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  1. Pronouns as Demonstratives.Kyle Blumberg - 2021 - Philosophers' Imprint 21 (35).
    In this paper, I outline a novel approach to the semantics of natural language pronouns. On this account, which I call 'demonstrativism', pronouns are semantically equivalent to demonstratives. I begin by presenting some contrasts that provide support for demonstrativism. Then I try to explain these contrasts by developing a particular demonstrativist proposal. I build on the "hidden argument" theory of demonstratives. On this theory, demonstratives are semantically similar to definite descriptions, with one important difference: demonstratives take two arguments, rather than (...)
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  2. A simple theory of rigidity.Tristan Grøtvedt Haze - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):4187-4199.
    The notion of rigidity looms large in philosophy of language, but is beset by difficulties. This paper proposes a simple theory of rigidity, according to which an expression has a world-relative semantic property rigidly when it has that property at, or with respect to, all worlds. Just as names, and certain descriptions like The square root of 4, rigidly designate their referents, so too are necessary truths rigidly true, and so too does cat rigidly have only animals in its extension. (...)
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  3. Proof Theory and Semantics for a Theory of Definite Descriptions.Nils Kürbis - 2021 - In Anupam Das & Sara Negri (eds.), TABLEAUX 2021, LNAI 12842.
    This paper presents a sequent calculus and a dual domain semantics for a theory of definite descriptions in which these expressions are formalised in the context of complete sentences by a binary quantifier I. I forms a formula from two formulas. Ix[F, G] means ‘The F is G’. This approach has the advantage of incorporating scope distinctions directly into the notation. Cut elimination is proved for a system of classical positive free logic with I and it is shown to be (...)
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  4. Rearming the Slingshot?Meg Wallace - 2015 - Acta Analytica 30 (3):283-292.
    Slingshot arguments aim to show that an allegedly non-extensional sentential connective—such as “necessarily ” or “the statement that Φ corresponds to the fact that ”—is, to the contrary, an extensional sentential connective. Stephen Neale : 761-825, 1995, 2001) argues that a reformulation of Gödel’s slingshot puts pressure on us to adopt a particular view of definite descriptions. I formulate a revised version of the slingshot argument—one that relies on Kaplan’s notion of “dthat.” I aim to show that if Neale’s version (...)
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  5. Plural Reference and Reference to a Plurality. Linguistic Facts and Semantic Analyses.Friederike Moltmann - 2016 - In Massimiliano Carrara, Alexandra Arapinis & Friederike Moltmann (eds.), Unity and Plurality. Logic, Philosophy, and Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 93-120.
    This paper defends 'plural reference', the view that definite plurals refer to several individuals at once, and it explores how the view can account for a range of phenomena that have been discussed in the linguistic literature.
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  6. Contextual Dependence and Definite Descriptions.François Recanati - 1987 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 87:57-73.
    François Recanati; IV*—Contextual Dependence and Definite Descriptions, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 87, Issue 1, 1 June 1987, Pages 57–74, h.
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  7. The ambiguity of definite descriptions.Michael Mckinsey - 1979 - Theoria 45 (2):78-89.
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  8. Descriptions and unknowability.Jan Heylen - 2010 - Analysis 70 (1):50-52.
    In a recent paper Horsten embarked on a journey along the limits of the domain of the unknowable. Rather than knowability simpliciter, he considered a priori knowability, and by the latter he meant absolute provability, i.e. provability that is not relativized to a formal system. He presented an argument for the conclusion that it is not absolutely provable that there is a natural number of which it is true but absolutely unprovable that it has a certain property. The argument depends (...)
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  9. A Cantorian argument against Frege's and early Russell's theories of descriptions.Kevin C. Klement - 2009 - In Nicholas Griffin & Dale Jacquette (eds.), Russell Vs. Meinong: The Legacy of "On Denoting". Routledge. pp. 65-77.
