This book is a defense of modal realism; the thesis that our world is but one of a plurality of worlds, and that the individuals that inhabit our world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds. Lewis argues that the philosophical utility of modal realism is a good reason for believing that it is true.

A transcript of three lectures, given at Princeton University in 1970, which deals with (inter alia) debates concerning proper names in the philosophy of language.

For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary.

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.

A total theory of linguistic understanding is often taken to require three subtheories: a syntactic theory, a semantic theory, and a pragmatic theory. The semantic theory occupies an intermediary role – it takes as input structures generated by the syntax, assigns to those structures meanings, and then passes those meanings on to the pragmatics, which characterizes the conversational 1 impact of those meanings. Semantic theories thus seek to explain phenomena such as truth conditions of and inferential relations among sentences/utterances, anaphoric (...) relations among terms, and ambiguity and incoherence of expressions. (shrink)

In Krifka (2001) I argued that three distinct phenomena of question semantics – alternative questions like Did it rain or not?, multiple constituent questions with pair-list readings like Who bought what? and the focus patterns of answers to constituent questions – cannot be dealt with adequately within the framework of Alternative Semantics. In Krifka (to appear) I argue that Alternative Semantics also is problematic as a framework for focus semantics in general; in particular, it makes wrong predictions in case focus (...) occurs in syntactic islands. (shrink)

Russell and Strawson sparked a well known debate on the subject of Linguistic Presupposition inspiring many linguists and philosophers to follow suit, including Frege, whose work initiated the modern study in this area. Beaver begins with the most comprehensive overview and critical discussion of this burgeoning field published to date. He then goes on to motivate and develop his own account based on a Dynamic Semantics. This account is a recent line of theoretical work in which the Tarskian emphasis on (...) truth conditions is questioned. The central plank of the theory of meaning is a formal account of the change in information effected by use of language on hearers or readers. The proposal thus consolidates ideas of Stalnaker, Karttunen and Heim, all of whom had suggested that such an account was needed. At the same time it provides a new impulse and motivation to Dynamic Semantics itself. (shrink)

First published in 1937. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Surveys and extens work that has been done in the past two years on 'tense logic' and is a sequel to the author's book, Time and Modality.

First published in 1952, professor Strawson's highly influential Introductionto Logical Theoryprovides a detailed examination of the relationship between the behaviour of words in common language and the behaviour of symbols in a logical ...

I ON THE PRIMITIVE TERM OF LOGISTICf IN this article I propose to establish a theorem belonging to logistic concerning some connexions, not widely known, ...

Data about attitude reports provide some of the most interesting arguments for, and against, various theses of semantic relativism. This paper is a short survey of three such arguments. First, I’ll argue (against recent work by von Fintel and Gillies) that relativists can explain the behaviour of relativistic terms in factive attitude reports. Second, I’ll argue (against Glanzberg) that looking at attitude reports suggests that relativists have a more plausible story to tell than contextualists about the division of labour between (...) semantics and meta-semantics. Finally, I’ll offer a new argument for invariantism (i.e. against both relativism and contextualism) about moral terms. The argument will turn on the observation that the behaviour of normative terms in factive and non-factive attitude reports is quite unlike the behaviour of any other plausibly context-sensitive term. Before that, I’ll start with some taxonomy, just so as it’s clear what the intended conclusions below are supposed to be. (shrink)

Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is asocial art.

This is the second edition of an award-winning 1981 book (Princeton University Press and Basil Blackwell, based on the author’s doctoral dissertation) considered to be a classic in the philosophy of language movement known variously as the New Theory of Reference or the Direct-Reference Theory, as well as in the metaphysics of modal essentialism that is related to this philosophy of language.

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 (...) holds that the sole contribution of a proper name to the truth conditions of a sentence is an individual) as well as the related doctrine that proper names are rigid designators. Elbourne begins by addressing donkey anaphora, relating other concerns about pronouns to the solution of this notorious problem. His subsequent argumentation provides a unified semantics for the donkey anaphoric and bound and referential uses of pronouns and discusses the prospect of unifying the syntax and semantics of pronouns with the syntax and semantics of normal definite descriptions. Elbourne's aim is not only to advance his proposal of a unified syntax and semantics but also to urge linguists and philosophers dealing with pronoun interpretation to consider a wider range of theories than they do at present, and to test the competing claims of description-based theories and dynamic semantics against the data. (shrink)

But Findlay's remark, like so much that has been written on the subject of time in the present century, was provoked in the first place by McTaggart's ...

The author describes an interpreted modal language and produces some clear examples of logical and analytic truths that are not necessary. These examples: (a) are far simpler than the ones cited in the literature, (b) show that a popular conception of logical truth in modal languages is incorrect, and (c) show that there are contingent truths knowable ``a priori'' that do not depend on fixing the reference of a term.

This is a study in the meaning of natural language probability operators, sentential operators such as probably and likely. We ask what sort of formal structure is required to model the logic and semantics of these operators. Along the way we investigate their deep connections to indicative conditionals and epistemic modals, probe their scalar structure, observe their sensitivity to contex- tually salient contrasts, and explore some of their scopal idiosyncrasies.

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.

