The theory of descriptions, presented informally in "On Denoting" and more formally in Principia Mathematica, has been endorsed by many linguists and philosophers of language as a contribution to natural-language semantics. However, the syntax of Principia’s formal language is far from ideal as a tool for the analysis of natural language. Stephen Neale has proposed a reconstruction of the theory of descriptions in a language of restricted quantification that gives a better approximation of the syntax of English (and, arguably, of (...) other natural languages). This has led to resistance from some Russell scholars who object to the identification of descriptions with quantifiers at the level of logical form in this new language on the grounds that the identification fails to respect the Russellian conception of descriptions as incomplete symbols. I defend Neale’s reconstruction of the theory and argue that he has preserved everything essential to the theory, including the notion of an incomplete symbol. However, I then go on to argue, contrary to Neale and his objectors as well as Russell himself, that the doctrine of incomplete symbols is a superfluous and undesirable element of the theory that is best jettisoned from the theory. (shrink)

Many epistemologists have been attracted to the view that knowledge-wh can be reduced to knowledge-that. An important challenge to this, presented by Jonathan Schaffer, is the problem of “convergent knowledge”: reductive accounts imply that any two knowledge-wh ascriptions with identical true answers to the questions embedded in their wh-clauses are materially equivalent, but according to Schaffer, there are counterexamples to this equivalence. Parallel to this, Schaffer has presented a very similar argument against binary accounts of knowledge, and thereby in favour (...) of his alternative contrastive account, relying on similar examples of apparently inequivalent knowledge ascriptions, which binary accounts treat as equivalent. In this article, I develop a unified diagnosis and solution to these problems for the reductive and binary accounts, based on a general theory of knowledge ascriptions that embed presuppositional expressions. All of Schaffer's apparent counterexamples embed presuppositional expressions, and once the effect of these is taken into account, it becomes apparent that the counterexamples depend on an illicit equivocation of contexts. Since epistemologists often rely on knowledge ascriptions that embed presuppositional expressions, the general theory of them presented here will have ramifications beyond defusing Schaffer's argument. (shrink)

The paper, although polemical for the most part, also presents a substantive thesis. The polemical part is directed at the claim that the Platonic Socrates held that philosophy as a practice is to be devoted to the care of self and others, and that the expression of emotion is an important aspect of the philosophic life. To undermine that claim, counter-examples from the autobiographical narrative in the Phaedo and the speeches of Diotima and Alcibiades in the Symposium are brought in. (...) Once analysed at the required depth, those passages show that, on the contrary, Plato's Socrates remains consistently dispassionate both in his life, as he narrates it, and in the views he is made to express in the two dialogues. Rather than promoting self-expression, Socrates never ceased to warn us against misology. (shrink)

Ratio, Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 104-111, June 2022.

Section I gives an overview of the contents of “Words and Contents”, and lays out the plan for this Critical Notice. Section II expounds Vallée’s Perry-inspired Pluri-Propositional semantic framework, and Section III is an in-depth case study, focused on complex demonstratives. In Sections IV-V we develop some criticisms, and in Section VI we suggest a solution to these difficulties, which builds on Vallée’s innovative work.

Are inborn characteristics deserved or undeserved? Using Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and Peter Strawson's objection to this theory, I argue that this question does not make sense. In order to know whether a person deserves something she has, it is necessary to evaluate what she did before having it. But people did not exist before their birth, so they did not exist before having their inborn characteristics. Therefore, talking about people deserving their inborn characteristics does not make sense: these (...) characteristics are neither deserved nor undeserved. (shrink)

‘A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science’.How many paradoxes are there? By 1920, Bertrand Russell's star student had concluded that there are few or zero paradoxes in philosophy. Most philosophical propositions ‘are not false but nonsensical’.

Reply to Beaney: the closing of the historical mindIn his comments, Michael Beaney sets himself up as the arbiter of what is genuine history and what isn’t. While celebrating the outpouring of specialized scholarship on Frege, he has no patience with the enterprise outlined in the Précis, which attempts to construct a large-scale picture of the richness of the analytic tradition. That enterprise is one in which great figures of our recent past are challenged by aspects of contemporary thought, and (...) our current struggles are enriched by insights of theirs that haven’t been fully absorbed. Although some work of this sort can be done piecemeal, one historical figure at a time, there is much to be learned from a more encompassing perspective. While no picture constructed by a single author can be authoritative about everything, the attempt to give informative, connected assessments of major milestones in the tradition is our best hope of understanding who we are and where we have come from. (shrink)

The paper reviews the central components of the cognitive theory of propositions and explains both its empirical advantages for theories of language and mind and its foundational metaphysical and epistemological advantages over other theories. It then answers a leading objection to the theory, before closing by raising the issue of how questions, which are the contents of interrogative sentences, and directives, which are the contents of imperative sentences, are related to propositions.