    It would be an understatement to say that Russell was interested in Cantorian diagonal paradoxes. His discovery of the various versions of Russell’s paradox—the classes version, the predicates version, the propositional functions version—had a lasting effect on his views in philosophical logic. Similar Cantorian paradoxes regarding propositions—such as that discussed in §500 of The Principles of Mathematics—were surely among the reasons Russell eventually abandoned his ontology of propositions.1 However, Russell’s reasons for abandoning what he called “denoting concepts”, and his rejection (...)
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  10. On Denoting.Bertrand Russell - 1905 - Mind 14 (56):479-493.
    By a `denoting phrase' I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England, the present King of France, the center of mass of the solar system at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round the earth. Thus a phrase is denoting solely in virtue of its form. We may distinguish (...)
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  11. Assertion and Incomplete Definite Descriptions.Nathan U. Salmon - 1982 - Philosophical Studies 42 (1):37--45.
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  12. On Designating.Nathan Salmon - 2005 - Mind 114 (456):1069-1133.
    A detailed interpretation is provided of the ‘Gray's Elegy’ passage in Russell's ‘On Denoting’. The passage is suffciently obscure that its principal lessons have been independently rediscovered. Russell attempts to demonstrate that the thesis that definite descriptions are singular terms is untenable. The thesis demands a distinction be drawn between content and designation, but the attempt to form a proposition directly about the content (as by using an appropriate form of quotation) inevitably results in a proposition about the thing designated (...)
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  13. Points, complexes, complex points, and a yacht.Nathan Salmon - 2009 - In Nicholas Griffin & Dale Jacquette (eds.), Russell Vs. Meinong: The Legacy of "on Denoting". Routledge.
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Attributive and Referential Uses of Descriptions
  1. "I am SO Humble!": On the Paradoxes of Humility.Brian Robinson - 2021 - In Mark Alfano, Michael Patrick Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 26-35.
    Humility is a paradoxical virtue. This should come as no great surprise. It doesn’t take much explanation for one to realize that if someone is boasting about how humble he is, then he probably is not humble. In fact, as we shall see, the paradoxical nature of humility has a long history, going back to at least Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. While it may not be a novel claim that there exists an apparent paradox of humility, I will (...)
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  2. Review of Reimer & Bezuidenhout (2004): Descriptions and Beyond. [REVIEW]John-Michael Kuczynski - 2006 - Pragmatics and Cognition 14 (1):196-204.
    In order to understand a sentence, one must know the relevant semantic rules. Those rules are not learned in a vacuum; they are given to one through one's senses. As a result, knowledge of semantic rules sometimes comes bundled with semantically irrelevant, but cognitively non-innocuous, knowledge of the circumstances in which those rules were learned. Thus, one must work through non-semantic information in order to know what is literally meant by a given sentence-token. A consequence is that one's knowledge of (...)
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  3. Pragmatic ambiguity and Kripke’s dialogue against Donnellan.Carlo Penco - 2019 - Ágora Filosófica 19 (1):103-134.
    DOIhttps://doi.org/10.25247/P1982-999X.2019.v19n1.p103-134• Esta obra está licenciada sob uma licençaCreative Commons Atribuição 4.0 InternacionalISSN 1982-999x|Pragmatic ambiguity and Kripke’s dialogue against DonnellanAmbiguidade Pragmática e o diálogo de Kripke contra DonnellanCarlo Penco (Universidade de Genova, Itália)AbstractIn this paper I discuss Donnellan’s claim of the pragmatic ambiguity of the distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite des-criptions. The literature on the topic is huge and full of alternative analysis. I will restrict myself to a very classical topos: the challenge posed by Kripke to Donnellan’s (...)
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  4. The Real Problem with Uniqueness.Andrei Moldovan - 2017 - SATS 18 (2):125-139.
    Arguments against the Russellian theory of definite descriptions based on cases that involve failures of uniqueness are a recurrent theme in the relevant literature. In this paper, I discuss a number of such arguments, from Strawson (1950), Ramachandran (1993) and Szabo (2005). I argue that the Russellian has resources to account for these data by deploying a variety of mechanisms of quantifier domain restrictions. Finally, I present a case that is more problematic for the Russellian. While the previous cases all (...)
