Scott Soames

Reference and Description: The Case against Two-Dimensionalism

A Word about Notation ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 PART ONE: THE REVOLT AGAINST DESCRIPTIVISM 5 CHAPTER 1: The Traditional Descriptivist Picture 7 CHAPTER 2: Attack on the Traditional Picture Proper Names, Non-Descriptionality, and Rigid Designation 14 PART TWO: DESCRIPTIVIST RESISTANCE: THE ORIGINS OF AMBITIOUS TWO-DIMENSIONALISM 33 CHAPTER 3: Reasons for Resistance and the Strategy for Descriptivist Revival 35 CHAPTER 4: Roots of Two-Dimensionalism in Kaplan and Kripke 43 CHAPTER 5: Stalnakers Two-Dimensionalist Model of Discourse 84 CHAPTER 6: The Early Two-Dimensionalist Semantics of Davies and Humberstone 106 PART THREE: AMBITIOUS TWO-DIMENSIONALISM 131 CHAPTER 7: Strong and Weak Two-Dimensionalism 133 CHAPTER 8: Jacksons Strong Two-Dimensionalist Program 149 CHAPTER 9: Chalmerss Two-Dimensionalist Defense of Zombies 194 CHAPTER 10: Critique of Ambitious Two-Dimensionalism 267 PART FOUR: THE WAY FORWARD 327 CHAPTER 11: Positive Nondescriptivism 329 Index 355

New Thinking About Propositions

New thinking about propositions / , New thinking about propositions / , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)

Truth, meaning, and understanding

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Rethinking language, mind, and meaning

Acknowledgments ix Chapter 1 The Need for New Foundations 1 Chapter 2 The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Information 15 Chapter 3 Thinking of Oneself, the Present Moment, and the Actual World-State 46 Chapter 4 Linguistic Cognition, Understanding, and Millian Modes of Presentation 67 Chapter 5 Perceptual and Demonstrative Modes of Presentation 96 Chapter 6 Recognition of Recurrence 117 Chapter 7 Believing, Asserting, and Communicating Propositions of Limited Accessibility 143 Chapter 8 Recognition of Recurrence Revisited 156 Chapter 9 Situating Cognitive Propositions in a Broader Context 164 Chapter 10 Overcoming Objections 208 Chapter 11 Worries, Opportunities, and Unsolved Problems 225 References 235 Index 239

Philosophical foundations of language in the law

1. Introduction 2. The Value of Vagueness 3. What Vagueness and Inconsistency Tell Us about Interpretation 4. Vagueness and the Guidance of Action 5. Can the Law Imply More Than It Says? On Some Pragmatic Aspects of Strategic Speech 6. Textualism and the Discovery of Rights 7. Textualism, Intentionalism, and the Law of Contracts 8. Modeling Legal Rules 9. Trying to Kill the Dead: De Dicto and De Re Intention in Attempted Crimes 10. Legislation As Communication? Legal Interpretation and the Study of Linguistic Communication

Why Propositions Cannot be Sets of Truth-supporting Circumstances

No semantic theory satisfying certain natural constraints can identify the semantic contents of sentences (the propositions they express), with sets of circumstances in which the sentences are true–no matter how fine-grained the circumstances are taken to be. An objection to the proof is shown to fail by virtue of conflating model-theoretic consequence between sentences with truth-conditional consequence between the semantic contents of sentences. The error underlines the impotence of distinguishing semantics, in the sense of a truth-based theory of logical consequence, and semantics, in the sense of a theory of meaning.

The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of Naming and Necessity

In this fascinating work, Scott Soames offers a new conception of the relationship between linguistic meaning and assertions made by utterances. He gives meanings of proper names and natural kind predicates and explains their use in attitude ascriptions. He also demonstrates the irrelevance of rigid designation in understanding why theoretical identities containing such predicates are necessary, if true.

Revisionism about Reference: A Reply to Smith

My task today is an unusual and not very pleasant one. I am not here to debate the adequacy of any philosophical thesis. Rather, my job is to assess claims involving credit and blame. According to Quentin Smith, the central doctrines of Naming and Necessity were developed by Ruth Marcus in her pioneering papers on quantified modal logic in the late 40’s, and in her paper, ‘Modalities and Intensional Languages’ in 1961.1 Smith maintains that Saul Kripke learned these doctrines from her, initially misunderstood them, and, when he later straightened things out, mistakenly took the doctrines to be his own. Finally, Kripke is supposed to have published them without properly citing her. The entire profession was allegedly fooled, despite the fact that Kripke and Marcus were among its most well known members, and their work was familiar to leading researchers in the field. For years nobody said anything. Now, more than 20 years later, Smith claims to be bringing the truth to light.

Attitudes and Anaphora

In this paper I will investigate how pronouns anaphoric on singular term antecedents are understood, and what a semantic theory should say about them. I propose to examine these questions by appealing to propositional attitude ascriptions containing such pronoun/antecedent pairs. In so doing I hope not only to advance our understanding of a particular linguistic construction, but also to illustrate a productive yet underappreciated methodology. If one is interested in characterizing what a certain sentence means, one can scarcely do better than attend to the assertions that utterances of the sentence are standardly used to make, and the beliefs they can reliably be taken to express. The reason for this is that when we ascribe such assertions and beliefs to a speaker on the basis of what he says, the truth of our ascription generally requires us to be more faithful, in characterizing what he says or believes, to the meaning of the sentence he utters than we would have to be if we were merely interested in providing the truth conditions of his remark. Consequently, judgements about the truth conditions of attitude ascriptions, N says that S or N believes that S, can often be used to discriminate between different semantic proposals regarding the interpretation of S, even when the proposals are extensionally and intensionally equivalent.1 They can also be used to raise difficult issues and problems for familiar semantic analyses that might otherwise seem unproblematic. My aim will be to illustrate both of these points regarding semantic analyses of pronouns anaphoric on singular term antecedents.2 The problems I am interested in arise from a theoretical background that includes the following assumptions.

More Revisionism about Reference

At the Eastern Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association in December of 1994,1 replied to Quentin Smith’s paper “Marcus, Kripke, and the Origin of the New Theory of Reference ”. After my comments, Smith was allowed to read a second paper, responding to me, which I had not had the opportunity to see. The three APA papers were later published in Synthese, with the result that Smith’s comments on my paper continued to stand unchallenged. I take the opportunity to respond to them now. Since it would take volumes to respond to all of Smith’s errors and misrepresentations, I will be selective, and concentrate on a few representative examples of his lax standards of scholarship and most blatant historical inaccuracies. I will take up substantive philosophical issues, beyond these discussed in my original reply, only where Smith’s discussion might lead others astray, and where correction may produce some general enlightenment. Finally, some important issues, like Smith’s treatment of the necessary aposteriori, and his interpretation of Marcus’ famous “dictionary remark”, will be left to the companion paper, “How Not to Write History of Philosophy: A Case Study” by my colleague, John Burgess.1