Perhaps the most pressing challenge for singularism—the predominant view that definite plurals like ‘the students’ singularly refer to a collective entity, such as a mereological sum or set—is that it threatens paradox. Indeed, this serves as a primary motivation for pluralism—the opposing view that definite plurals refer to multiple individuals simultaneously through the primitive relation of plural reference. Groups represent one domain in which this threat is immediate. After all, groups resemble sets in having a kind of membership-relation and iterating: (...) we can have groups of groups, groups of groups of groups, etc. Yet there cannot be a group of all non-self-membered groups. In response, we develop a potentialist theory of groups according to which we always can, but do not have to, form a group from any sum. Modalizing group-formation makes it a species of potential, as opposed to actual or completed, infinity. This allows for a consistent, plausible, and empirically adequate treatment of natural language plurals, one which is motivated by the iterative nature of syntactic and semantic processes more generally. (shrink)

Russell claims that ordinary proper names are eccentric, i.e. that the semantic referent of a name is determined by the descriptive condition that the individual utterer of the name associates with the name. This is deeply puzzling, for the evidence that names are subject to interpersonal coordination seems irrefutable. One way of making sense of Russell’s view would be to claim that he has been systematically misinterpreted and did not, in fact, offer a semantic theory at all. Such a view (...) is put forward in Sainsbury Departing from Frege, Routledge, London, 2002). Sainsbury claims that Russellian descriptivism is not the theory that the thought in the mind of the speaker determines the semantic reference of a name, but simply a theory about the thought in the mind of the speaker using a name. I argue that the truth is subtly different, and points the way towards an intuitive explanation of Russell’s eccentricity. (shrink)

This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so much (...) to demonstrate the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 2, Page 326-347, April 2022.

Although the historical‐causal picture of reference Kripke sketches in Naming and Necessity is highly influential, Kripke in fact says very little about what reference is and how it comes about. In this paper I point out that the possibility of asking WH‐questions (i.e. ‘what?’, ‘who?’, ‘which?’) about a sound or inscription pattern (e.g., what does that refer to?) shows that in case of names especially, their reference, if there is one, will be preserved by a causal‐historical chain constituted by transmissions (...) of the (physical) patterns themselves, even in absence of language users or any linguistic intentions. I sketch out a causal‐informational theory of reference, that holds that the causal aspect of refence transmission is due to two‐factors. On the other hand there are informational chains constituted by data transmissions, on the other, also communicational rules by which speakers can interpret the data as information of something are needed. In most part the causal‐informational theory sketched in the paper can be viewed as complementing Kripke’s original causal picture. However, I will argue that Kripke's account of fixing the reference of proper names in ‘initial baptisms’ is inadequate. I will argue that most cases of seemingly fixing the reference via use of a definite description (e.g., the naming of Neptune) in fact presuppose a prior causal‐informational connection to the named object, thus essentially fixing the reference in the same way as in cases of baptism by ostension. I will further argue that in the cases that do not fall into the previous category, the baptism by definite description simply fail to fix any reference. I thus conclude that there is no such thing as fixing the reference of a proper name by definite description. (shrink)

In §442 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein criticizes the application of Russell’s theory of descriptions to the sentence in the title without mentioning Russell or his theory. Wittgenstein is making a general point of wider interest. I have two aims. The first is to situate Wittgenstein’s critique within the larger theoretical setting of Russell’s theory of descriptions and Frege’s theory of indirect reference in light of the familiar problem of quantifying into attitude contexts. The second is to draw broader methodological implications (...) from the foregoing for how best to think of the role of individual semantic paraphrases within the formal semantic study of natural language. (shrink)

The question of the origin of polyadic expressivity is explored and the results are brought to bear on Bertrand Russell's 1903 theory of denoting concepts, which is the main object of criticism in his 1905 "On Denoting". It is shown that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the background ontology of the earlier theory of denoting enables the full-blown expressive power of first-order polyadic quantification theory without any syntactic accommodation of scopal differences among denoting phrases such as 'all φ', 'every φ', (...) and 'any φ' on the one hand, and 'some φ' and 'a φ' on the other. The case provides an especially vivid illustration of the general point that structural (or ideological) austerity can be paid for in the coin of ontological extravagance. (shrink)