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  5. Donnellan's Misdescriptions and Loose Talk.Carlo Penco - 2017 - In Kepa Korta Maria De Ponte (ed.), Reference and Representation in Language and Thought. Oxford (UK): Oxford University Press. pp. 104-125.
    Keith Donnellan wrote his paper on definite descriptions in 1966 at Cornell University, an environment where nearly everybody was discussing Wittgenstein’s ideas of meaning as use. However, his idea of different uses of definite descriptions became one of the fundamental tenets against descriptivism, which was considered one of the main legacies of the Frege–Russell– Wittgenstein view; and I wonder whether a more Wittgensteinian interpretation of Donnellan’s work is possible.
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  6. Descripciones definidas y su uso referencial: una propuesta contextualizada.Justina Diaz Legaspe - 2011 - Cuadernos de Filosofía 56:135-138.
    Las descripciones definidas pueden ser interpretadas de acuerdo con las dos lecturas propuestas por Donnellan. El presente trabajo presenta una interpretación contextualista de la lectura referencial de estas expresiones.
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  7. The Real distinction Between Descriptions and Indexicals.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2005 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 24 (3):49-74.
    Some contemporary semantic views defend an asymmetry thesis concerning defi-nite descriptions and indexicals. Semantically, indexicals are devices of singular refer-ence; they contribute objects to the contents of the speech acts made with utterances including them. Definite descriptions, on the other hand, are generalized quantifiers, behaving roughly the way Russell envisaged in “On Denoting”. The asymmetry thesis depends on the existence of a sufficiently clear-cut distinction between semantics and pragmatics, because indexicals and descriptions are often used in ways that apparently contradict (...)
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  8. Descriptions: Predicates or quantifiers?Berit Brogaard - 2007 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (1):117 – 136.
    In this paper I revisit the main arguments for a predicate analysis of descriptions in order to determine whether they do in fact undermine Russell's theory. I argue that while the arguments without doubt provide powerful evidence against Russell's original theory, it is far from clear that they tell against a quantificational account of descriptions.
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  9. Referential/attributive: A contextualist proposal.Francois Recanati - 1989 - Philosophical Studies 56 (3):217 - 249.
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Descriptions as Predicates
  1. Desires, Scope, and Tense.Delia Graff - 2003 - Philosophical Perspectives 17 (1):141-163.
    According to James McCawley (1981) and Richard Larson and Gabriel Segal (1995), the following sentence is three-ways ambiguous: -/- Harry wants to be the mayor of Kenai. -/- According to them also, the three-way ambiguity cannot be accommodated on the Russellian view that definite descriptions are quantified noun phrases. In order to capture the three-way ambiguity of the sentence, these authors propose that definite descriptions must be ambiguous: sometimes they are predicate expressions; sometimes they are Russellian quantified noun phrases. After (...)
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  2. Descriptions: Predicates or quantifiers?Berit Brogaard - 2007 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (1):117 – 136.
    In this paper I revisit the main arguments for a predicate analysis of descriptions in order to determine whether they do in fact undermine Russell's theory. I argue that while the arguments without doubt provide powerful evidence against Russell's original theory, it is far from clear that they tell against a quantificational account of descriptions.
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  3. Knowledge-the and propositional attitude ascriptions.Berit Brogaard - 2008 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 77 (1):147-190.
    Determiner phrases embedded under a propositional attitude verb have traditionally been taken to denote answers to implicit questions. For example, 'the capital of Vermont' as it occurs in 'John knows the capital of Vermont' has been thought to denote the proposition which answers the implicit question 'what is the capital of Vermont?' Thus, where 'know' is treated as a propositional attitude verb rather than an acquaintance verb, 'John knows the capital of Vermont' is true iff John knows that Montpelier is (...)
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  4. Sharvy's theory of definite descriptions revisited.Berit Brogaard - 2007 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88 (2):160–180.
    The paper revisits Sharvy's theory of plural definite descriptions. An alternative account of plural definite descriptions building on the ideas of plural quantification and non-distributive plural predication is developed. Finally, the alternative is extrapolated to account for generic uses of definite descriptions.
