Distributed utterances [penultimate version].
Forthcoming in selected proceedings from the 2016 Context, Cognition and
Communication Conference in Warsaw. To be published by Springer.
I propose an apparatus for handling intrasentential change in context. The
standard approach has problems with sentences with multiple occurrences of the
same demonstrative or indexical. My proposal involves the idea that contexts can
be complex. Complex contexts are built out of (“simple”) Kaplanian
contexts by ordered n-tupling. With these we can revise the clauses of
Kaplan’s Logic of Demonstratives so that each part of a sentence is taken
in a different component of a complex context. I consider other applications of
the framework: to agentially distributed utterances (ones made partly by one
speaker and partly by another); to an account of scare-quoting; and to an
account of a binding-like phenomenon that avoids what Kit Fine calls “the
antinomy of the variable.”
2018. Kinds of
monsters and kinds of compositionality.
Analysis 78: 657–66.
In response to Stefano
Predelli’s article finding in David Kaplan’s
“Demonstratives” (1977) a distinction between “context
shifting” monsters and “operators on character,” I argue that
context shifters are operators on character. That conclusion conflicts
with the claim (made by Kaplan and endorsed by Predelli) that operators on
character must be covertly quotational. But that claim is itself unmotivated.
2017. Scare-quoting
and incorporation. In The
semantics and pragmatics of quotation, edited by Paul Saka and Michael Johnson, 3–34.
Dordrecht: Springer.
I explain a mechanism I call “incorporation,” that I think is at
work in a wide range of cases often put under the headings of
“scare-quoting” or “mixed-quoting.” Incorporation is
flagging some words in one’s own utterance to indicate that they are to be
interpreted as if uttered by some other speaker in some other context, while
supplying evidence to one’s interpreter enabling them to identify that
other speaker and context. This mechanism gives us a way to use others’
vocabularies and contexts, thereby extending our expressive capacities on the
fly. Explaining incorporation involves explaining intrasentential shifts in
lexicon and in context. Shifts of the former sort are familiar to linguists
under the heading of “code-switching.” Shifts of the latter sort
have been less explored; accordingly I explain how to modify David
Kaplan’s Logic of Demonstratives to allow for such shifts. I compare
the incorporation account of scare-quoting with accounts offered by Brandom
1994, Recanati
2000, Geurts and Maier
2003, Benbaji
2004, Predelli 2003a
and 2003b, and Shan 2010. Finally I note
a possible implication concerning the speech act of assertion: that you can
properly assert a content you don’t believe, let alone know, because part
of it is expressed with words you don’t understand.
2017. Russellianism
unencumbered. Philosophical Studies 174: 2819–43.
Richard Heck, Jr has recently
argued against Russellianism about proper names not in the usual
way—by appeal to “intuitions” about the truth conditions of
“that”-clause belief ascriptions—but by appeal to our need to
specify beliefs in a way that reflects their individuation. Since beliefs are
individuated by their psychological roles and not their Russellian contents, he
argues, Russellianism is precluded in principle from accounting for our ability
to specify beliefs in ordinary language. I argue that Heck thus makes things
easier for the Russellian. For by framing the issue as one concerning
the specificatory powers of ordinary language in general, rather than just of
“that”-clause ascriptions, Heck weakens the implications of any
claim about the semantics of that one type of belief-specifying locution. I
augment this diagnosis with a positive account of the specificatory usefulness,
and attested commonness, of (partly or wholly) quotational belief
ascriptions, e.g. “Lois believes that ‘Superman’ is at the
meeting.” This proposal is not of the usual sort concerning such locutions
since it does not involve the (dubious) claim that they are in some way
equivalent to “that”-clause ascriptions.
2017 [edited volume]. Williamson
on modality, co-edited with Juhani Yli-Vakkuri (London: Routledge).
