Logic texts

A Second Course in Logic. (Large pdf: 8.4MB.) This is a free book, 148 pages. It is for anyone who has had a solid introductory logic course and wants more. Topics covered include soundness and completeness for first-order logic, Tarski's theorem on the undefinability of truth, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the undecidability of first-order logic, a smattering of second-order logic, and modal logic (both propositional and quantificational). I wrote it for use in my own course, because I thought I could present the most important results and concepts more clearly than the available textbooks.

Kripke's Theory of Truth (pdf document. 128 K) This is not a research paper. It is just a handout that I prepared for a course some years ago. It is a presentation of Kripke's theory of truth that I intend to be understandable even to people who have had only a first course in logic. Although elementary, it is completely precise. All the terms are defined and all the proofs (except one trivial induction) are given in detail. I am putting this on the web because I think there are probably a lot of people who want to think about truth and who recognize that they need to know something about Kripke's theory but who are not sure whether they have the necessary background to follow the precise presentations that have been published.

Recent work in semantics

The Circle of Deference Proves the Normativity of Semantics (pdf document. 304K. Published in Rivista di Estetica (special issue: essays in honor of Diego Marconi) 34 (2007): 181-198.) Abstract: According to normativism about meaning, as I define it, a statement to the effect that a word has a certain meaning is in effect a proposal. It is a proposal to use a word in a certain way. If the proposal is accepted, then it carries normative force. This paper is a defense of normativism, so defined. The key premise of my argument is that for every group of users of a word, the members of that group regard themselves as responsible to the usage of the other members of the group.

Zero Tolerance for Pragmatics (pdf document. I presented a very different version of this paper at the Semantics/Pragmatics Workshop in Paris, July 2005. The present paper was completed in the summer of 2006. It is due to be published in a special issue of Synthese and might appear there before the end of time. If your library subscribes, you should be able to get the journal preprint is here.) Abstract: The proposition expressed by a sentence is relative to a context. But what determines the content of the context? Many theorists would include among these determinants aspects of the speaker's intention in speaking. My thesis is that, on the contrary, the determinants of the context never include the speaker's intention. My argument for this thesis turns on a consideration of the role that the concept of proposition expressed in context is supposed to play in a theory of linguistic communication. To illustrate an alternative approach, I present an original theory of the reference of demonstratives according to which the referent of a demonstrative is the object that minimally and best satisfies certain accessibility criteria. Although I call my thesis zero tolerance for pragmatics, it is not an expression of intolerance for everything that might be called “pragmatics”.

Against Accommodation: Heim, van der Sandt, and the Presupposition Projection Problem (forthcoming in John Hawthorne, ed., Philosophical Perspectives, 22, Logic and Language, Blackwell Publishing, 2008): This paper criticizes the dominant approaches to presupposition projection and proposes an alternative. Both the update semantics of Heim and the discourse representation theory of van der Sandt have problems in explicating the presuppositions of disjunctions. Moreover, Heim's approach is committed to a conception of accommodation that founders on the problem of informative presuppositions, and van der Sandt's approach is committed to a conception of accommodation that generates over-interpretations of utterances. The present approach borrows Karttunen's idea that instead of associating presuppositions with sentences, we should define the conditions that contexts must meet in order to satisfy-the-presuppositions of a sentence. However, in place of Karttunen's conception of contexts in terms of common ground, the present theory substitutes a conception of contexts as objective entities that are independent of the attitudes of the interlocutors. Contexts, so conceived, may be defined as containing sets of relevant possibilities. This allows us to define the conditions under which a context satisfies the presuppositions of a disjunction.

The Illusion of Semantic Reference (pdf document. Version of March 21, 2006. Originally written in response to an invitation for a publication project that was subsequently cancelled.) A lot of us have given up on the idea that there will be a naturalistic account of the relation of semantic reference and so have resolved to formulate our theories of semantics and communication without appeal to it. Still, there is a resilient intuition to the effect that I know the extensions of the terms of my language. This paper explicates that intuition without yielding to it. The key idea is to give a "skeptical" account of what it is to "know the meaning" of a word, by which I mean an account of the status that is granted to a person in saying that he or she "knows the meaning" of a word.

Comments on Dynamic Semantics (pdf document). This is the text of my comments on the project of dynamic semantics for the session on that topic at the Central Division APA meeting on April 21, 2007. The other speakers were Jeroen Groenendijk, Frank Veltman and Thony Gillies. I question the philosophical basis for dynamic semantics. My doubts have to do with the nature of information states and the norms of semantics. I also question the data that inspire the project. In particular, I question the data concerning presupposition and the data concerning modal operators and conditionals.


Recent work in the philosophy of mind

Here I am posting only work that is not readily available from the outlets in which it was published.

On the Evidence for Prelinguistic Concepts. (pdf document. 64K.) Theoria (Spain) 54 (2005): 287-297 (special issue on the relation between thought and language). Abstract: Language acquisition is often said to be a process of mapping words into pre-existing concepts. Some researchers regard this theory as an immediate corollary of the assumption that all problem-solving involves the application of concepts. But in light of basic philosophical objections to the theory of language acquisition, that kind of rationale cannot be very persuasive. To have a reason to accept the theory of language acquisition despite the philosophical objections, we ought to have experimental evidence for the existence of concepts in prelinguistic children. One of the few lines of research that attempts to provide such evidence is the work of Paul Quinn, who claims that looking-time results show that four-month old infants form "category representations". This paper argues that Quinn's results have an alternative explanation. A distinction is drawn between conceptual thought and the perception of comparative similarity relations, and it is argued that Quinn's results can be explained in terms of the latter rather than the former.

The Belief-Desire Law. (pdf document. 124K. Facta Philosophica 7, 2005: 121-144.) Many philosophers hold that for various reasons there must be psychological laws governing beliefs and desires. One of the few serious examples that they offer is the belief-desire law, which states, roughly, that ceteris paribus people do what they believe will satisfy their desires. This paper argues that, in fact, there is no such law. In particular, decision theory does not support the contention that there is such a law. The problem of incomparable value scales suggests, moreover, that there will be no such law.

I also have a few on-line publications:

Articles on Paul Grice and Wilfrid Sellars in the on-line Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind (University of Waterloo)

Article on Language and Thought in A Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mind (Società Italiana Filosofia Analitica).This is a relatively simple distillation of the critical (as opposed to constructive) component of my work on language.

Review of Andrea Iacona, Propositions, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews