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  1. Tropes, Bare Demonstratives, and Apparent Statements of Identity.Friederike Moltmann - unknown
    Philosophers who accept tropes generally agree that tropes do play a role in the semantics of natural language, namely as the objects of reference of nominalizations of adjectives, such as Socrates' wisdom or the beauty of the landscape. In fact, a philosophical discussion of the ontology of tropes can hardly do without the use of such nominalizations. In this paper, I will argue that tropes play a further important role in the semantics of natural language, namely in the semantics of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Complex demonstratives, hidden arguments, and presupposition.Ethan Nowak - 2019 - Synthese (4):1-36.
    Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are. If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. The same prediction follows from ‘hidden argument’ theories like the ones described by King (2001) and Elbourne (2005). Wolter (2006), however, has shown that complex demonstratives admit non-deictic interpretations only (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference.Saul A. Kripke - 1977 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2 (1):255-276.
    am going to discuss some issues inspired by a well-known paper ofKeith Donnellan, "Reference and Definite Descriptions,”2 but the interest—to me—of the contrast mentioned in my title goes beyond Donnellan's paper: I think it is of considerable constructive as well as critical importance to the philosophy oflanguage. These applications, however, and even everything I might want to say relative to Donnellan’s paper, cannot be discussed in full here because of problems of length. Moreover, although I have a considerable interest in (...)
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  • This and That: A Theory of Reference for Names, Demonstratives, and Things in Between.Eliot Michaelson - 2013 - Dissertation, Ucla
    This dissertation sets out to answer the question ''What fixes the semantic values of context-sensitive referential terms—like names, demonstratives, and pronouns—in context?'' I argue that it is the speaker's intentions that play this role, as constrained by the conventions governing the use of particular sorts of referential terms. These conventions serve to filter the speaker's intentions for just those which meet these constraints on use, leaving only these filtered-for intentions as semantically relevant. By considering a wide range of cases, including (...)
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  • Quasi Indexicals.Justin Khoo - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (1):26-53.
    I argue that not all context dependent expressions are alike. Pure (or ordinary) indexicals behave more or less as Kaplan thought. But quasi indexicals behave in some ways like indexicals and in other ways not like indexicals. A quasi indexical sentence φ allows for cases in which one party utters φ and the other its negation, and neither party’s claim has to be false. In this sense, quasi indexicals are like pure indexicals (think: “I am a doctor”/“I am not a (...)
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  • Discourse and logical form: pronouns, attention and coherence.Una Stojnić, Matthew Stone & Ernie Lepore - 2017 - Linguistics and Philosophy 40 (5):519-547.
    Traditionally, pronouns are treated as ambiguous between bound and demonstrative uses. Bound uses are non-referential and function as bound variables, and demonstrative uses are referential and take as a semantic value their referent, an object picked out jointly by linguistic meaning and a further cue—an accompanying demonstration, an appropriate and adequately transparent speaker’s intention, or both. In this paper, we challenge tradition and argue that both demonstrative and bound pronouns are dependent on, and co-vary with, antecedent expressions. Moreover, the semantic (...)
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  • Insensitive Semantics: A Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism.Herman Cappelen & Ernest Lepore - 2005 - Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Edited by Ernest LePore.
    _Insensitive Semantics_ is an overview of and contribution to the debates about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication, investigating the effects of context on communicative interaction and, as a corollary, what a context of utterance is and what it is to be in one. Provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism Addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language Defends a distinctive (...)
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  • Constructing Contexts.Brett Sherman - 2015 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2.
    It is commonly held that the context with respect to which an indexical is interpreted is determined independently of the interpretation of the indexical. This view, which I call Context Realism, has explanatory significance: it is because the context is what it is that an indexical refers to what it does. In this paper, I provide an argument against Context Realism. I then develop an alternative that I call Context Constructivism, according to which indexicals are defined not in terms of (...)
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  • Which Concepts Should We Use?: Metalinguistic Negotiations and The Methodology of Philosophy.David Plunkett - 2015 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (7-8):828-874.
    This paper is about philosophical disputes where the literal content of what speakers communicate concerns such object-level issues as ground, supervenience, or real definition. It is tempting to think that such disputes straightforwardly express disagreements about these topics. In contrast to this, I suggest that, in many such cases, the disagreement that is expressed is actually one about which concepts should be employed. I make this case as follows. First, I look at non-philosophical, everyday disputes where a speaker employs a (...)