A dynamic semantics for epistemically modalized sentences is an attractive alternative to the orthodox view that our best theory of meaning ascribes to such sentences truth-conditions relative to what is known. This essay demonstrates that a dynamic theory about might and must offers elegant explanations of a range of puzzling observations about epistemic modals. The first part of the story offers a unifying treatment of disputes about epistemic modality and disputes about matters of fact while at the same time avoiding (...) the complexities of alternative theories. The second part of the story extends the basic framework to cover some complicated data about retraction and the interaction between epistemic modality and tense. A comparison between the suggestion made in this essay and current versions of the orthodoxy is provided. (shrink)

A distinction is developed between two uses of definite descriptions, the "attributive" and the "referential." the distinction exists even in the same sentence. several criteria are given for making the distinction. it is suggested that both russell's and strawson's theories fail to deal with this distinction, although some of the things russell says about genuine proper names can be said about the referential use of definite descriptions. it is argued that the presupposition or implication that something fits the description, present (...) in both uses, has a different genesis depending upon whether the description is used referentially or attributively. this distinction in use seems not to depend upon any syntactic or semantic ambiguity. it is also suggested that there is a distinction between what is here called "referring" and what russell defines as denoting. definite descriptions may denote something, according to his definition, whether used attributively or referentially. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: (i) to introduce the framework of update semantics and to explain what kind of semantic phenomena may successfully be analysed in it: (ii) to give a detailed analysis of one such phenomenon: default reasoning.

There is a familiar debate between Russell and Strawson concerning bivalence and ‘the present King of France’. According to the Strawsonian view, ‘The present King of France is bald’ is neither true nor false, whereas, on the Russellian view, that proposition is simply false. In this paper, I develop what I take to be a crucial connection between this debate and a different domain where bivalence has been at stake: future contingents. On the familiar ‘Aristotelian’ view, future contingent propositions are (...) neither true nor false. However, I argue that, just as there is a Russellian alternative to the Strawsonian view concerning ‘the present King of France’, according to which the relevant class of propositions all turn out false, so there is a Russellian alternative to the Aristotelian view, according to which future contingents all turn out false, not neither true nor false. The result: contrary to millennia of philosophical tradition, we can be open futurists without denying bivalence. (shrink)

This article discusses some of the ways in which natural language can express modal information – information which is, to a first approximation, about what could be or must be the case, as opposed to being about what actually is the case. It motivates, explains, and raises problems for Angelika Kratzer's influential theory of modal auxiliaries, and introduces a new approach to one important debate about the relationships between modality, evidentiality, context change, and imperative force.

Let DDQ be the thesis that definite descriptions are quantifiers. Philosophers often deny DDQ because they believe that quantifiers do not depend on context in certain ways, ways in which definite descriptions do depend on context. In this paper, we examine one such argument, which, if sound, would entail the negation of DDQ.We show that this argument fails, and draw some consequences from its failure.

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)

Jason Stanley presents a startling and provocative claim about knowledge: that whether or not someone knows a proposition at a given time is in part determined by his or her practical interests, i.e. by how much is at stake for that person at that time. In defending this thesis, Stanley introduces readers to a number of strategies for resolving philosophical paradox, making the book essential not just for specialists in epistemology but for all philosophers interested in philosophical methodology. Since a (...) number of his strategies appeal to linguistic evidence, it will be of great interest to linguists as well. (shrink)

According to what I will call a contextualist solution to the sorites paradox, vague terms are context-sensitive, and one can give a convincing dissolution of the sorites paradox in terms of this context-dependency. The reason, according to the contextualist, that precise boundaries for expressions like “heap” or “tall for a basketball player” are so difficult to detect is that when two entities are sufficiently similar (or saliently similar), we tend to shift the interpretation of the vague expression so that if (...) one counts as falling in the extension of the property expressed by that expression, so does the other. As a consequence, when we look for the boundary of the extension of a vague expression in its penumbra, our very looking has the effect of changing the interpretation of the vague expression so that the boundary is not where we are looking. This accounts for the persuasive force of sorites arguments. (shrink)

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 (...) John Perry has called`unarticulated constituents''. I conclude by drawingsome consequences of my arguments for appeals tocontext-dependence in the resolution of problems inepistemology and philosophical logic. (shrink)

In this book one of the world's foremost philosophers of language presents his unifying vision of the field--its principal achievements, its most pressing current questions, and its most promising future directions. In addition to explaining the progress philosophers have made toward creating a theoretical framework for the study of language, Scott Soames investigates foundational concepts--such as truth, reference, and meaning--that are central to the philosophy of language and important to philosophy as a whole. The first part of the book describes (...) how philosophers from Frege, Russell, Tarski, and Carnap to Kripke, Kaplan, and Montague developed precise techniques for understanding the languages of logic and mathematics, and how these techniques have been refined and extended to the study of natural human languages. The book then builds on this account, exploring new thinking about propositions, possibility, and the relationship between meaning, assertion, and other aspects of language use. An invaluable overview of the philosophy of language by one of its most important practitioners, this book will be essential reading for all serious students of philosophy. (shrink)

A unified theory is offered to account for three types of definite descriptions: with singular, plural, & mass predicates, & to provide an account for the word the in descriptions. It is noted that B. Russell's analysis ("On Denoting," Mind, 1905, 14, 479-493) failed to account for plural & mass descriptions. The proposed theory differs from Russell's only by the substitution of the notation (less than or equal to) for Russell's =. It is suggested that for every predicate G there (...) is an appropriate "part of" or "some of" relation on the extension of G. For singular predicates, (less than or equal to) becomes just the identity relation =. The predicate G is formulated as "the G" & analyzed with the formula ((schwa)x) (Gx . (Gy (includes) yy (less than or equal to) x)), which accounts for all cases of definite descriptions. It is suggested that the primary use of the is not to indicate uniqueness, but totality. C. Ornatowski. (shrink)