This essay argues that in linguistic communication, nothing corresponds to a linguistic competence as summarized by the three principles of first meaning in language: that first meaning is systematic, first meanings are shared, and first meanings are governed by learned conventions or regularities. There is no such a thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language users (...) acquire and then apply to cases, as well as the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions. (shrink)

According to Semantic Minimalism, every use of "Chiara is tall" (fixing the girl and the time) semantically expresses the same proposition, the proposition that Chiara is (just plain) tall. Given standard assumptions, this proposition ought to have an intension (a function from possible worlds to truth values). However, speakers tend to reject questions that presuppose that it does. I suggest that semantic minimalists might address this problem by adopting a form of "nonindexical contextualism," according to which the proposition invariantly expressed (...) by "Chiara is tall" does not have a context-invariant intension. Nonindexical contextualism provides an elegant explanation of what is wrong with "context-shifting arguments" and can be seen as a synthesis of the (partial) insights of semantic minimalists and radical contextualists. (shrink)

In this essay I examine how we use indexicals. The key function of indexicals, I claim, is to help the audience --- that is the hearers or readers of the utterance with whom the speaker intends to be communicating---to find supplementary channels of information about the object to which the indexical refers. To keep the discussion manageable, I will oversimplify the epistemology of conversation. I ignore the fact that people sometimes lie and sometimes make mistakes. I talk freely about what (...) one learns and the information one gets from an utterance. (shrink)

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 (...) context‐dependence will provide guidelines for how to decide, for an arbitrary case of context‐dependent discourse, whether it should be treated syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically. (shrink)

Leaving detail aside, I think we may sum up Mr. Strawson's argument and my reply to it as follows: There are two problems, that of descriptions and that of egocentricity. Mr. Strawson thinks they are one and the same problem, but it is obvious from his discussion that he has not considered as many kinds of descriptive phrases as are relevant to the argument. Having confused the two problems, he asserts dogmatically that it is only the egocentric problem that needs (...) to be solved, and he offers a solution of this problem which he seems to believe to be new, but which in fact was familiar before he wrote. He then thinks that he has offered an adequate theory of descriptions, and announces his supposed achievement with astonishing dogmatic certainty. (shrink)

A critique of the purely semantic, minimalist notion of 'what is said'.

According to the dominant position among philosophers of language today, we can legitimately ascribe determinate contents to natural language sentences, independently of what the speaker actually means. This view contrasts with that held by ordinary language philosophers fifty years ago: according to them, speech acts, not sentences, are the primary bearers of content. François Recanati argues for the relevance of this controversy to the current debate about semantics and pragmatics. Is 'what is said' determined by linguistic conventions, or is it (...) an aspect of 'speaker's meaning'? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is 'literal meaning'? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati provides an original and insightful defence of 'contextualism', and offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the semantics/pragmatics interface. (shrink)

I present a Russellian analysis of Donnellan’s classic examples involving empty definite descriptions, such as a use of ‘the man with the Martini’ in a scenario in which the intended target is a teetotaler with water in his glass. Unlike the traditional Kripke‐style responses to Donnellan, my analysis grants semantic significance to the intuition that, in appropriate circumstances, such a use picks out the teetotaler. I then argue that the apparatus developed in my discussion of Donnellan’s examples may be successfully (...) applied to the semantic treatment of improper definite descriptions, such as ‘the table’ in Strawson’s ‘the table is covered with books.’. (shrink)

This book is an original examination of attempts to dislodge a cornerstone of modern philosophy: the idea that our thoughts and utterances are representations ...

This is the introductory essay to a collection commemorating the 100th anniversary of the publication in Mind of Bertrand Russell’s paper ‘On Denoting’.