Smith shoots Jones intentionally but kills Jones unintentionally. How can a single act be both intentional and unintentional? Fine's theory of embodiment construes the compatibility of intentional shooting with unintentional killing through a pluralist framework of qua objects that distinguishes the act qua being a shooting from the act qua being a killing as two distinct qua objects. I compare this pluralist account with a more traditional monist take on qua modification according to which there is only one item there, (...) a single act which is intentional qua being a shooting and unintentional qua being a killing. According to the latter monist view, to be intentional is to bear a relation to a qua property. I argue that consideration of our moral practices from a participant standpoint gives the monist view a clear advantage over its pluralist rival. I end by sketching a monist alternative superior to both. (shrink)

Here, the logical behaviour of negation in Wittgenstein's Tractatus is compared with Demos' account of denial. Even if we hold negation as a pure syntactical device, at least in some context, it brings a handful of complex semantic information – potentially an infinite amount. We advocate then the existence of at least two negations due to the existence of two different and non-reducible types of exclusion. The first negation is a Tractarian and classical one, based on the notion of contradiction, (...) whereas the second is a non-classical negation, based on the notion of contrariety. (shrink)

In this paper it will be shown that a substantial conception of semantics, one that does not regard semantic phenomena as subsumed under pragmatic ones, is necessary to account for what cries out for an explanation regarding the old problem of the semantic relevance of the referential/attributive distinction, as applied to singular definite descriptions. I consider some alternative proposals to deal with the data, showing why they are wrong, and I finish by establishing that some arguments that allegedly derive the (...) conclusion that some substantial conception of semantics is basically wrong, simply beg the question against their opponents, assuming a form of the very conclusion they want to vindicate. (shrink)

Just about every theorist holds that vague terms are context-sensitive to some extent. What counts as ?tall?, ?rich?, and ?bald? depends on the ambient comparison class, paradigm cases, and/or the like. To take a stock example, a given person might be tall with respect to European entrepreneurs and downright short with respect to professional basketball players. It is also generally agreed that vagueness remains even after comparison class, paradigm cases, etc. are fixed, and so this context sensitivity does not solve (...) the problems with vague terms. In this paper, I briefly sketch the main features of my broadly contextualist account of vagueness, that of the late Ruth Manor, and that of Agustín Rayo, showing how the three accounts relate to, and reinforce, each other, noting a seeming difference. A key item used to articulate my own view is David Lewis's notion of conversational score. This is used to track which borderline cases have been called in the course of a conversation. Manor alludes to Lewis's notion of accommodation, a key aspect of the kinematics of conversation, and Rayo invokes Stalnaker's notion of common ground. I'll show how the conversational score could be employed to develop and extend their views, showing how vague terms, as they construe them, are (or can be) deployed in conversation, consistent with both the underlying indeterminacy of the terms and normal communicative goals. To help develop all three views further, I invoke Craige Roberts's notion of Retrievability, a tool developed to show how definites, such as definite descriptions, singular pronouns, and proper names, are deployed in conversation, in a Lewis-style scorekeeping framework. This, I think, is exactly the right way to understand conversations in what Manor calls non-sorities situations and, to invoke my own view, in sorites situations as well. (shrink)

Some authors have claimed that ante rem structuralism has problems with structures that have indiscernible places. In response, I argue that there is no requirement that mathematical objects be individuated in a non-trivial way. Metaphysical principles and intuitions to the contrary do not stand up to ordinary mathematical practice, which presupposes an identity relation that, in a sense, cannot be defined. In complex analysis, the two square roots of –1 are indiscernible: anything true of one of them is true of (...) the other. I suggest that ‘i’ functions like a parameter in natural deduction systems. I gave an early version of this paper at a workshop on structuralism in mathematics and science, held in the Autumn of 2006, at Bristol University. Thanks to the organizers, particularly Hannes Leitgeb, James Ladyman, and Øystein Linnebo, to my commentator Richard Pettigrew, and to the audience there. The paper also benefited considerably from a preliminary session at the Arché Research Centre at the University of St Andrews. I am indebted to my colleagues Craige Roberts, for help with the linguistics literature, and Ben Caplan and Gabriel Uzquiano, for help with the metaphysics. Thanks also to Hannes Leitgeb and Jeffrey Ketland for reading an earlier version of the manuscript and making helpful suggestions. I also benefited from conversations with Richard Heck, John Mayberry, Kevin Scharp, and Jason Stanley. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