Timothy
Williamson is one of the most influential living philosophers working in the
areas of logic and metaphysics. His work has been particularly influential in
shaping debates about metaphysical modality, which is the topic of his recent
provocative and closely-argued book Modal
Logic as Metaphysics (2013). The present book comprises ten essays by
metaphysicians and logicians responding to Williamson’s work on
metaphysical modality. The authors include some of the most distinguished
philosophers of modality in the world, as well as several rising stars. Each
essay is followed by a reply by Williamson. In addition, the book contains a
major new essay by Williamson, “Modal science,” concerning the role
of modal claims in natural science. This book was originally published as a
special issue of the Canadian Journal of
Philosophy.
2011. Critical
notice of Language turned on itself, by Herman Cappelen and Ernie
Lepore (Oxford University Press, 2007). Analytic Philosophy 52:
349–67.
This is a lively, provocative book and many of its arguments are convincing.
In this critical study I summarize the book, then discuss some of the
authors’ claims, dwelling on three issues: their objections to the view of
François
Recanati on “pre-semantic” effects; the relation between their
theory of quotation and the Tarskian “Proper Name Theory,” which
they reject; and their treatment of mixed quotation, which rests on the claim
that quotation expressions are “syntactic chameleons.” I argue that
the objections to Recanati don’t expose any problem with his view, and
that the “Proper Name Theory” has all the virtues of their own
proposal. Finally I raise some queries about the technical apparatus of
syntactic chameleonism.
2011. How to use
a concept you reject. Philosophical Quarterly 61: 293–319.
Inferentialist accounts of concept possession are often supported by
examples in which rejection of some inference seems to amount to rejection of
some concept. Timothy Williamson has argued that these
accounts have the implausible consequence that in such a case, someone rejecting
the inference can’t so much as understand those who use the
concept. Here I explain how to avoid that consequence: by distinguishing
between conditions necessary on direct uses of a concept (to describe
the non-cognitive world) and conditions necessary on content-specifying
uses (to specify what someone thinks or says). I consider how this claim about
the non-uniformity of concept possession accords with different theories of
attitude ascription and with claims about reverse compositionality. There is
surprisingly little standing in the way of the claim that someone unable to use
a concept directly can nonetheless satisfy conditions for using it in a
content-specifying thought.
2007. Understanding mixed
quotation. Mind 116: 927–46.
Mixed quotation is when part of an indirect quotation is itself a direct
quotation put to work simultaneously in a content-specifying, as well as
utterance-specifying role. (For example, in the sentence
Stig said that Dinsdale was “vicious but fair”
the directly quoted part of the that-clause plays both these roles.) It is
surprisingly difficult to account for the semantics of mixed quotations. Davidson’s
account (elaborated by
Cappelen and Lepore) handles many cases well, but it fails to accommodate
the fact that the part enclosed in quotation marks is used to specify not what
the quoter means when she utters it but what the quoted speaker means
when she utters it. In this paper I propose an account that is
Davidsonian in terms of logical form yet which accommodates that fact. It rests
on the idea that mixed quotation involves deferred demonstration: in the
example above, I specified what Stig meant partly by using my utterance of
“vicious but fair” to deferred-demonstrate his utterance of
those words. The account also explains why it’s possible to understand
direct and indirect quotations while failing to understand mixed
quotations—hence mixed quotation is a nontrivial addition to our
linguistic repertoire.
2005. Inferentialism
and singular reference. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35:
183–220.
Basic to Robert Brandom’s project in Making It Explicit
is the demarcation of singular terms according to the structure of their
inferential roles—rather than, as is usual, according to the kinds of
things they purport to denote. But the demarcational effort founders on the
need to distinguish extensional and nonextensional occurrences of expressions in
terms of inferential roles; the closest that an inferentialist can come to
drawing that distinction is to discern degrees of extensionality, and that is
not close enough. The general moral applies as well to “two factor”
theories of content: the notion of inferential role lacks the independence from
the notion of denotation that many proponents of such theories have attributed
to it.
2005. Motivating inferentialism. Southwest
Philosophy Review. 21: 77–84.
Robert Brandom has supported his inferentialist conception of
semantic content by appealing to the claim that it is a necessary condition on
having a propositional attitude that one appreciate the inferential relations it
stands in. When we see what considerations can be given in support of that
claim, however, we see that it doesn’t even motivate an inferentialist
semantics. The problem is that that claim about what it takes to have a
propositional attitude does nothing to show that its inferential relations are a
feature of its content rather than of the relation that the subject
stands in to that content—that is, the attitude.