Philosophers on all sides of the contextualism debates have had an overly narrow conception of what semantic context sensitivity could be. They have conflated context sensitivity (dependence of truth or extension on features of context) with indexicality (dependence of content on features of context). As a result of this conflation, proponents of contextualism have taken arguments that establish only context sensitivity to establish indexicality, while opponents of contextualism have taken arguments against indexicality to be arguments against context sensitivity. Once these (...) concepts are carefully pulled apart, it becomes clear that there is conceptual space in semantic theory for nonindexical forms of contextualism that have many advantages over the usual indexical forms. (shrink)

Classical Gricean pragmatics is usually conceived as dealing with far-side pragmatics, aimed at computing implicatures. It involves reasoning about why what was said, was said. Near-side pragmatics, on the other hand, is pragmatics in the service of determining, together with the semantical properties of the words used, what was said. But this raises the specter of ‘the pragmatic circle.’ If Gricean pragmatics seeks explanations for why someone said what they did, how can there be Gricean pragmatics on the near-side? Gricean (...) reasoning seems to require what is said to get started. But then if Gricean reasoning is needed to get to what is said, we have a circle. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to provide a non‐contradictory interpretation of sentences such as “Smith's murderer might not have murdered Smith”. An anti‐actualist, two‐dimensional framework including partial functions provides the basis for my solution. I argue for two claims. The modal profile of the proposition expressed by “The F might not have been an F” is complex: at any world where there is a unique F the proposition is true; at any world without a unique F the proposition has (...) no truth‐value; hence, at no world is it false. It remains an open semantic and epistemological question which of the first two kinds of world the actual world is. The semantic method should be based on explicit intensionalization in lieu of actualism. Actualism accords a privileged role to the actual world. Explicit intensionalization places all possible worlds, including the actual one, on an equal footing. Syntactically, a lambda‐bound world variable replaces the actual‐world constant or operator, while the other world variable is existentially bound. (shrink)

This paper deals with the truth-Conditions and the logic for vague languages. The use of supervaluations and of classical logic is defended; and other approaches are criticized. The truth-Conditions are extended to a language that contains a definitely-Operator and that is subject to higher order vagueness.

Definite descriptions, I shall argue, have two possible functions. 1] They are used to refer to what a speaker wishes to talk about, but they are also used quite differently. Moreover, a definite description occurring in one and the same sentence may, on different occasions of its use, function in either way. The failure to deal with this duality of function obscures the genuine referring use of definite descriptions. The best known theories of definite descriptions, those of Russell and Strawson, (...) I shall suggest, are both guilty of this. Before discussing this distinction in use, I will mention some features of these theories to which it is especially relevant. (shrink)

A common objection to Russell's theory of descriptions concerns incomplete definite descriptions: uses of (for example) ‘the book is overdue’ in contexts where there is clearly more than one book. Many contemporary Russellians hold that such utterances will invariably convey a contextually determined complete proposition, for example, that the book in your briefcase is overdue. But according to the objection this gets things wrong: typically, when a speaker utters such a sentence, no facts about the context or the speaker's communicative (...) intentions single out a particular description-theoretic proposition as the proposition expressed. However, this is an objection only if it is assumed that successful linguistic communication requires the hearer to identify a proposition uniquely intended by the speaker. We argue that this assumption is mistaken. On our view, no proposition, descriptive or referential, is uniquely intended in such a context; thus, no proposition can nor need be identified as the proposition expressed. One significant upshot is that, once the aforementioned assumption is rejected, incompleteness no longer poses a threat to Russell's theory of descriptions. (shrink)

I critically examine an argument, due to howard wettstein, purporting to show that sentences containing definite descriptions are semantically ambiguous between referential and attributive readings. Wettstein argues that many sentences containing nonidentifying descriptions--descriptions that apply to more than one object--cannot be given a Russellian analysis, and that the descriptions in these sentences should be understood as directly referential terms. But because Wettstein does not justify treating referential uses of nonidentifying descriptions differently than attributive uses of nonidentifying descriptions, his argument fails.

Leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics present brand-new papers on a major topic at the intersection of the two fields, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Anyone engaged with this issue in either discipline will find much to reward their attention here. Contributors: Kent Bach, Herman Cappelen, Michael Glanzberg, Jeffrey C. King, Ernie Lepore, Stephen Neale, F. Recanati, Nathan Salmon, Mandy Simons, Scott Soames, Robert J. Stainton, Jason Stanley, Zoltan Gendler Szabo.