There is an interesting logical/semantic issue with some mathematical languages and theories. In the language of (pure) complex analysis, the two square roots of i’ manage to pick out a unique object? This is perhaps the most prominent example of the phenomenon, but there are some others. The issue is related to matters concerning the use of definite descriptions and singular pronouns, such as donkey anaphora and the problem of indistinguishable participants. Taking a cue from some work in linguistics and (...) the philosophy of language, I suggest that i functions like a parameter in natural deduction systems. This may require some rethinking of the role of singular terms, at least in mathematical languages. (shrink)

In this article, I suggest an original solution to the Liar Paradox, based on the pragmatic theory of speech acts. This solution implies making a distinction between two concepts of truth: the intentional truth of a speaker’s utterances directed toward an addressee with the objective of obtaining a consensual agreement; the effective truth objectively recognized by the addressee in the speaker’s utterances. In view of reaching this new solution to the classic paradox, I conduct a critical review of solutions put (...) forward by Tarski, Kripke and Strawson. (shrink)

The prime purpose of this paper is, first, to restore to discourse-bound occasion sentences their rightful central place in semantics and secondly, taking these as the basic propositional elements in the logical analysis of language, to contribute to the development of an adequate logic of occasion sentences and a mathematical foundation for such a logic, thus preparing the ground for more adequate semantic, logical and mathematical foundations of the study of natural language. Some of the insights elaborated in this paper (...) have appeared in the literature over the past thirty years, and a number of new developments have resulted from them. The present paper aims atproviding an integrated conceptual basis for this new development in semantics. In Section 1 it is argued that the reduction by translation of occasion sentences to eternal sentences, as proposed by Russell and Quine, is semantically and thus logically inadequate. Natural language is a system of occasion sentences, eternal sentences being merely boundary cases. The logic hasfewer tasks than is standardly assumed, as it excludes semantic calculi, which depend crucially on information supplied by cognition and context and thus belong to cognitive psychology rather than to logic. For sentences to express a proposition and thus be interpretable and informative, they must first be properly anchored in context. A proposition has a truth value when it is, moreover, properly keyed in the world, i.e. is about a situation in the world. Section 2 deals with the logical properties of natural language. It argues that presuppositional phenomena require trivalence and presents the trivalent logic PPC3, with two kinds of falsity and two negations. It introduces the notion of -space for a sentence A as the basis of logical model theory, and the notion of P A /, functioning as a `private' subuniverse for A/A. The trivalent Kleene calculus is reinterpreted as a logical account of vagueness, rather than of presupposition. PPC3 and the Kleene calculus are refinements of standard bivalent logic and can be combined into one logical system. In Section 3 the adequacy of PPC3 as a truth-functional model of presupposition is considered more closely and given a Boolean foundation. In a noncompositional extended Boolean algebra, three operators are defined: 1a for the conjoined presuppositions of a, ã for the complement of a within 1a, and â for the complement of 1a within Boolean 1. The logical properties of this extended Boolean algebra are axiomatically defined and proved for all possible models. Proofs are provided of the consistency and the completeness of the system. Section 4 is a provisional exploration of the possibility of using the results obtained for a new discourse-dependent account of the logic of modalities in natural language. The overall result is a modified and refined logical and model-theoretic machinery, which takes into account both the discourse-dependency of natural language sentences and the necessity of selecting a key in the world before a truth value can be assigned. (shrink)

Contrary to received opinion, the Aristotelian Square of Opposition (square) is logically sound, differing from standard modern predicate logic (SMPL) only in that it restricts the universe U of cognitively constructible situations by banning null predicates, making it less unnatural than SMPL. U-restriction strengthens the logic without making it unsound. It also invites a cognitive approach to logic. Humans are endowed with a cognitive predicate logic (CPL), which checks the process of cognitive modelling (world construal) for consistency. The square is (...) considered a first approximation to CPL, with a cognitive set-theoretic semantics. Not being cognitively real, the null set Ø is eliminated from the semantics of CPL. Still rudimentary in Aristotle’s On Interpretation (Int), the square was implicitly completed in his Prior Analytics (PrAn), thereby introducing U-restriction. Abelard’s reconstruction of the logic of Int is logically and historically correct; the loca (Leaking O-Corner Analysis) interpretation of the square, defended by some modern logicians, is logically faulty and historically untenable. Generally, U-restriction, not redefining the universal quantifier, as in Abelard and loca, is the correct path to a reconstruction of CPL. Valuation Space modelling is used to compute the effects of U-restriction. (shrink)