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  5. Descriptions as predicates.Delia Graff Fara - 2001 - Philosophical Studies 102 (1):1-42.
    Although Strawson’s main aim in “On Referring” was to argue that definite descriptions can be used referentially – that is, “to mention or refer to some individual person or single object . . . , in the course of doing what we should normally describe as making a statement about that person [or] object” (1950, p. 320) – he denied that definite descriptions are always used referentially. The description in ‘Napoleon was the greatest French soldier’ is not used referentially, says (...)
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  6. Descriptions with adverbs of quantification.Delia Graff Fara - 2006 - Philosophical Issues 16 (1):65–87.
    In “Descriptions as Predicates” (Fara 2001) I argued that definite and indefinite descriptions should be given a uniform semantic treatment as predicates rather than as quantifier phrases. The aim of the current paper is to clarify and elaborate one of the arguments for the descriptions-aspredicates view, one that concerns the interaction of descriptions with adverbs of quantification.
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Incompleteness of Descriptions
  1. Review of Reimer & Bezuidenhout (2004): Descriptions and Beyond. [REVIEW]John-Michael Kuczynski - 2006 - Pragmatics and Cognition 14 (1):196-204.
    In order to understand a sentence, one must know the relevant semantic rules. Those rules are not learned in a vacuum; they are given to one through one's senses. As a result, knowledge of semantic rules sometimes comes bundled with semantically irrelevant, but cognitively non-innocuous, knowledge of the circumstances in which those rules were learned. Thus, one must work through non-semantic information in order to know what is literally meant by a given sentence-token. A consequence is that one's knowledge of (...)
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  2. Wolpert, Chaitin and Wittgenstein 불가능, 불완전 성, 거짓말 쟁이 역설, 신념, 전산 한계, 비 양자 역학적 불확실성 원리 및 -Turing 기계 이론의 궁극적 이론(.Michael Richard Starks - 2020 - In 지구상의 지옥에 오신 것을 환영합니다 : 아기, 기후 변화, 비트 코인, 카르텔, 중국, 민주주의, 다양성, 역학, 평등, 해커, 인권, 이슬람, 자유주의, 번영, 웹, 혼돈, 기아, 질병, 폭력, 인공 지능, 전쟁. Las Vegas, NV USA: Reality Press. pp. 201-209.
    나는 컴퓨터로 계산과 우주의 한계에 대한 많은 최근의 토론을 읽었습니다, polymath 물리학자 및 결정 이론가 데이비드 울퍼트의 놀라운 작품에 대한 몇 가지 의견을 찾을 수 있기를 바라고 있지만 하나의 인용을 발견하지 않은 그래서 나는이 매우 간단한 요약을 제시. Wolpert는 계산을 수행하는 장치와 는 별개이며 물리학법칙과는 무관하므로 컴퓨터, 물리학 및 인간의 행동에 적용되므로 추론(계산)에 대한 제한에 대해 놀라운 불가능또는 불완전성 정리(1992년에서 2008년 참조 arxiv dot org)를 입증했습니다. 그들은 캔터의 대각선화, 거짓말쟁이 역설 및 세계관을 사용하여 튜링 머신 이론의 궁극적 인 정리가 될 (...)
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  3. O que significa paraconsistente, indecível, aleatório, computável e incompleto?- Uma revisão da ‘Godel’s Way: exploits into an undecidable world’ (Maneira de Godel: façanhas em um mundo indecidível) por Gregory Chaitin, Francisco A Doria, Newton C.A. da costa 160P (2012) (revisão revisada 2019).Michael Richard Starks - 2019 - In Delírios Utópicos Suicidas no Século XXI Filosofia, Natureza Humana e o Colapso da Civilization- Artigos e Comentários 2006-2019 5ª edição. Las Vegas, NV USA: Reality Press. pp. 168-182.