What place is left for semantic notions? There are three main positions in response to that question: eliminativism, physicalism and semanticalism. This book argues in favour of a version of semanticalism. That version of semanticalism does not make semantic notions mysterious as if they are added from outside the realm of nature, as is the case with the Cartesian conception of mental properties. Semantic properties are treated as emergent properties reference to which serves to play a normative role in the (...) account of the nature of linguistic expressions. The need for positing semantic properties stems from the fact that the best explanation of the nature of linguistic expressions as guides to reality, to inform and to learn about the states of the world, invokes semantic properties. It consists in endowing linguistic expressions with semantic properties that correlate them to things and states of the world. Semantics, then, should be kept distinct from the theory of meaning. We need the theory of meaning for giving an account of linguistic competence in order to explain speakers' linguistic behaviour, but we need semantics in order to explain the nature of the objects produced by the behavioural output of linguistic competence. Consider a speaker who reads the sentence "it will be sunny and warm tomorrow" on the weather forecast page of the newspaper. We do not need to model his understanding as if he knew the semantic properties of the expressions occurring in that sentence. Rather, we need to invoke the semantic properties of that sentence, and of its constituents, in order to explain the social practice of uttering and writing it to inform people about weather conditions. This book argues that liberal naturalists are entitled to endorse the same attitude towards semantic properties as W.V.O. Quine's towards mathematical entities. We ought to accept semantic properties since our best theory of the world makes reference to them. The metaphysical principle of the supervenience of semantic properties over naturalistic properties, though unexplained, is justified to the extent that it too belongs to our best overall theory of the world, which as a whole faces the tribunal of experience. (shrink)

This revised edition includes a new Preface outlining developments in Relevance Theory since 1986, discussing the more serious criticisms of the theory, and ...

Presenting a novel account of singular thought, a systematic application of recent work in the theory of speech acts, and a partial revival of Russell's analysis of singular terms, this book takes an original approach to the perennial problems of reference and singular terms by separating the underlying issues into different levels of analysis.

This paper tries to show that the assumption here called monopropositionalism is taken for granted by most semantic and pragmatic theories of natural language, and that it has decisively conditioned many of the debates in recent philosophy of language. Monopropositionalism claims that, leaving aside implicatures, the utterance of a sentence expresses a unique proposition, which is taken as what is said by the utterance, its content or its truth-conditions. But different and, often, incompatible roles are required from that proposition. We (...) will argue for the convenience of rejecting that assumption and the adoption of a pluripropositionalist theory of utterances, based on Korta and Perry’s (forthcoming) Critical Pragmatics. (shrink)

This paper continues an ongoing debate between Michael Devitt and me on referential uses of definite descriptions. He has argued that definite descriptions have referential meanings, and I have argued that they do not. Having previously rebutted the view that referential uses are akin to particularized conversational implicatures, he now he rebuts the view that they are akin to generalized conversational implicatures. I agree that the GCI is not the best model, but I maintain that in exploiting the quantificational meaning (...) of definite descriptions, referential uses involve a different sort of pragmatic regularity. Also, I try to bolster my objection to Devitt’s claim that the word ‘the’ is semantically ambiguous. (shrink)

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.

Logical AI develops computer programs that represent what they know about the world primarily by logical formulas and decide what to do primarily by logical reasoning--including nonmonotonic logical reasoning. It is convenient to use logical sentences and terms whose meaning depends on context. The reasons for this are similar to what causes human language to use context dependent meanings. This note gives elements of some of the formalisms to which we have been led. Fuller treatments are in [McC93], [Guh91] and (...) [MB94] and the references cited in the Web page [Buv95]. The first main idea is to make contexts first class objects in the logic and use the formula ist(c,p) to assert that the proposition p is true in the context c. A second idea is to formalize how propositions true in one context transform when they are moved to different but related contexts. An ability to transcend the outermost context is needed to give computer programs the ability to reason about the totality of all they have thought about so far [McC96]. (shrink)