Philosophy of Linguistics

The role of artificial languages

by Martin Stokhof

In: D. Graff Fara and G. Russell (eds), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language, London, Routledge, 2011, pp. 544-53

Comments-to-comments

by Martin Stokhof

Theoretical Linguistics, Vol. 37, no. 1-2, 2011, pp. 79-94
co-authored with Michiel van Lambalgen

Abstractions and idealisations: The construction of modern linguistics

by Martin Stokhof

Theoretical Linguistics, Vol. 37, no. 1-2, 2011, pp. 1-26
co-authored with Michiel van Lambalgen

Intuitions and competence in formal semantics

by Martin Stokhof

In: B. Partee, M. Glanzberg and J. Skilters (eds), The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication. Volume 6: Formal Semantics and Pragmatics. Discourse, Context and Models., Riga, University of Latvia Press 2011, pp. 1-23

Ignorance of linguistics: A note on Michael Devitt's Ignorance of language

by Guy Longworth

Conflicting grammatical appearances

by Guy Longworth

Quotation and Conceptions of Language

by Paul Saka

The Semantics of 'Good'

by Dean Pettit

The meaning of ‘good’ has long been a topic of philosophical interest. Much of the philosophical literature has aimed... more The meaning of ‘good’ has long been a topic of philosophical interest. Much of the philosophical literature has aimed to understand the semantics of ‘good’ within predicative and attributive constructions. In these constructions, ‘good’ has often been understood to predicate some property or concept (or family thereof), though this view has been challenged by non-cognitivists. Relatively little attention has been given to a range of syntactic constructions ‘good’ occurs in that are characteristic of modal adjectives, such as ‘necessary’ and ‘possible’. The present paper argues that these constructions are more revealing as to the semantics of ‘good’. The central thesis will be that ‘good’ is a modal adjective with a distinctive modal semantics that, rather than merely quantifying over possible worlds, sets up comparisons between worlds. This constitutes both a novel approach to the semantics of ‘good’ and a novel species of modality. The predicates ‘good’ occurs in have a derivative modal semantics that applies to objects by construing them as occupying a particular role within worlds that the semantics can compare.

Why knowledge is unnecessary for understanding language

by Dean Pettit

It is a natural thought that understanding language consists in possessing knowledge—to understand a word is to know... more It is a natural thought that understanding language consists in possessing knowledge—to understand a word is to know what it means. It is also natural to suppose that this knowledge is propositional knowledge—to know what a word means is to know that it means such‐and‐such. Thus it is prima facie plausible to suppose that understanding a bit of language consists in possessing propositional knowledge of its meaning. I refer to this as the epistemic view of understanding language. The theoretical appeal of this view for the philosophy of language is that it provides for an attractive account of the project of the theory of meaning. If understanding language consists in possessing propositional knowledge of the meanings of expressions, then a meaning theory amounts to a theory of what speakers know in virtue of understanding language. In this paper I argue that, despite its intuitive and theoretical appeal, the epistemic view is false. Propositional knowledge is not necessary for understanding language, not even tacit knowledge. Unlike knowledge, I argue, linguistic understanding does not fail in Gettier cases, does not require epistemic warrant and does not even require belief. The intuitions about knowledge that have been central to epistemology do not seem to hold for linguistic understanding. So unless epistemologists have been radically mistaken about what knowledge requires, knowledge is unnecessary for understanding language.

Belief and Understanding: A Rejoinder to Gross

by Dean Pettit

On the Epistemology and Psychology of Speech Comprehension

by Dean Pettit

How do we know what other speakers say? Perhaps the most natural view is that we hear a speaker’s utterance and infer... more How do we know what other speakers say? Perhaps the most natural view is that we hear a speaker’s utterance and infer what was said, drawing on our competence in the syntax and semantics of the language. An alternative view that has emerged in the literature is that native speakers have a non-inferential capacity to perceive the content of speech. Call this the perceptual view. The disagreement here is best understood to be an epistemological one about whether our knowledge of what speakers say is epistemically mediated by our linguistic competence. The present paper takes up the question of how we should go about settling this issue. Arguments for the perceptual view generally appeal to the phenomenology of speech comprehension. The present paper develops a line of argument for the perceptual view that draws on evidence from empirical psychology. The evidence suggests that a speaker’s core syntactic and semantic competence is typically deployed sub-personally (e.g., by something like a module). The point is not just that the competence is tacit or unconscious, but that the person is not the locus of the competence. I argue that standing competence can enter into the grounds for knowledge only if it is subject to a certain sort of epistemic assessment that is appropriate only if the person is the locus of that competence. If the person is not the locus of a speaker’s core linguistic competence, as the psychological evidence suggests, then that competence does not enter into the grounds for our knowledge of what speakers say. If this line of argument is right, it has implications for the epistemology of perception and for our understanding of how empirical psychology bears on epistemology generally.

