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Descriptions

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008)

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  1. Names and Rigid Designation.Jason Stanley - 1997 - In Bob Hale, Crispin Wright & Alexander Miller (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 920–947.
    This chapter discusses a version of the descriptive account of content which is compatible with rigidity thesis (RT) and critiques of RT. The rigidity of proper names demonstrates that utterances of sentences containing proper names, and utterances of sentences differing from those sentences only in containing non‐rigid descriptions in place of the proper names, differ in content. The fact that natural‐language proper names are rigid designators is an empirical discovery about natural language. The chapter intends to be a survey of (...)
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  • Language, Form, and Logic: In Pursuit of Natural Logic's Holy Grail.Peter Ludlow & Saso Živanović - 2022 - Oxford University Press.
    This book explores the idea that all of logic can be reduced to two very simple rules that are sensitive to logical polarity. The authors show that this idea has profound consequences for our understanding of the nature of human inferential capacities, and for some of the key issues in contemporary linguistics.
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  • (6 other versions)Logic and Conversation.H. Paul Grice - 1975 - In Donald Davidson (ed.), The logic of grammar. Encino, Calif.: Dickenson Pub. Co.. pp. 64-75.
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  • Information Structure in Discourse: Towards an Integrated Formal Theory of Pragmatics.Craige Roberts - 1996 - Semantics and Pragmatics 5:1-69.
    A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of (...)
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  • Situations and Individuals.Paul D. Elbourne - 2005 - MIT Press.
    In Situations and Individuals, Paul Elbourne argues that the natural language expressions that have been taken to refer to individuals — pronouns, proper names, and definite descriptions — have a common syntax and semantics, roughly that of definite descriptions as construed in the tradition of Frege. In the course of his argument, Elbourne shows that proper names have previously undetected donkey anaphoric readings.This is contrary to previous theorizing and, if true, would undermine what philosophers call the direct reference theory (which (...)
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  • Introduction to Logical Theory.P. F. Strawson - 1954 - Philosophy 29 (108):78-80.
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  • Designation.M. Devitt - 1983 - Mind 92 (368):622-624.
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  • (4 other versions)Naming and Necessity.Saul Kripke - 1980 - Critica 17 (49):69-71.
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  • (3 other versions)On Referring.J. F. Thomson & P. F. Strawson - 1950 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 18 (1):87.
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  • (4 other versions)The Causal Theory of Perception.H. P. Grice & Alan R. White - 1961 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 35 (1):121-168.
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  • On the presuppositions of number sentences.Katharina Felka - 2015 - Synthese 192 (5):1393-1412.
    This paper is concerned with an intuitive contrast that arises when we consider sentences containing empty definite descriptions. A sentence like ‘The king of France is bald’ appears neither true nor false, while a sentence like ‘My friend was visited by the king of France’ appears false. Recently, Stephen Yablo has suggested an account of this intuitive contrast. Yablo’s account is particularly interesting, since it has important consequences for the ontological commitments of number sentences like ‘The number of planets is (...)
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  • Language and reality: an introduction to the philosophy of language.Michael Devitt & Kim Sterelny - 1999 - Cambridge: MIT Press. Edited by Kim Sterelny.
    Completely revised and updated in its Second Edition, Language and Reality provides students, philosophers and cognitive scientists with a lucid and provocative introduction to the philosophy of language.
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  • Identity Statements.David Wiggins - 1965 - In R. J. Butler (ed.), Analytic Philosophy, 2nd edition. Blackwell. pp. 40-71.
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  • The Articles: A Study of Their Theory and Use in English.Paul Christophersen - 1939 - Einar Munksgaard.
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  • Definite Descriptions.Paul Elbourne - 2013 - Oxford University Press.
    Paul Elbourne defends the Fregean view that definite descriptions ('the table', 'the King of France') refer to individuals, and offers a new and radical account of the semantics of pronouns. He draws on a wide range of work, from Frege, Peano, and Russell to the latest findings in linguistics, philosophy of language, and psycholinguistics.
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  • Definite Descriptions: What Frege Got Right and Russell Didn’t.Zsófia Zvolenszky - 1997 - Aporia Undergraduate Philosophy Journal:1-16.
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  • Referential Descriptions and Conversational Implicatures.Michael Devitt - 2007 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (2):7-32.
    Bach fails to give a satisfactory pragmatic account of referential uses of definite descriptions because he does not explain how a description’s quantificational meaning plays a “key role” in those uses. Bach’s criticism that my semantic account does not explain how the hearer understands a description is misguided. Bach’s denial that a pragmatic account is committed to the attributive use being more fundamental detaches meaning from use in an unacceptable way.