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  • Semantics and Context-Dependence: Towards a Strawsonian Account.Richard Heck - 2014 - In Alexis Burgess & Brett Sherman (eds.), Metasemantics: New Essays on the Foundations of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 327-364.
    This paper considers a now familiar argument that the ubiquity of context -dependence threatens the project of natural language semantics, at least as that project has usually been conceived: as concerning itself with `what is said' by an utterance of a given sentence. I argue in response that the `anti-semantic' argument equivocates at a crucial point and, therefore, that we need not choose between semantic minimalism, truth-conditional pragmatism, and the like. Rather, we must abandon the idea, familiar from Kaplan and (...)
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  • The Metasemantics of Contextual Sensitivity.Jeffrey C. King - 2014 - In Alexis Burgess & Brett Sherman (eds.), Metasemantics: New Essays on the Foundations of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 97-118.
    Some contextually sensitive expressions are such that their context independent conventional meanings need to be in some way supplemented in context for the expressions to secure semantic values in those contexts. As we’ll see, it is not clear that there is a paradigm here, but ‘he’ used demonstratively is a clear example of such an expression. Call expressions of this sort supplementives in order to highlight the fact that their context independent meanings need to be supplemented in context for them (...)
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  • Demonstratives without rigidity or ambiguity.Ethan Nowak - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (5):409-436.
    Most philosophers recognize that applying the standard semantics for complex demonstratives to non-deictic instances results in truth conditions that are anomalous, at best. This fact has generated little concern, however, since most philosophers treat non-deictic demonstratives as marginal cases, and believe that they should be analyzed using a distinct semantic mechanism. In this paper, I argue that non-deictic demonstratives cannot be written off; they are widespread in English and foreign languages, and must be treated using the same semantic machinery that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Pragmatism and Binding.Stephen Neale - 2004 - In Zoltan Gendler Szabo (ed.), Semantics Versus Pragmatics. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 165-285.
    Names, descriptions, and demonstratives raise well-known logical, ontological, and epistemological problems. Perhaps less well known, amongst philosophers at least, are the ways in which some of these problems not only recur with pronouns but also cross-cut further problems exposed by the study in generative linguistics of morpho-syntactic constraints on interpretation. These problems will be my primary concern here, but I want to address them within a general picture of interpretation that is required if wires are not to be crossed. That (...)
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  • Deixis (even without pointing).Una Stojnic, Matthew Stone & Ernie Lepore - 2013 - Philosophical Perspectives 27 (1):502-525.
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  • Negotiating Taste.Chris Barker - 2013 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 56 (2-3):240-257.
    Using a vague predicate can make commitments about the appropriate use of that predicate in the remaining part of the discourse. For instance, if I assert that some particular pig is fat, I am committed to judging any fatter pig to be fat as well. We can model this update effect by recognizing that truth depends both on the state of the world and on the state of the discourse: the truth conditions of ‘This pig is fat’ rule out evaluation (...)
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  • Semantics and the objects of assertion.Dilip Ninan - 2010 - Linguistics and Philosophy 33 (5):355-380.
    This paper is about the relationship between two questions: the question of what the objects of assertion are and the question of how best to theorise about ‘shifty’ phenomena like modality and tense. I argue that the relationship between these two questions is less direct than is often supposed. I then explore the consequences of this for a number of debates in the philosophy of language.
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  • (2 other versions)Epistemic Modals in Context.Andy Egan, John Hawthorne & Brian Weatherson - 2005 - In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in philosophy: knowledge, meaning, and truth. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 131-170.
    A very simple contextualist treatment of a sentence containing an epistemic modal, e.g. a might be F, is that it is true iff for all the contextually salient community knows, a is F. It is widely agreed that the simple theory will not work in some cases, but the counterexamples produced so far seem amenable to a more complicated contextualist theory. We argue, however, that no contextualist theory can capture the evaluations speakers naturally make of sentences containing epistemic modals. If (...)
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  • Tropes, Bare Demonstratives, and Apparent Statements of Identity.Friederike Moltmann - 2011 - Noûs 47 (2):346-370.
    Philosophers who accept tropes generally agree that tropes act as the objects of reference of nominalizations of adjectives, such as 'Socrates’ wisdom' or 'the beauty of the landscape'. This paper argues that tropes play a further important role in the semantics of natural language, namely in the semantics of bare demonstratives like 'this' and 'that' in what in linguistics is called identificational sentences.
