim that he knows that this is a hand, or that he knows he is a human being, is mistaken because it assumes that saying "I know this is a hand" or "I know I am a human being" makes more sense than "I don't know this is a hand" or "I don't know I'm a human being". The proper response to the skeptic is to say that neither the assertion nor the denial that one knows that this is a hand makes sense (in a philosophical context).

John R. Searle, "Austin on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts"

2008-06-06T08:51:00.001-07:00

The distinction between locutionary acts (or, more specifically, rhetic acts) and illocutionary acts cannot be sustained. There are locutionary acts like "I hereby promise to come", which in virtue of meaning what they do, perform an illocutionary act. The locutionary act should be replaced with the propositional act, which is the expression of a certain proposition.

Howard Wettstein, "Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake?"

2008-06-01T20:57:00.001-07:00

Frege's criterion of adequacy for semantic theory is that it register differences of cognitive significance. New theories of reference do not meet Frege's criterion of adequacy, and attempts by new theorists like Kaplan and Perry to satisfy the criterion by employing "character" or "role" fail to do justice to Frege's data. The proper response for new theorists of reference is to reject Frege's criterion of adequacy. Belief reports do not favor either Fregeans or new theorists.

Jerry A. Fodor, "On Knowing What We Would Say"

2008-06-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

Speaker intuitions in cases where they are asked to imagine cases radically different from what we know to be the case are systematically unreliable, because it isn't possible to predict what other beliefs would change given change in some of our basic beliefs. That means it isn't possible to cite speakers' intuitions to isolate a difference between a mere empirical feature of the meaning of an expression (a "symptom") and a "logical" feature of the meaning of an expression (one the absence of which would entail a change in the meaning of the expression--a "criterion").

Warren Goldfarb, "I Want You to Bring Me A Slab: Remarks on the Opening Sections of the Philosophical Investigations"

2008-05-18T18:55:00.001-07:00

The opening sections of the Investigations aim to reveal a groundless and usually unnoticed move from commonplace observations about meaning to the beginning of philosophical debates about theories of meaning. "Wittgenstein wishes to snap such debates off before they begin by showing at the start that we have misread the facts" (p. 280).

Peter Ludlow, "Referential Semantics for I-Languages?"

2007-07-16T12:26:00.000-07:00

Ludlow presents three different conceptions of referential semantics and argues that two of them (one according to which reference is a relation that holds between expressions and mental representations, and the other according to which reference is a complex relation holding between expressions, speakers, context, and the world) are compatible with Chomsky's conception of I-language. He also suggests that, on the assumption that we think of the structure of language and the structure of the world as isomorphic (LWI, or Language-World Isomorphism), doing semantics and doing metaphysics might illuminate one another.

(In Chomsky and His Critics, Blackwell, 2003)

Noam Chomsky, "Language and Interpretation"

2007-07-15T17:04:00.000-07:00

Chomsky criticizes central philosophical accounts of what constraints should apply to the study of language: Quine's behaviorism, Davidson's demand that we explain communication, and Dummett's claims about public language. None of these notions are compatible with the actual scientific investigation of language.

Akeel Bilgrami and Carol Rovane, "Mind, Language and the Limits of Inquiry"

2007-07-15T16:55:00.000-07:00

Summarizes Chomsky's reasons to think that the study of reference and intentionality fall outside the scope of legitimate scientific inquiry. Also treats Chomsky's attitude towards the mind-body problem and explains his reasons for thinking that the problem cannot be coherently formulated.

R.M. Sainsbury, "Two Ways to Smoke a Cigarette"

2007-04-02T17:26:00.001-07:00

Most cases of purported hidden ambiguity can be handled by recognizing that meaning is "unspecific"--that the meaning of a sentence is compatible with a wide range of different states of affairs making it true. In a case like Travis's "The leaves are green", the leaves are green so long as there is some surface that is green; the feeling that one of the utterances is false is the result of our normal expectations about the way the sentence is made true being subverted.

Avashai Margalit, "Open Texture"

2007-03-27T12:52:00.000-07:00

The intension of a sentence should be a function only from those worlds that are compatible with our "hard core" beliefs to truth values, not from all possible worlds. Open texture is the fact that the set of hard core beliefs is "fuzzy", so it won't be obvious whether certain worlds are compatible with them or not, and so there will be situations where we can grasp the meaning of a sentence and still not know whether or not it applies in a particular world.

Mark Lance and Margaret Little, "Defeasibility and the Normative Grasp of Context"

2007-03-26T13:30:00.000-07:00

Defeasible generalizations like "normally, the appearance that p justifies that p" should not be understood as merely statistical generalizations, or as enthymemes (with a supressed exceptionless premise). They are genuinely explanatory, even though exception-laden.