The Preaching of Justification and Illocutionary Acts

by Lance Green

my BA thesis.
Still needs more edits... which I'll do when I have time ;)

Despite popilar sentiment that the core of Christian teaching is best understood through physical actions, such as... more Despite popilar sentiment that the core of Christian teaching is best understood through physical actions, such as humanitarian services, contemporary philosophy and theology increasingly point to the power of language and the speaker to perform and accomplish something real in the concrete world. Drawing from the theological work of German theologian Oswald Bayer, this paper applies John Searle's categories of illocutionary acts to the homiletic emphases, and examines how the doctrine of justification is understood and applied in various contexts. Considering each of Searle's speech acts categories–declarative, assertive, directive, commissive, and expressive–I show that the various theological perspective that exist today tend toward a reductionism of Christian proclamation to a speech act other than the declarative. Identifying the doctrine of justification in Lutheran theology as primarily bound to a preached declarative speech act, I argue that the declarative is the hub and fountain of all other illoctutionary acts, and that the other acts are ineffective or incoherent without a connection to the central, first-order declaration of justification. I examine in turn each of the ways in which speech act reductionisms correspond to Protestant liberalism, fundamentalism, decisional theology, and moralism. I conclude that the centrality and potency of first-order declaration of justification is a central, valuable contribution of Luther's theology to current concerns about theology and language.

Inconsistency Theories of Semantic Paradox

by Douglas Patterson

Meaning, Communication and Knowledge by Testimony

by Douglas Patterson

Forthcoming, Schantz ed. _Prospects for Meaning_.

Understanding the Liar

by Douglas Patterson

Cumulative readings of "every" do not provide evidence for events and thematic roles

by Lucas Champollion

Champollion, Lucas (2009). To appear in Proceedings of the 17th Amsterdam Colloquium, December 16-18, 2009.

An argument by Kratzer (2000) based on Schein (1986, 1993) does not conclusively show that events and thematic roles... more An argument by Kratzer (2000) based on Schein (1986, 1993) does not conclusively show that events and thematic roles are necessary ingredients of the logical representation of natural language sentences. The argument claims that cumulative readings of "every" can be represented only with these ingredients. But scope-splitting accounts make it possible to represent cumulative readings of "every" in an eventless framework. Such accounts are motivated by obligatory reconstruction  effects of "every" and by crosslinguistic considerations. Kratzer proposes that "agent" but not "theme" occurs in the logical representation of sentences because this allows her to model subject-object asymmetries in the distribution of cumulative every. But the reason for these asymmetries seems to be that every must be c-commanded by another quantifier in order to cumulate with it, no matter what its thematic role is. So the distribution of cumulative "every" does not provide support for Kratzer’s proposal.

Move and accommodate: A solution to Haddock's puzzle

by Lucas Champollion

Champollion, Lucas, and Uli Sauerland (2010). Move and accommodate: A solution to Haddock's puzzle. Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 8, Olivier Bonami and Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (eds.) 2010.

This paper proposes a solution to Haddock's puzzle: Why do embedded definites ("the rabbit in the hat") have... more This paper proposes a solution to Haddock's puzzle: Why do embedded definites ("the rabbit in the hat") have different presuppositions from what would be expected on a strictly compositional semantics? For example, "the rabbit in the hat" does not presuppose that there is a unique hat, but only that there is a unique combination of a hat and a rabbit in it. This is unexpected if the presupposition of "the hat" is computed locally. The solution is given in terms of the independently attested mechanisms of intermediate presupposition accommodation and quantifier raising: the inner definite is raised above the outer one, whose uniqueness presupposition is then accommodated into the inner definite. Since quantifier raising is subject to island constraints, the account predicts that embedded definites should be sensitive to islands. This prediction is confirmed in an experiment with 800 participants conducted with Amazon Mechanical Turk.