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  • Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications.John MacFarlane - 2014 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    John MacFarlane explores how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative. He provides new, satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis, including what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do.
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  • Universal grammar.Richard Montague - 1970 - Theoria 36 (3):373--398.
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  • Afterthoughts.David Kaplan - 1989 - In Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein (eds.), Themes From Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 565-614.
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  • Dthat.David Kaplan - 1978 - In Peter Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics: Pragmatics. Academic Press. pp. 221--243.
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  • (1 other version)The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English.Richard Montague - 1973 - In Patrick Suppes, Julius Moravcsik & Jaakko Hintikka (eds.), Approaches to Natural Language. Dordrecht. pp. 221--242.
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  • Lectures on Government and Binding.Noam Chomsky - 1981 - Foris.
    A more extensive discussion of certain of the more technical notions appears in my paper "On Binding" (Chomsky,; henceforth, OB). ...
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  • Index, context, and content.David K. Lewis - 1980 - In Stig Kanger & Sven Öhman (eds.), Philosophy and Grammar. Reidel. pp. 79-100.
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  • (2 other versions)Speaker's reference and semantic reference.Saul A. Kripke - 1977 - In Peter A. French, Theodore Edward Uehling & Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Studies in the philosophy of language. Morris: University of Minnesota, Morris. pp. 255-296.
    am going to discuss some issues inspired by a well-known paper ofKeith Donnellan, "Reference and Definite Descriptions,”2 but the interest—to me—of the contrast mentioned in my title goes beyond Donnellan's paper: I think it is of considerable constructive as well as critical importance to the philosophy oflanguage. These applications, however, and even everything I might want to say relative to Donnellan’s paper, cannot be discussed in full here because of problems of length. Moreover, although I have a considerable interest in (...)
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  • Semantics in generative grammar.Irene Heim & Angelika Kratzer - 1998 - Malden, MA: Blackwell. Edited by Angelika Kratzer.
    Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...
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  • Variabilism.Samuel Cumming - 2008 - Philosophical Review 117 (4):525-554.
    Variabilism is the view that proper names (like pronouns) are semantically represented as variables. Referential names, like referential pronouns, are assigned their referents by a contextual variable assignment (Kaplan 1989). The reference parameter (like the world of evaluation) may also be shifted by operators in the representation language. Indeed verbs that create hyperintensional contexts, like ‘think’, are treated as operators that simultaneously shift the world and assignment parameters. By contrast, metaphysical modal operators shift the world of assessment only. Names, being (...)
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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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  • General semantics.David K. Lewis - 1970 - Synthese 22 (1-2):18--67.
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  • Epistemic Modals.Seth Yalcin - 2007 - Mind 116 (464):983-1026.
    Epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's paradox. I set out the puzzling phenomena, explain why a standard relational semantics for these operators cannot handle them, and recommend an alternative semantics. A pragmatics appropriate to the semantics is developed and interactions between the semantics, the pragmatics, and the definition of consequence are investigated. The semantics is then extended to probability operators. Some problems and prospects for probabilistic representations of content and context are explored.
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  • (1 other version)Context and logical form.Jason Stanley - 2000 - Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (4):391--434.
    In this paper, I defend the thesis that alleffects of extra-linguistic context on thetruth-conditions of an assertion are traceable toelements in the actual syntactic structure of thesentence uttered. In the first section, I develop thethesis in detail, and discuss its implications for therelation between semantics and pragmatics. The nexttwo sections are devoted to apparent counterexamples.In the second section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of true non-sentential assertions.In the third section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of what (...)
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  • Demonstrating and Necessity.Nathan Salmon - 2002 - Philosophical Review 111 (4):497-537.
    My title is meant to suggest a continuation of the sort of philosophical investigation into the nature of language and modality undertaken in Rudolf Carnap’s Meaning and Necessity and Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity. My topic belongs in a class with meaning and naming. It is demonstratives—that is, expressions like ‘that darn cat’ or the pronoun ‘he’ used deictically. A few philosophers deserve particular credit for advancing our understanding of demonstratives and other indexical words. Though Naming and Necessity is concerned (...)
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  • Term limits.Stephen Neale - 1993 - Philosophical Perspectives 7:89-123.
