Switch to: Citations

Add references

You must login to add references.
  1. (4 other versions)Naming and Necessity.Saul Kripke - 1980 - Philosophy 56 (217):431-433.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1803 citations  
  • (4 other versions)Naming and Necessity.S. Kripke - 1972 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 45 (4):665-666.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2750 citations  
  • (1 other version)Realism and truth.Michael Devitt - 1991 - Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
    This second edition includes a new Afterword by the author.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   288 citations  
  • (2 other versions)Semantics, cross-cultural style.Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols & Stephen Stich - 2004 - Cognition 92 (3):1-12.
    Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al. 2001) has shown systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical cases (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   345 citations  
  • Overlooking Conventions: The Trouble with Linguistic Pragmatism.Michael Devitt - 2021 - Springer Verlag.
    This book criticizes the methodology of the recent semantics-pragmatics debate in the theory of language and proposes an alternative. It applies this methodology to argue for a traditional view against a group of “contextualists” and “pragmatists”, including Sperber and Wilson, Bach, Carston, Recanati, Neale, and many others. The author disagrees with these theorists who hold that the meaning of the sentence in an utterance never, or hardly ever, yields its literal truth-conditional content, even after disambiguation and reference fixing; it needs (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Ignorance of Language.Michael Devitt - 2006 - Oxford, GB: Oxford: Clarendon Press.
    The Chomskian revolution in linguistics gave rise to a new orthodoxy about mind and language. Michael Devitt throws down a provocative challenge to that orthodoxy. What is linguistics about? What role should linguistic intuitions play in constructing grammars? What is innate about language? Is there a 'language faculty'? These questions are crucial to our developing understanding of ourselves; Michael Devitt offers refreshingly original answers. He argues that linguistics is about linguistic reality and is not part of psychology; that linguistic rules (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   104 citations  
  • (2 other versions)Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style.Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols & Stephen Stich - 2004 - O Gnition 92:B1--B12.
    Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one's intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology has shown systematic differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical cases. In light of these findings on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   196 citations  
  • Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition.Richard E. Nisbett, Kaiping Peng, Incheol Choi & Ara Norenzayan - 2001 - Psychological Review 108 (2):291-310.
    The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners, are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   286 citations  
  • Linguistic and metalinguistic intuitions in the philosophy of language.Edouard Machery, Christopher Y. Olivola & Molly De Blanc - 2009 - Analysis 69 (4):689-694.
    Machery et al. (2004) reported some preliminary evidence that intuitions about reference vary within and across cultures, and they argued that if real, such variation would have significant philosophical implications (see also Mallon et al. 2009). In a recent article, Genoveva Martı´ (2009) argues that the type of intuitions examined by Machery and colleagues (‘metalin- 10 guistic intuitions’) is evidentially irrelevant for identifying the correct theory of reference, and she concludes that the variation in the relevant intuitions about reference within (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   61 citations  
  • Experimental Semantics.Michael Devitt - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (2):418 - 435.
    In their delightfully provocative paper, “Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style,” Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich (2004),[1] make several striking claims about theories of reference. First, they claim: (I) Philosophical views about reference “are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations” (p. B1). This claim is prompted by their observations of the role of intuitions in Saul Kripke’s refutation of the descriptivist view of proper names in favor of a causal-historical view (1980). The (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   88 citations  
  • A New Perspective Concerning Experiments on Semantic Intuitions.Justin Sytsma & Jonathan Livengood - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (2):315-332.
    Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich [2004; forthcoming] use experimental methods to raise a spectre of doubt about reliance on intuitions in developing theories of reference which are then deployed in philosophical arguments outside the philosophy of language. Machery et al. ran a cross-cultural survey asking Western and East Asian participants about a famous case from the philosophical literature on reference (Kripke's G del example). They interpret their results as indicating that there is significant variation in participants' intuitions about semantic reference (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   54 citations  
  • The referential mechanism of proper names: cross-cultural investigations into referential intuitions.Jincai Li - 2023 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    Each of us bears a unique name given to us at birth. When people use your name, they typically refer to you. But what is the linkage that ties a name to a person and hence allows it to refer? Li's book approaches this question of reference empirically through the medium of referential intuitions. Building on the literature on philosophical and linguistic intuitions, she proposes a linguistic-competence-based account of referential intuitions. Subsequently, using a series of novel experiments, she investigates the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Against semantic multi-culturalism.Genoveva Marti - 2009 - Analysis 69 (1):42-48.