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  • Presuppositions of quantified sentences: experimental data. [REVIEW]Emmanuel Chemla - 2009 - Natural Language Semantics 17 (4):299-340.
    Some theories assume that sentences like (i) with a presupposition trigger in the scope of a quantifier carry an existential presupposition, as in (ii); others assume that they carry a universal presupposition, as in (iii). No student knows that he is lucky. Existential presupposition: At least one student is lucky.Universal presupposition: Every student is lucky. This work is an experimental investigation of this issue in French. Native speakers were recruited to evaluate the robustness of the inference from (i) to (iii). (...)
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  • The reference book.John Hawthorne & David Manley - 2012 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by David Manley.
    This book critically examines some widespread views about the semantic phenomenon of reference and the cognitive phenomenon of singular thought. It begins with a defense of the view that neither is tied to a special relation of causal or epistemic acquaintance. It then challenges the alleged semantic rift between definite and indefinite descriptions on the one hand, and names and demonstratives on the other—a division that has been motivated in part by appeals to considerations of acquaintance. Drawing on recent work (...)
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  • The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases.Irene Heim - 1982 - Dissertation, Umass Amherst
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  • (1 other version)Assertion.Robert Stalnaker - 1978 - Syntax and Semantics (New York Academic Press) 9:315-332.
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  • From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory.Hans Kamp & Uwe Reyle - 1993 - Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
    Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than ...
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  • Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence.T. Hofweber & A. Everett (eds.) - 2000 - CSLI Publications.
    Philosophers and theorists have long been puzzled by humans' ability to talk about things that do not exist, or to talk about things that they think exist but, in fact, do not. _Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence_ is a collection of 13 new works concerning the semantic and metaphysical issues arising from empty names, non-existence, and the nature of fiction. The contributors include some of the most important researchers working in these fields. Some of the papers develop (...)
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  • Semantic vs. Syntactic Categories.Edwin Williams - 1983 - Linguistics and Philosophy 6 (3):423 - 446.
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  • Descriptions, truth value intuitions, and questions.Anders J. Schoubye - 2009 - Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (6):583-617.
    Since the famous debate between Russell (Mind 14: 479–493, 1905, Mind 66: 385–389, 1957) and Strawson (Mind 59: 320–344, 1950; Introduction to logical theory, 1952; Theoria, 30: 96–118, 1964) linguistic intuitions about truth values have been considered notoriously unreliable as a guide to the semantics of definite descriptions. As a result, most existing semantic analyses of definites leave a large number of intuitions unexplained. In this paper, I explore the nature of the relationship between truth value intuitions and non-referring definites. (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Causal Theory of Names.Gareth Evans - 1973 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 47 (1):187–208.
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  • Relevance: Communication and Cognition.Dan Sperber & Deirdre Wilson - 1986/1995 - Oxford: Blackwell.
    This revised edition includes a new Preface outlining developments in Relevance Theory since 1986, discussing the more serious criticisms of the theory, and ...
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  • Speaker reference, descriptions, and anaphoria.Keith S. Donnellan - 1979 - In A. French Peter, E. Uehling Theodore, Howard Jr & K. Wettstein (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language. University of Minnesota Press.
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  • Presupposition and the Delimitation of Semantics.R. M. Kempson - 1975 - Linguistics and Philosophy 2 (3):437-446.
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  • Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intentionality.Edward N. Zalta - 1988 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
    This book tackles the issues that arise in connection with intensional logic -- a formal system for representing and explaining the apparent failures of certain important principles of inference such as the substitution of identicals and existential generalization -- and intentional states --mental states such as beliefs, hopes, and desires that are directed towards the world. The theory offers a unified explanation of the various kinds of inferential failures associated with intensional logic but also unifies the study of intensional contexts (...)
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  • (1 other version)Frege: Philosophy of Language.Michael Dummett - 1973 - London: Duckworth.
    This highly acclaimed book is a major contribution to the philosophy of language as well as a systematic interpretation of Frege, indisputably the father of ...
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  • Knowledge of Meaning: An Introduction to Semantic Theory.Richard K. Larson & Gabriel M. A. Segal - 1995 - MIT Press.
    Current textbooks in formal semantics are all versions of, or introductions to, the same paradigm in semantic theory: Montague Grammar. Knowledge of Meaning is based on different assumptions and a different history. It provides the only introduction to truth- theoretic semantics for natural languages, fully integrating semantic theory into the modern Chomskyan program in linguistic theory and connecting linguistic semantics to research elsewhere in cognitive psychology and philosophy. As such, it better fits into a modern graduate or undergraduate program in (...)