G.A. Cohen, "Deeper into Bullshit"

2007-03-20T20:09:00.000-07:00

Frankfurt's account of bullshit is only a partial account; he characterizes the essence of bullshit that comes from an intentional indifference to truth, whereas there is another kind of bullshit that needn't be intentionally produced. This other kind of bullshit is that which is unclarifiable. A rough test for this kind of bullshit is if affixing (or removing) a negation sign to the text under scrutiny does not affect "its level of plausibility".

Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense"

2007-03-19T18:47:00.000-07:00

Truth, when not tautological, is an illusion. We pursue truth not for its own sake, but for its "agreeable, life-preserving consequences".

Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit

2007-03-11T11:29:00.001-07:00

The essence of bullshit is indifference to the truth.

Friedrich Waismann, "How I See Philosophy"

2007-03-08T14:10:00.000-08:00

Philosophy doesn't provide answers to questions, it finds sense for the questions to have, or shows how they lack sense. Philosophers don't explain anything, because to try to explain something would only push the demand for further explanation back a step. Figures of speech present in ordinary language (like "the flow of time") contribute to philosophical perplexity.

Stanley Cavell, "The Ordinary as the Uneventful"

2007-03-06T20:47:00.000-08:00

The Annales historians oppose a traditional history focused on great events, focusing instead on long term social change. Paul Ricoeur claims that the Annales historians think they can do history without reference to events, but that they are mistaken, because all forms of narrative presuppose some conception of events. But a better way to understand what the Annales historians are up to is to see them as not trying to avoid events altogether, but as interested in the uneventful, the ordinary.

Sören Stenlund, Language and Philosophical Problems, Chapter 2: "Notions of Language and Theories of Meaning"

2007-03-04T08:33:00.000-08:00

There are two approaches to the study of meaning: an a priori approach, concerned with the "conceptual" conditions for the possibility of meaning (exemplified by Frege and the early Wittgenstein), and an empirical, naturalistic, approach, which dominates contemporary discussions of meaning. The naturalistic approach, while suitable for certain kinds of limited clarifications, when applied to fundamental questions about the nature of language and meaning, produces confusions. The basic mistake of the empirical approach is to assume that expressions of ordinary language have sense independently of the practices in which they are used. And the practices in which expressions are used are fundamental; they can't be explained in more basic terms. Any attempted explanation will presuppose what it tries to explain.

Sören Stenlund, Language and Philosophical Problems, Chapter 1: "Language, Mind and Machines"

2007-03-03T20:03:00.000-08:00

There are a number of conceptual confusions involved in standard formal approaches to the study of mind and language, including a tendency to assume that a formal calculus is actually present (in some sense) in ordinary practice, or somehow explains that practice. Formal calculi are valuable for particular activities, but they are no help in understanding language or mind as a whole.

Rush Rhees, "Wittgenstein's Builders"

2007-03-01T23:30:00.000-08:00

Speaking a language involves more than participating in language games; speaking a language involves having something to say, which requires an ability to see connections between language games.

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, Chapter 16, "Presuppositions and Methods of Linguistics"

2007-03-01T14:11:00.000-08:00

Explaining failures of use by way of presupposition failure is to mistake a linguistic form of description for actual use. Talk of presuppositions makes sense only against a background of normal use. We should aim for a careful description of linguistic practice, not an explanation of it.

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, Chapter 14, "The Semantic Reading and Indirect Speech"

2007-03-01T13:18:00.000-08:00

The notion of the "literal meaning" of a sentence is dependent on applying a particular semantic theory of language to language use. It is a mistake to think that the system of representation that we have for language (a semantic theory, e.g.) is actually in the language itself.

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, Chapter 13, "Intentions and Beliefs as Conditions for Use"

2007-03-01T12:37:00.000-08:00

The picture of language according to which external, lifeless signs need to be supplemented by inner processes, like belief or intention, is a misleading picture. Words have significance in use, and the need for a theory of speaker intentions is occasioned by nothing more than the misleading picture of external, lifeless marks and sounds.

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, Chapter 12, "Language vs. Languages and Philosophy vs. Linguistics"

2007-03-01T11:59:00.000-08:00

The activity of language use cannot be reconstructed using the formal techniques of linguistics and philosophy of language; words only have significance in that they are used in particular activities.

Charles Travis, Thought's Footing, Chapter 1

2007-03-01T11:18:00.000-08:00

The truth conditional content of a sentence is determined by the role of the sentence in a language game (this can be put as the slogan: "content is inseparable from point").

