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.