    Em "Godel's Way", três cientistas eminentes discutem questões como a undecidability, incompletude, aleatoriedade, computabilidade e paraconsistência. Eu abordar estas questões do ponto de vista Wittgensteinian que existem duas questões básicas que têm soluções completamente diferentes. Há as questões científicas ou empíricas, que são fatos sobre o mundo que precisam ser investigados observacionalmente e questões filosóficas sobre como a linguagem pode ser usada inteligìvelmente (que incluem certas questões em matemática e lógica), que precisam ser decidido por olhar uma como nós realmente (...)
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  4. Remarks on Wittgenstein, Gödel, Chaitin, Incompleteness, Impossiblity and the Psychological Basis of Science and Mathematics.Michael Richard Starks - 2019 - In Remarks on Impossibility, Incompleteness, Paraconsistency, Undecidability, Randomness, Computability, Paradox, Uncertainty and the Limits of Reason in Chaitin, Wittgenstein, Hofstadter, Wolpert, Doria, da Costa, Godel, Searle, Rodych, Berto, Floyd, Moyal. Reality Press. pp. 24-38.
    It is commonly thought that such topics as Impossibility, Incompleteness, Paraconsistency, Undecidability, Randomness, Computability, Paradox, Uncertainty and the Limits of Reason are disparate scientific physical or mathematical issues having little or nothing in common. I suggest that they are largely standard philosophical problems (i.e., language games) which were resolved by Wittgenstein over 80 years ago. -/- Wittgenstein also demonstrated the fatal error in regarding mathematics or language or our behavior in general as a unitary coherent logical ‘system,’ rather than as (...)
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  5. Über die deskriptive Unerschöpflichkeit der Einzeldinge.Geert Keil - 2006 - In Geert Keil & Udo Tietz (eds.), Phänomenologie und Sprachanalyse. mentis. pp. 83-125.
    Der Topos von der Unerschöpflichkeit des Gegenstands wird mit der Phänomenologie assoziiert. Den ihm verwandten Topos von der Unaussprechlichkeit des Individuellen haben Goethe und die deutschen Romantiker in die Welt getragen. Der Diktion der analytischen Philosophie sind die Ausdrücke „unerschöpflich“ und „unaussprechlich“ fremd. Dieser Umstand sollte analytische Philosophen nicht davon abhalten, sich den sprachphilosophischen und ontologischen Problemen zuzuwenden, die sich hinter den besagten Formeln verbergen. Husserls Wort für Unerschöpflichkeit ist „Fülle“. Die „Fülle des Gegenstandes“ erläutert Husserl als den „Inbegriff der (...)
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  6. A Problem for Predicativism Not Solved by Predicativism.Anders J. Schoubye - forthcoming - Semantics and Pragmatics.
    In 'The Reference Book' (2012), Hawthorne and Manley observe the following contrast between (1) and (2): -/- (1) In every race John won. (2) In every race, the colt won. -/- The name 'John' in (1) must intuitively refer to the same single individual for each race. However, the description 'the colt' in (2) has a co-varying reading, i.e. a reading where for each race it refers to a different colt. This observation is a prima facie problem for proponents of (...)
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  7. Names Are Predicates.Delia Graff Fara - 2015 - Philosophical Review 124 (1):59-117.
    One reason to think that names have a predicate-type semantic value is that they naturally occur in count-noun positions: ‘The Michaels in my building both lost their keys’; ‘I know one incredibly sharp Cecil and one that's incredibly dull’. Predicativism is the view that names uniformly occur as predicates. Predicativism flies in the face of the widely accepted view that names in argument position are referential, whether that be Millian Referentialism, direct-reference theories, or even Fregean Descriptivism. But names are predicates (...)
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  8. Incomplete Descriptions, Incomplete Quantified Expressions (Part of the dissertation portfolio Modality, Names and Descriptions).Zsófia Zvolenszky - 2007 - Dissertation, New York University
    This paper offers a unified, quantificational treatment of incomplete descriptions like ‘the table’. An incomplete quantified expression like ‘every bottle’ (as in “Every bottle is empty”) can feature in true utterances despite the fact that the world contains nonempty bottles. Positing a contextual restriction on the bottles being talked about is a straightforward solution. It is argued that the same strategy can be extended to incomplete definite descriptions across the board. ncorporating the contextual restrictions into semantics involves meeting a complex (...)