Avner Baz, "Who Knows"

2007-02-22T23:41:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-22T23:37:00.000-08:00

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"

2007-02-13T11:38:00.000-08:00

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"

2007-02-12T23:10:00.000-08:00

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"

2007-02-12T23:05:00.000-08:00

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"

2007-02-10T22:12:00.000-08:00

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"

2007-02-10T21:24:00.000-08:00

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"

2007-02-10T21:07:00.000-08:00

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"

2007-02-10T14:12:00.000-08:00

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"

2007-02-10T12:33:00.000-08:00

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)

2007-02-05T10:23:00.000-08:00

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)

2007-02-05T09:54:00.000-08:00

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"

2007-02-01T23:40:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-01T23:32:00.000-08:00

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"

2007-02-01T22:11:00.000-08:00

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

James A. Connor, Pascal's Wager

2007-01-29T23:05:00.000-08:00

Pascal's life was dominated by the conflict of his interest in science and philosophy and his commitment to Jansenism, a radical form of Catholicism based on the teachings of St. Augustine.

John MacFarlane, "Relativism and Disagreement"

2007-01-26T08:11:00.000-08:00

Contexualists (someone who thinks the content of a proposition is partly determined by the context of utterance) can account for the intuition that disagreements of taste are sometimes not genuine disagreements, but they can't account for the intuition that sometimes disagreements of taste are genuine disagreements. Relativists can account for both intuitions by taking disagreement to be when one party to the disagreement accepts a proposition and the other rejects it, and relative to the "circumstance of evaluation that is relevant to the assessment of the acceptance (rejection) [of the proposition] in its context" both parties can't be right. So, when there is genuine disagreement, both parties share the circumstance of evaluation relevant to the assessment of the proposition, and when disagreement is merely apparent, the parties don't share that circumstance of evaluation.

William Lycan and George Schlesinger, "You Bet Your Life: Pascal's Wager Defended"

2007-01-25T23:20:00.000-08:00

Standard objections to Pascal's recommended wager fail; epistemic reasons (including simplicity) count in favor of belief in an Anselmian perfect God.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, §233

2007-01-25T23:17:00.000-08:00

We cannot know that God exists or does not exist, but it is better to believe that God exists than not to believe He exists.

René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

2007-01-25T23:15:00.000-08:00

I am a thinking thing; God exists; the essence of material substance is extension; mind and body are distinct.

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

2006-12-18T10:45:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-12-18T08:12:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-12-15T21:24:00.001-08:00

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

2006-12-14T07:18:00.000-08:00

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

Michel de Montaigne, "On Experience"

2006-12-13T09:37:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-12-13T09:33:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-06T08:37:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-11-29T12:13:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-11-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

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

Amir D. Aczel, Descartes's Secret Notebook

2006-11-29T12:07:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-11-15T06:26:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-11-13T07:25:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-11-10T09:14:00.001-08:00

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"

2006-11-07T11:29:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-10-31T15:32:00.000-08:00

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

Keith deRose, "Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions"

2006-10-31T14:34:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-10-30T09:34:00.000-08:00

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

2006-10-30T06:52:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-10-03T20:44:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-10-01T19:20:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-10-01T19:19:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-10-01T19:17:00.002-07:00

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?"

2006-10-01T19:17:00.001-07:00

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"

2006-09-29T07:33:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-29T07:31:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-29T07:28:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-29T07:26:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-29T07:24:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-28T20:34:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-28T19:28:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-28T19:25:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-27T20:46:00.002-07:00

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"

2006-09-27T20:46:00.001-07:00

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?"

2006-09-27T20:45:00.002-07:00

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

2006-09-27T20:45:00.001-07:00

Sensible, democratic answers to common questions about language.

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

2006-09-27T20:44:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-27T20:43:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-27T20:42:00.000-07:00

Iconoclastic assault on all aspects of truth-conditional semantics.

Donald Davidson, "Moods and Performances"

2006-09-27T20:41:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-27T06:46:00.001-07:00

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

Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds

2006-09-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

Consciousness is not an all or nothing affair.

Stephen Ambrose, Pegasus Bridge

2006-09-27T06:44:00.002-07:00

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

2006-09-27T06:44:00.001-07:00

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

2006-09-27T06:43:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-26T10:47:00.001-07:00

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"

2006-09-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-26T10:45:00.002-07:00

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"

2006-09-26T10:45:00.001-07:00

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

Emma Borg, Minimal Semantics

2006-09-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-26T10:43:00.002-07:00

Reflections on and techniques for perspicuous presentation of information.

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

2006-09-26T10:43:00.001-07:00

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

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

2006-09-26T10:42:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-26T10:41:00.002-07:00

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"

2006-09-26T10:41:00.001-07:00

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

2006-09-26T10:40:00.002-07:00

Introduction to "pure" semantics and syntax.

Stefano Predelli, Contexts

2006-09-26T10:40:00.001-07:00

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