2003. Do
inferential roles compose? Dialectica 57: 430–37.
Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have
argued that inferential roles are not compositional. It is unclear,
however, whether the theories at which they aim their objection are obliged to
meet the strong compositionality requirement they have in mind. But even if
that requirement is accepted, the data they adduce can in fact be derived from
an inferential-role theory that meets it. Technically this is trivial, but it
raises some interesting objections turning on the issue of the
generality of inferential roles. I explain how those objections can be
met. Whether Fodor’s and Lepore’s strong compositionality
requirement is justified or not, then, inferential-role theories do not have the
problem that they claim to have identified.
2002. Self-knowledge
failures and first person authority. Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 64: 365–80.
No account of self-knowledge is satisfactory, I claim, unless it explains
how we might truly attribute failures to possess self-knowledge. We
can make progress towards a satisfactory account, then, by asking, What sorts of
self-knowledge could be at issue in true attributions of such failures? It might
seem that it can’t be the sort of self-knowledge whose possession
conditions Tyler Burge
(1988) and Donald Davidson (1984, 1987) have described. I argue that
it can be, once we generalize Burge’s and Davidson’s accounts along
a certain dimension along which propositional attitude-types can differ. For
the sort of self-knowledge required to have attitudes of one type can
differ from the sort of self-knowledge required to have attitudes of other
types.
2002. Wittgenstein on rules and
practices. Journal of Philosophical
Research 27: 83–100.
Some readers of Wittgenstein—I discuss Robert Brandom—think that
his writings contain a regress argument showing that the notion of participating
in a practice is more basic than the notion of following a rule, in explanations
of linguistic correctness. But the regress argument bears equally on both these
notions: if there is an explanatory regress of rules, then there is an
explanatory regress of practices as well. Why then does Wittgenstein invoke the
notion of a practice, apparently by way of diagnosing the error on which the
regress argument rests? I suggest that he invokes that notion to emphasize
certain aspects of rule-following which we are apt to neglect, when we forget
that rule-following is—not, rests
upon—participating in a practice. When we appreciate those aspects
of rule/practice-following we see the flaw in both regress arguments.
2000. Functionalism and
self-consciousness. Mind & Language 15: 481–99.
I offer a philosophically well-motivated solution to a problem that George
Bealer has identified, which
he claims is fatal to functionalism. The problem is that there seems to be no
way to generate a satisfactory Ramsey sentence of a psychological theory in
which mental-state predicates occur within the scopes of mental-state
predicates. My central claim is that the functional roles in terms of which a
creature capable of self-consciousness identifies her own mental states must be
roles that items could play within creatures whose psychology is less complex
than hers. (Bealer’s
reply to this paper appears in the same issue of Mind & Language.)
2000. Solitary and
embedded knowledge. Southwest Philosophy Review 16: 161–9.
I argue for the usefulness of the distinction between knowledge
that is, and knowledge that is not, acquired in such a way as necessarily to be
acquired along with other knowledge so acquired. Knowledge gained in the latter
ways—e.g. by testimony, by linguistic stipulation—has proved
philosophically puzzling. But this is because philosophers have used
traditional epistemological vocabulary to try to describe what’s
distinctive about it. Using the solitary/embedded distinction, we can frame
descriptions that are both true, and not stipulative-seeming, of what is
distinctive of knowledge gained in these ways. I illustrate these points by
discussing Saul Kripke’s claim that one can gain non-linguistic knowledge
by linguistic stipulation.
1995. Mediality
and rationality in Aristotle’s account of excellence of character.
Apeiron 28: 155–74.
I offer a reading of Aristotle’s “doctrine of the
mean” that avoids two pitfalls: taking it as truistic, and taking it as
involving the bizarre thesis that whenever one acts as reason directs,
one’s action is mid-way between some extremes. The crucial point is that
while Aristotle denies the existence of useful general ethical truths, he
himself offers truths about the likelihoods with which rationality will
require actions of certain types; and it is with such truths that the
statistical idea of the mean gets a foothold in his theory of the virtues.