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  • Adverbs of quantification.David K. Lewis - 1975 - In Edward Louis Keenan (ed.), Formal semantics of natural language: papers from a colloquium sponsored by the King's College Research Centre, Cambridge. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 3--15.
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  • Abstract Objects: An Introduction to Axiomatic Metaphysics.Edward N. Zalta - 1983 - Dordrecht, Netherland: D. Reidel.
    In this book, Zalta attempts to lay the axiomatic foundations of metaphysics by developing and applying a (formal) theory of abstract objects. The cornerstones include a principle which presents precise conditions under which there are abstract objects and a principle which says when apparently distinct such objects are in fact identical. The principles are constructed out of a basic set of primitive notions, which are identified at the end of the Introduction, just before the theorizing begins. The main reason for (...)
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  • Must existence-questions have answers?Stephen Yablo - 2009 - In Ryan Wasserman, David Manley & David Chalmers (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 507-525.
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  • Non-catastrophic presupposition failure.Stephen Yablo - 2006 - In Judith Jarvis Thomson & Alex Byrne (eds.), Content and modality: themes from the philosophy of Robert Stalnaker. New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • Beyond rigidity: the unfinished semantic agenda of Naming and necessity.Scott Soames - 2002 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    In this fascinating work, Scott Soames offers a new conception of the relationship between linguistic meaning and assertions made by utterances. He gives meanings of proper names and natural kind predicates and explains their use in attitude ascriptions. He also demonstrates the irrelevance of rigid designation in understanding why theoretical identities containing such predicates are necessary, if true.
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  • (2 other versions)Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.Bertrand Russell - 1911 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11:108--28.
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  • What is Presupposition Accommodation, Again?Kai Von Fintel - 2008 - Philosophical Perspectives 22 (1):137--170.
    In his paper “What is a Context of Utterance?”, Christopher Gauker argues that the phenomenon of informative presuppositions is incompatible with the “pragmatic” view of presuppositions as involving requirements on the common ground, the body of shared assumptions of the participants in a conversation. This is a surprising claim since most proponents of this view have in fact dealt with informative presuppositions by appealing to a process called presupposition accommodation. Gauker’s attack shows the need to clarify the nature of this (...)
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  • A Century Later.Stephen Neale - 2005 - Mind 114 (456):809-871.
    This is the introductory essay to a collection commemorating the 100th anniversary of the publication in Mind of Bertrand Russell’s paper ‘On Denoting’.
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  • Descriptions.Stephen Neale - 1990 - MIT Press.
    When philosophers talk about descriptions, usually they have in mind singular definite descriptions such as ‘the finest Greek poet’ or ‘the positive square root of nine’, phrases formed with the definite article ‘the’. English also contains indefinite descriptions such as ‘a fine Greek poet’ or ‘a square root of nine’, phrases formed with the indefinite article ‘a’ (or ‘an’); and demonstrative descriptions (also known as complex demonstratives) such as ‘this Greek poet’ and ‘that tall woman’, formed with the demonstrative articles (...)
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  • On Quantifier Domain Restriction.Jason Stanley & Zoltán Gendler Szabó - 2000 - Mind and Language 15 (2-3):219--61.
    In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the space of possible analyses of the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction, together with a set of considerations which militate against all but our own proposal. Among the many accounts we consider and reject are the ‘explicit’ approach to quantifier domain restric‐tion discussed, for example, by Stephen Neale, and the pragmatic approach to quantifier domain restriction proposed by Kent Bach. Our hope is that the exhaustive discussion of this special case of (...)
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  • The semantics of singular terms.Brian Loar - 1976 - Philosophical Studies 30 (6):353 - 377.
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  • Two notions of necessity.Martin Davies & Lloyd Humberstone - 1980 - Philosophical Studies 38 (1):1-31.
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  • (1 other version)Modality and description.Arthur Smullyan - 1948 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 13 (1):31-37.
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  • (1 other version)Proper names.John R. Searle - 1958 - Mind 67 (266):166-173.
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  • (1 other version)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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  • Quantification and context.Marga Reimer - 1998 - Linguistics and Philosophy 21 (1):95-115.
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  • (1 other version)Scorekeeping in a language game.David Lewis - 1979 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1):339--359.
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  • Causal descriptivism.Frederick W. Kroon - 1987 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 65 (1):1 – 17.
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