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.

James A. Connor, Pascal's Wager

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"

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"

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

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

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

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.