This paper aims to introduce Meinongian Abstractionism (MA), i.e. a view on the metaphysics of truthmaking and modality. This approach is based on the notion of objectives—one of the key elements of Alexius Meinong’s Theory of Objects. In the light of it, worlds are interpreted in terms of sets of subsistent and non-subsistent objectives. This—along with Meinong’s characterization of objectives—provides a ground for possible as well as impossible worlds. One of the consequences of Meinongain Abstractionism is a reformulation of the (...) relation of truthmaking in modal terms. Importantly, this reformulation avoids the problem of too-coarse grained analysis of truthmakers. This makes MA a metaphysically–oriented supporter of the so-called ‘hyperintensional revolution.’. (shrink)

The subject of this article is the Principle of Characterization—the most controversial principle of Alexius Meinong’s Theory of Objects. The aim of this text is twofold. First of all, to show that Bertrand Russell’s well-known objection to the Principle of Characterization can be reformulated against contemporary unrestricted interpretations of it. Second, to propose an alternative formulation of this principle. This refers to the methodology of metaphysics and is based on the distinction between pre-theoretical and theoretical languages. The proposed formulation fits (...) well with every type of contemporary interpretation of the Theory of Objects and helps to overcome Russell’s criticism. (shrink)

The subject of this article is the Principle of Characterization—the most controversial principle of Alexius Meinong’s Theory of Objects. The aim of this text is twofold. First of all, to show that Bertrand Russell’s well-known objection to the Principle of Characterization can be reformulated against contemporary unrestricted interpretations of it. Second, to propose an alternative formulation of this principle. This refers to the methodology of metaphysics and is based on the distinction between pre-theoretical and theoretical languages. The proposed formulation fits (...) well with every type of contemporary interpretation of the Theory of Objects and helps to overcome Russell’s criticism. (shrink)

The subject of my article is the principle of characterization – the most controversial principle of Meinong’s Theory of Objects. The aim of this text is twofold. First of all, I would like to show that Russell’s well-known objection to Meinong’s Theory of Objects can be reformulated against a new modal interpretation of Meinongianism that is presented mostly by Graham Priest. Secondly, I would like to propose a strategy which gives uncontroversial restriction to the principle of characterization and which allows (...) to avoid Russell’s argument. The strategy is based on the distinction between object- and metalanguage, and it applies to modal Meinongianism as well as to other so-called Meinongian theories. (shrink)

The Negation Problem states that expressivism has insufficient structure to account for the various ways in which a moral sentence can be negated. We argue that the Negation Problem does not arise for expressivist accounts of all normative language but arises only for the specific examples on which expressivists usually focus. In support of this claim, we argue for the following three theses: 1) a problem that is structurally identical to the Negation Problem arises in non-normative cases, and this problem (...) is solved once the hidden quantificational structure involved in such cases is uncovered; 2) the terms ‘required’, ‘permissible’, and ‘forbidden’ can also be analyzed in terms of hidden quantificational structure, and the Negation Problem disappears once this hidden structure is uncovered; 3) the Negation Problem does not arise for normative language that has no hidden quantificational structure. We conclude that the Negation Problem is not really a problem about expressivism at all but is rather a feature of the quantificational structure of the required, permitted, and forbidden. (shrink)

The-Predicativism is the view that names are count nouns. For example, the meaning of the name ‘Louise’ is roughly the property of being called Louise. Moreover, proponents of this view maintain that names that are ostensibly in argument position of a predicate are covert definite descriptions. In recent years, The-Predicativism has acquired a number of new supporters, mainly Elbourne (), Matushansky (), and Fara (). And while it was pointed out by Kripke () that these kinds of views generally struggle (...) with capturing the rigidity of proper names, these new views are alleged to solve this problem. In this paper I argue that the more recent versions of the view continue to struggle. In particular, I show that the views fail to provide an explanatory and/or empirically adequate analysis of rigidity. My discussions of these views are then supplemented with a general diagnosis of the problem and an explanation of why it is unlikely to be solved by The-Predicativism. (shrink)