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  9. On a unitary semantical analysis for definite and indefinite descriptions.Peter Ludlow & Gabriel Segal - 2004 - In Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and Beyond. Oxford University Press. pp. 420-437.
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  10. The semantics and pragmatics of complex demonstratives.Ernest Lepore & Kirk Ludwig - 2000 - Mind 109 (434):199-240.
    Complex demonstratives, expressions of the form 'That F', 'These Fs', etc., have traditionally been taken to be referring terms. Yet they exhibit many of the features of quantified noun phrases. This has led some philosophers to suggest that demonstrative determiners are a special kind of quantifier, which can be paraphrased using a context sensitive definite description. Both these views contain elements of the truth, though each is mistaken. We advance a novel account of the semantic form of complex demonstratives that (...)
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  11. Parts and Wholes in Semantics.Friederike Moltmann - 1997 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    This book present a unified semantic theory of expressions involving the notions of part and whole. It develops a theory of part structures which differs from traditional (extensional) mereological theories in that the notion of an integrated whole plays a central role and in that the part structure of an entity is allowed to vary across different situations, perspectives, and dimensions. The book presents a great range of empirical generalizations involving plurals, mass nouns, adnominal and adverbial modifiers such as 'whole', (...)
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Indefinite Descriptions
  1. Definiteness in English and Estonian: same pragmatic principles, different syntaxes (Määravus inglise ja eesti keeles: samad pragmaatilised põhimõtted, erinevad süntaksid).Alex Davies - 2023 - In Bruno Mölder & Jaan Kangilaski (eds.), Keel, vaim, tunnetus. Analüütilise filosoofia seminar 30+. Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus. pp. 59-83.
    Estonian doesn't have a definite article. Instead, bare singular noun phrases can unambiguously bear either a definite interpretation or an indefinite interpretation. This paper argues that the pragmatic principles governing the felicitous use of three English articles ("a", "the" and "another"), described by A Grønn and KJ Sæbø (2012, 'A, the, another: A game of same and different' Journal of Logic, Language and Information 21, 75-95) can also account for the conditions under which a bare singular noun phrase in Estonian (...)
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  2. Review of Reimer & Bezuidenhout (2004): Descriptions and Beyond. [REVIEW]John-Michael Kuczynski - 2006 - Pragmatics and Cognition 14 (1):196-204.
    In order to understand a sentence, one must know the relevant semantic rules. Those rules are not learned in a vacuum; they are given to one through one's senses. As a result, knowledge of semantic rules sometimes comes bundled with semantically irrelevant, but cognitively non-innocuous, knowledge of the circumstances in which those rules were learned. Thus, one must work through non-semantic information in order to know what is literally meant by a given sentence-token. A consequence is that one's knowledge of (...)
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  3. Termos Singulares Indefinidos: Frege, Russell e a tradição matemática.Daniel Durante Pereira Alves - 2016 - Saberes: Filosofia E Educação (Filosofia Lógica e Metafísica An):33-53.
    É bem conhecida a divergência entre as posições de Gottlob Frege e Bertrand Russell com relação ao tratamento semântico dado a sentenças contendo termos singulares indefinidos, ou seja, termos singulares sem referência ou com referência ambígua, tais como ‘Papai Noel’ ou ‘o atual rei da França’ ou ‘1/0 ’ ou ‘√4’ ou ‘o autor de Principia Mathematica’. Para Frege, as sentenças da linguagem natural que contêm termos indefinidos não formam declarações e portanto não são nem verdadeiras nem falsas. Já para (...)
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  4. The interpretation of indefinites in future tense sentences. A novel argument for the modality of will?Fabio Del Prete - 2014 - In Mikhail Kissine, Philippe de Brabanter & Saghie Sharifzadeh (eds.), Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought. Oxford University Press.
