Philosophy of Language

This book provides a response to the argument for meaning scepticism set out by Saul Kripke in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Kripke asks what makes it the case that anybody ever means anything by any word, and argues that there are no facts of the matter as to what anybody ever means. Kripke's argument has inspired a lively and extended debate in the philosophy of language, as it raises some of the most fundamental issues in the field: namely, the reality, privacy, and normativity of meaning. The book argues that in order to achieve the radical conclusion that there are no facts as to what a person means by a word, the sceptic must rely on the thesis that meaning is normative, and that this thesis fails. Since any ‘sceptical solution’ to the sceptical problem is irremediably incoherent, the book concludes that there must be a fact of the matter about what we mean. In addition to providing an overview of the debate on meaning and content scepticism, this book presents a detailed discussion of the contributions made by Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Robert Brandom, Fred Dretske, John McDowell, and Crispin Wright, among others, to the controversy surrounding Kripke's argument. The issues considered include the normativity of meaning and its relation to the normativity of moral judgments, reductive and non-reductive theories of meaning, deflationism about truth and meaning, and the privacy of meaning.

Conditionals are of two basic kinds, often called ‘indicative’ and ‘subjunctive’. This book expounds and evaluates the main literature about each kind. It eventually defends the view of Adams and Edgington that indicatives are devices for expressing subjective probabilities, and the view of Stalnaker and Lewis that subjunctives are statements about close possible worlds. But it also discusses other views, e.g. that indicatives are really material conditionals, and Goodman's approach to subjunctives.

David Kaplan's intellectual influence on 20th-century analytic philosophy has been transformative. He introduced lasting innovations in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. Just as important, however, is Kaplan's way of doing philosophy; generous but incisive, his profoundly interactive style mentored countless generations of students, many of whom contribute to this book. This book collects new, previously unpublished articles on Kaplan, analyzing a broad spectrum of topics ranging from cutting-edge linguistics and the philosophy of mathematics, to metaphysics, the foundations of pragmatics, and the theory of communication. With its historical introduction and personal tributes, this book also reveals much of Kaplan's life and times, highlighting the key players of analytic philosophy of the last century, and underscoring Kaplan's substantial impact on contemporary philosophy.

This work explores some of the many interesting philosophical issues that arise in the conduct of generative linguistics. There are three basic themes that are woven throughout the work. The first theme is that generative linguistics at its best is concerned with understanding and explanation, and not just with observation and data gathering. Generative linguistics is interested in underlying mechanisms that give rise to language related phenomena, and this interest will often trump the goal of accumulating more data. The second theme is the Ψ-language hypothesis. It is the hypothesis that the underlying mechanisms posited by generative linguists are fundamentally psychological mechanisms and that generative linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology, but that it doesn't follow that cognitive psychology must therefore be interested in psychological states individuated narrowly. It is consistent with the Ψ-language hypothesis that psychological states are individuated in part by the embedding environment. The third theme is the principle of methodological minimalism. It is the thesis that best theory criteria like simplicity and formal rigor all really come down to one thing: seek methods that help linguists to do their jobs effectively and with the minimal of cognitive labor.

This is the first collection of essays on J. L. Austin’s philosophy published by a major Anglophone press in nearly forty years. Rejecting the standard picture of him as an effectively obsolete “doyen of ordinary language philosophy”, the contributors show how Austin’s work can be brought to bear on issues that are on the top of today’s philosophical agenda, such as scepticism and contextualism, the epistemology of testimony, the generality of the conceptual, the viability of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, and issues in philosophical methodology. The connections made between Austin’s philosophy and current debates provide new interpretations of his views and aim to demonstrate that his work deserves a more central place in mainstream philosophical discussion than it currently has. The collection also contains a substantial introduction that situates Austin’s thought in its original intellectual milieu and provides an overview of the many different ways in which his ideas have influenced later developments, in philosophy and elsewhere. Contributors are Avner Baz, Simon Glendinning, Martin Gustafsson, Mark Kaplan, Adam Leite, Benjamin McMyler, Jean-Philippe Narboux, and Charles Travis.

Plural predication is a pervasive part of ordinary language. We can say that some people are fifty in number, are surrounding a building, come from many countries, and are classmates. These predicates can be true of some people without being true of any one of them; they are non-distributive predications. Yet the apparatus of predication and quantification in standard modern logic does not allow a place for such non-distributive predicates. This book explores the enrichment of modern logic with plural predication and quantification. We can have genuinely non-distributive predication without relying on singularizing procedures from set theory and mereology. The fundamental ‘among’ relation can be understood in a way that does not generate any hierarchy of plurals analogous to a hierarchy of types or a hierarchy of higher-order logics. Singular quantification can be understood as a special case, with the general type being quantifiers that allow both singular and plural quantification. The ‘among’ relation is formally similar to a ‘part of’ relation, but the relations are distinct, so that mass quantification and plural quantification cannot be united in the same way that plural and singular are united. Analysis of singular and plural definite descriptions follows, with a defence of a fundamentally Russellian analysis, but coupled with some new ideas about how to be sensitive to the role of context. This facilitates an analysis of some central features of the use of pronouns, both singular and plural.

This book examines some recent answers to the questions of how and where to draw the divide between semantics (roughly, features of the literal meaning of linguistic items) and pragmatics (roughly, features emerging from the context within which such items are being used). In particular, the book defends what is commonly known as ‘minimal semantics’ (aka ‘semantic invariantism’ or ‘insensitive semantics’). Minimal semantics, as the name suggests, offers a pretty minimal account of the inter-relation between semantics and pragmatics. Specifically, it holds that while context can affect literal semantic content in the case of genuine (i.e. lexically or syntactically marked) context-sensitive items (e.g. indexicals, demonstratives, tense markers), this is the extent of pragmatic influence within the semantic realm. Minimalism, then, prohibits what are here called ‘free pragmatic effects’: putative effects on semantic content which are not required by any lexico‐syntactic item in a sentence. The book opens with an exploration of the current positions in this debate, introducing the main approaches of minimalism, indexicalism, contextualism, relativism, and occasionalism and offers some initial reasons for being concerned about many of the positions opposing minimalism. The main arguments against minimalism are then explored, looking at the argument that minimal contents are explanatorily irrelevant, the argument that at least some sentences fail to express minimal contents, and the argument that the kinds of word meanings which minimalism requires are either impossible or explanatorily inadequate. The ultimate conclusion of the book is that none of these arguments are compelling and that minimalism in fact provides an attractive and plausible account of the literal meanings of natural language sentences.

Quantification is a topic which brings together linguistics, logic, and philosophy. Quantifiers are the essential tools with which, in language or logic, we refer to quantity of things or amount of stuff. In English they include such expressions as no, some, all, both, or many. This book presents the definitive interdisciplinary exploration of how they work — their syntax, semantics, and inferential role.

So far as language and meaning are concerned, Donald Davidson and Willard Van Orman Quine are typically regarded as birds of a feather. This book urges first of all that they cannot be. Quine’s most basic and general philosophical commitment is to his methodological naturalism, which is incompatible with Davidson’s main commitments. In particular, it is not possible to endorse, from Quine’s perspective, the roles played by the concepts truth and reference in Davidson’s philosophy of language; Davidson’s employment of the concept of truth is from Quine’s point of view needlessly ambitious; and his use of the concept of reference cannot be divorced from unscientific ‘intuition’. Second, the book puts the case positively in favour of Quine’s naturalism and its corollary, naturalized epistemology. It is possible to give a consistent account of language without problematic uses of the concepts truth and reference, which in turn makes a strident naturalism much more plausible.