The orthodox view of proper names, Millianism, provides a very simple and elegant explanation of the semantic contribution of referential uses of names–names that occur as bare singulars and as the argument of a predicate. However, one problem for Millianism is that it cannot explain the semantic contribution of predicative uses of names. In recent years, an alternative view, so-called the-predicativism, has become increasingly popular. According to the-predicativists, names are uniformly count nouns. This straightforwardly explains why names can be used (...) predicatively, but is prima facie less congenial to an analysis of referential uses. To address this issue, the-predicativists argue that referential names are in fact complex determiner phrases consisting of a covert definite determiner and a count noun—and so, a referential name is a definite description. In this paper, I will argue that despite the appearance of increased theoretical complexity, the view that names are ambiguous between predicative and referential types is in fact superior to the unitary the-predicativist view. However, I will also argue that to see why this ambiguity view is better, we need to give up the standard Millian analysis. Consequently, I will first propose an alternative analysis of referential names that retains the virtues of Millianism, but provides an important explanatory connection to the predicative uses. Once this analysis of names is adopted, the explanation for why names are systematically ambiguous between referential and predicative types is both simple and elegant. Second, I will argue that the-predicativism has the appearance of being simpler than an ambiguity view, but is in fact unable to account for certain key properties of referential names without making ad hoc stipulations. (shrink)

The Generalized Integration Challenge is the task of providing, for a given domain of discourse, a simultaneously acceptable metaphysics, epistemology and metasemantics and showing them to be so. In this paper, we focus on a metaethical position for which seems particularly acute: the brand of normative realism which takes normative properties to be mind-independent and causally inert. The problem is that these metaphysical commitments seem to make normative knowledge impossible. We suggest that bringing metasemantics into play can help to resolve (...) this puzzle. We propose an independently plausible metasemantic constraint on reference determination and show how it can provide a plausible response to for this brand of normative realism. (shrink)

It is commonly argued that natural language has the expressive power of quantifying over intensional entities, such as times, worlds, or situations. A standard way of modelling this assumes that there are unpronounced but syntactically represented variables of the corresponding type. Not all that much as has been said, however, about the exact syntactic location of these variables. Meanwhile, recent work has highlighted a number of problems that arise because the interpretive options for situation pronouns seem to be subject to (...) various restrictions. This paper is primarily concerned with situation pronouns inside of determiner phrases, arguing that they are introduced as arguments of (certain) determiners. Verbal predicates, on the other hand, are assumed to not combine with a situation pronoun. The various restrictions on their interpretation are shown to fall out from the semantic system that is developed based on that view. Further support for such an account comes from situation semantic analyses of donkey sentences as well as data on the temporal interpretation of nominal predicates. Its ability to account for this full range of data in a unified manner is shown to set it apart from previous proposals. The paper closes with an outlook on further extensions, including an account of quantifier domain restriction based on situation pronouns. (shrink)

The proper statement and assessment of Russell's theory depends on one's semantic presuppositions. A semantic framework is provided, and Russell's theory formulated in terms of it. Referential uses of descriptions raise familiar problems for the theory, to which there are, at the most general level of abstraction, two possible Russellian responses. Both are considered, and both found wanting. The paper ends with a brief consideration of what the correct positive theory of definite descriptions might be, if it is not the (...) Russellian theory. (shrink)

The sentence Irving was closer to me than he was to most of the others contains a quantifier, most of the other, in the scope a comparative. The first part of this paper explains the challenges presented by such cases to existing approaches to the semantics of the comparative. The second part presents a new analysis of comparatives based on intervals rather than points on a scale. This innovation is analogized to the move from moments to intervals in tense semantics. (...) The remainder of the paper is concerned with an interval-based semantics of degree in relation to issues other than the comparative proper. The paper begins with a discussion of the role negative polarity has played in studies on the semantics of comparatives. (shrink)

MILLIANISM and DESCRIPTIVISM are without question the two most prominent views with respect to the semantics of proper names. However, debates between MILLIANS and DESCRIPTIVISTS have tended to focus on a fairly narrow set of linguistic data and an equally narrow set of problems, mainly how to solve with Frege's puzzle and how to guarantee rigidity. In this article, the author focuses on a set of data that has been given less attention in these debates—namely, so-called predicative uses, bound uses, (...) and shifted uses of names. The author first shows that these data points seem to favor a DESCRIPTIVIST view over a MILLIAN view, but the author then introduces an alternative view of names that not only provides a simple and elegant way of dealing with the data, but also retains rigidity without becoming subject to the problems raised by Frege's puzzle. This is the view that names are variables, also called VARIABILISM. (shrink)