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  • 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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  • Complex demonstratives, QI uses, and direct reference.Jeffrey C. King - 2008 - Philosophical Review 117 (1):99-117.
    result from combining the determiners `this' or `that' with syntactically simple or complex common noun phrases such as `woman' or `woman who is taking her skis off'. Thus, `this woman', and `that woman who is taking her skis off' are complex demonstratives. There are also plural complex demonstratives such as `these skis' and `those snowboarders smoking by the gondola'. My book Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account argues against what I call the direct reference account of complex demonstratives (henceforth DRCD) and (...)
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  • Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions.H. Paul Grice - 1969 - Philosophical Review 78 (2):147-177.
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  • Indeterminism and the Thin Red Line.Nuel Belnap & Mitchell Green - 1994 - Philosophical Perspectives 8:365 - 388.
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  • Speaker's reference, semantic reference, sneaky reference.Eliot Michaelson - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (5):856-875.
    According to what is perhaps the dominant picture of reference, what a referential term refers to in a context is determined by what the speaker intends for her audience to identify as the referent. I argue that this sort of broadly Gricean view entails, counterintuitively, that it is impossible to knowingly use referential terms in ways that one expects or intends to be misunderstood. Then I sketch an alternative which can better account for such opaque uses of language, or what (...)
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  • Semantics and metasemantics in the context of generative grammar.Seth Yalcin - 2014 - In Alexis Burgess & Brett Sherman (eds.), Metasemantics: New Essays on the Foundations of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 17-54.
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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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  • (2 other versions)The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics.Alfred Tarski - 1944 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 9 (3):68-68.
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  • A unified non monstrous semantics for third person pronouns.Fabio Del Prete & Sandro Zucchi - 2017 - Semantics and Pragmatics 10.
    It is common practice in formal semantics to assume that the context specifies an assignment of values to variables and that the same variables that receive contextually salient values when they occur free may also be bound by quantifiers and λs. These assumptions are at work to provide a unified account of free and bound uses of third person pronouns, namely one by which the same lexical item is involved in both uses. One way to pursue this account is to (...)
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  • The Role of Speaker and Hearer in the Character of Demonstratives.Jeff Speaks - 2016 - Mind 125 (498):301-339.
    Demonstratives have different semantic values relative to different contexts of utterance. But it is surprisingly difficult to describe the function from contexts to contents which determines the semantic value of a given use of a demonstrative. It is very natural to think that the intentions of the speaker should play a significant role here. The aim of this paper is to discuss a pair of problems that arise for views which give intentions this central role in explaining the characters of (...)
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  • Billboards, bombs and shotgun weddings.Andy Egan - 2009 - Synthese 166 (2):251-279.
    It's a presupposition of a very common way of thinking about contextsensitivity in language that the semantic contribution made by a bit of context-sensitive vocabulary is sensitive only to features of the speaker's situation at the time of utterance. I argue that this is false, and that we need a theory of context-dependence that allows for content to depend not just on the features of the utterance's origin, but also on features of its destination. There are cases in which a (...)
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  • Demonstratives as Definites.Craige Roberts - 2002 - In Kees van Deemter & Rodger Kibble (eds.), Information Sharing: Reference and Presupposition in Language Generation and Interpretation. CSLI Press. pp. 89-196.
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  • (2 other versions)Speaker’s reference and semantic reference.Saul Kripke - 2013 - In Maite Ezcurdia & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy. Peterborough, CA: Broadview Press. pp. 60.
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  • Why and how not to be a sortalist about thought.Rachel Goodman - 2012 - Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1):77-112.
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  • Bare-Boned Demonstratives.Stefano Predelli - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 41 (3):547-562.
    This essay proposes a novel semantic account of demonstratives, aimed at clarifying the sense in which demonstratives are semantically dependent on demonstrations. Its first two sections summarize the main views currently on the market. Section 3 argues that they are all vitiated by the same shortcomings, and yield incorrect results of ‘truth in virtue of character’ and entailment. Section 4 proposes a different account of the relationships between demonstratives and demonstrations, grounded on the idea of truth-conditionally irrelevant aspects of the (...)
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  • Against the identification of assertoric content with compositional value.Brian Rabern - 2012 - Synthese 189 (1):75-96.
    This essay investigates whether or not we should think that the things we say are identical to the things our sentences mean. It is argued that these theoretical notions should be distinguished, since assertoric content does not respect the compositionality principle. As a paradigmatic example, Kaplan's formal language LD is shown to exemplify a failure of compositionality. It is demonstrated that by respecting the theoretical distinction between the objects of assertion and compositional values certain conflicts between compositionality and contextualism are (...)
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