    The chapter considers two semantic issues concerning will-sentences: Stalnaker’s Asymmetry and modal subordination in Karttunen-type discourses. The former points to a distinction between will and modal verbs, seeming to show that will does not license non-specific indefinites. The latter, conversely, suggests that will-sentences involve some kind of modality. To account for the data, the chapter proposes that will is semantically a tense, hence it doesn’t contribute a quantifier over modal alternatives; a modal feature, however, is introduced in the interpretation of (...)
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  5. Incomplete Descriptions, Incomplete Quantified Expressions (Part of the dissertation portfolio Modality, Names and Descriptions).Zsófia Zvolenszky - 2007 - Dissertation, New York University
    This paper offers a unified, quantificational treatment of incomplete descriptions like ‘the table’. An incomplete quantified expression like ‘every bottle’ (as in “Every bottle is empty”) can feature in true utterances despite the fact that the world contains nonempty bottles. Positing a contextual restriction on the bottles being talked about is a straightforward solution. It is argued that the same strategy can be extended to incomplete definite descriptions across the board. ncorporating the contextual restrictions into semantics involves meeting a complex (...)
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  6. On a unitary semantical analysis for definite and indefinite descriptions.Peter Ludlow & Gabriel Segal - 2004 - In Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and Beyond. Oxford University Press. pp. 420-437.
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  7. Sharvy's theory of definite descriptions revisited.Berit Brogaard - 2007 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88 (2):160–180.
    The paper revisits Sharvy's theory of plural definite descriptions. An alternative account of plural definite descriptions building on the ideas of plural quantification and non-distributive plural predication is developed. Finally, the alternative is extrapolated to account for generic uses of definite descriptions.
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Presuppositional Account of Descriptions
  1. Understanding Frege’s notion of presupposition.Thorsten Sander - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12603-12624.
    Why did Frege offer only proper names as examples of presupposition triggers? Some scholars claim that Frege simply did not care about the full range of presuppositional phenomena. This paper argues, in contrast, that he had good reasons for employing an extremely narrow notion of ‘Voraussetzung’. On Frege’s view, many devices that are now construed as presupposition triggers either express several thoughts at once or merely ‘illuminate’ a thought in a particular way. Fregean presuppositions, in contrast, are essentially tied to (...)
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  2. Presuppositional Anaphora Is The Sobel Truth.Daniel Dohrn - 2017 - In Salvatore Pistoia-Reda & Filippo Domaneschi (eds.), Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Approaches on Implicatures and Presuppositions. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 199-238.
    Sobel sequences have had a huge impact on the discussion of counterfactuals. They can be composed of conditionals and mere descriptions. What is especially puzzling about them is that they are often felicitously uttered when their reversal is not. Up to now, there is no unified explanation. I examine two strategies. We might begin with conditionals and proceed to descriptions. Or we might begin with descriptions and proceed to conditionals. I argue for the latter variant and outline a universal theory (...)
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Russell's Theory of Descriptions
  1. Definiteness in English and Estonian: same pragmatic principles, different syntaxes (Määravus inglise ja eesti keeles: samad pragmaatilised põhimõtted, erinevad süntaksid).Alex Davies - 2023 - In Bruno Mölder & Jaan Kangilaski (eds.), Keel, vaim, tunnetus. Analüütilise filosoofia seminar 30+. Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus. pp. 59-83.
    Estonian doesn't have a definite article. Instead, bare singular noun phrases can unambiguously bear either a definite interpretation or an indefinite interpretation. This paper argues that the pragmatic principles governing the felicitous use of three English articles ("a", "the" and "another"), described by A Grønn and KJ Sæbø (2012, 'A, the, another: A game of same and different' Journal of Logic, Language and Information 21, 75-95) can also account for the conditions under which a bare singular noun phrase in Estonian (...)
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  2. A Quantificational Analysis of the Liar Paradox.Matheus Silva - manuscript
    It seems that the most common strategy to solve the liar paradox is to argue that liar sentences are meaningless and, consequently, truth-valueless. The other main option that has grown in recent years is the dialetheist view that treats liar sentences as meaningful, truth-apt and true. In this paper I will offer a new approach that does not belong in either camp. I hope to show that liar sentences can be interpreted as meaningful, truth-apt and false, but without engendering any (...)
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