    E. Machery, R. Mallon, S. Nichols and S. Stich, have argued that there is empirical evidence against Kripke’s claim that names are not descriptive. Their argument is based on an experiment that compares the intuitions about proper name use of a group of English speakers in Hong Kong with those of a group of non-Chinese American students. The results of the experiment suggest that in some cultures speakers use names descriptively. I argue that such a conclusion is incorrect, for the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   67 citations  
  • Whither Experimental Semantics?Michael Devitt - 2012 - Theoria 27 (1):5-36.
    The main goal of the paper is to propose a methodology for the theory of reference in which experiments feature prominently. These experiments should primarily test linguistic usage rather than the folk’s referential intuitions. The proposed methodology urges the use of: (A) philosophers’ referential intuitions, both informally and, occasionally, scientifically gathered; (B) the corpus, both informally and scientifically gathered; (C) elicited production; and, occasionally,_ _(D) folk’s referential intuitions. The most novel part of this is (C) and that is where most (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   42 citations  
  • What is in a name?: The development of cross-cultural differences in referential intuitions.Jincai Li, Liu Longgen, Elizabeth Chalmers & Jesse Snedeker - 2018 - Cognition 171 (C): 108-111.
    Past work has shown systematic differences between Easterners' and Westerners' intuitions about the reference of proper names. Understanding when these differences emerge in development will help us understand their origins. In the present study, we investigate the referential intuitions of English- and Chinese-speaking children and adults in the U.S. and China. Using a truth-value judgment task modeled on Kripke's classic Gödel case, we find that the cross-cultural differences are already in place at age seven. Thus, these differences cannot be attributed (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Reference in the Land of the Rising Sun: A Cross-cultural Study on the Reference of Proper Names.Justin Sytsma, Jonathan Livengood, Ryoji Sato & Mineki Oguchi - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (2):213-230.
    A standard methodology in philosophy of language is to use intuitions as evidence. Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich challenged this methodology with respect to theories of reference by presenting empirical evidence that intuitions about one prominent example from the literature on the reference of proper names vary between Westerners and East Asians. In response, Sytsma and Livengood conducted experiments to show that the questions Machery and colleagues asked participants in their study were ambiguous, and that this ambiguity affected the responses (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  • The Reference of Proper Names: Testing Usage and Intuitions.Michael Devitt & Nicolas Porot - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (5):1552-1585.
    Experiments on theories of reference have mostly tested referential intuitions. We think that experiments should rather be testing linguistic usage. Substantive Aim (I): to test classical description theories of proper names against usage by “elicited production.” Our results count decisively against those theories. Methodological Aim (I): Machery, Olivola, and de Blanc (2009) claim that truth-value judgment experiments test usage. Martí (2012) disagrees. We argue that Machery et al. are right and offer some results that are consistent with that conclusion. Substantive (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • The origin of cross-cultural differences in referential intuitions: Perspective taking in the Gödel case.Jincai Li - 2021 - Journal of Semantics 38 (3).
    In this paper, we aim to trace the origin of the systematic cross-cultural variations in referential intuitions by investigating the effects of perspective taking on people’s responses in the Gödel-style probes through two novel experiments. Here is how we will proceed. In section 2, we first briefly introduce the MMNS (2004) study, and then critically review the two relevant studies conducted by Sytsma and colleagues (i.e., Sytsma and Livengood 2011; Sytsma et al. 2015). In section 3, we introduce the literature (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Testing the causal theory of reference.Filippo Domaneschi, Massimiliano Vignolo & Simona Di Paola - 2017 - Cognition 161 (C):1-9.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Empirical Data and the Theory of Reference.Genoveva Marti - 2012 - In Bill Kabasenche, Michael O'Rourke & Matthew Slater (eds.), Reference and Referring: Topics in Contemporary Philosophy, Volume 10. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 63-82.
    This paper is an extended response to Machery, Olivola and De Blanc (2009). I argue that the concerns I raised about Machery, Mallon, Nichols and Stich (2004) in Marti (2009) still stand.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • The 'Gödel' effect.Gary Ostertag - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (1):65-82.
    In their widely discussed paper, “Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style”, Machery et al. argue that Kripke’s Gödel–Schmidt case, generally thought to undermine the description theory of names, rests on culturally variable intuitions: while Western subjects’ intuitions conflict with the description theory of names, those of East Asian subjects do not. Machery et al. attempt to explain this discrepancy by appealing to differences between Western and East Asian modes of categorization, as identified in an influential study by Nisbett et al. I claim that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations