Stephen Neale

Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language

ing away from certain details that I will get to later, the direction of analysis for Grice is as follows, 43 It could be argued that one of the lessons of twentieth-century philosophy is that watertight reductive analysis is, for the most part, impossible. To argue this would not be to commit oneself to the denial of the existence of a viable analytic-synthetic distinction. For some of Grice’s thoughts on this matter, see the 1956 paper “In Defence of a Dogma,” written with Peter Strawson (Essay 13 of Studies) and Grice (1986). 44 Although he separates “natural” and “nonnatural” meaning, the possibility of viewing nonnatural meaning as a “descendant” of natural meaning appeals to Grice. In the final paragraph of “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions” he suggests that a simplified treatment of utterer’s meaning might emerge from investigating the relation between natural and nonnatural meaning (p. 116). An attempt to spell out the relation is contained in “Meaning Revisited” (Essay 18) and important auxiliary notions are discussed in “Method in Philosophical Psychology.” Stephen Neale Paul Grice and the Philosopy of Language 31 (Fig. 3) (2) utterance-type meaning

On a Milestone of Empiricism

Quine has presented powerful arguments against the intelligibility of any statement involving quantification into the scope of a non-extensional sentence connective purporting to express logical necessity, logical possibility, or strict implication. He has also presented a fully general argument against the possibility of satisfactory non-extensional connectives. It is easy to be lured into thinking that if definite descriptions (and also, perhaps, proper names) are analysed in accordance with Russell’s Theory of Descriptions — an idea to which Quine is highly sympathetic — then facts about substitution and deduction in primitive notation yield all that is needed to circumvent Quine’s formal arguments. I have claimed as much myself, and so have Carnap, Church, Fitch, Follesdal, Kripke, Marcus, Myhill, Prior, Sharvy, Smullyan, and others. But as far as logical modality is concerned this is a mistake. Only Quine’s general argument is thus undermined, and seeing why leads to an interesting logico-semantic hypothesis, suggested by Quine and Godel, and, as far as I know, hitherto unproved. Furthermore, it would seem that the only way to answer Quine’s original challenge to quantified modal logic is to make the controversial assumption that names of the same object are synonymous and hence intersubstitutable in all contexts. But even this does not provide a full answer; and in fact what has happened is that ideas in the work of Follesdal, Hintikka, Kanger, Kripke, and Quine, have resulted in a metamorphosis of subject matter.

Persistence, Polarity, and Plurality

(A), (B), and (C) below are taken by many semanticists to be good working hypotheses: (A) A sentence of the form the As are Bs is true (on its distributive reading) if and only if every A is B and there is more than one A (Russell 1919, Chomsky 1975, Evans 1977, Neale 1990). (B) So-called “negative polarity” expressions like ever and any can occur only in “downward entailing” (↓) environments (Ladusaw 1981, May 1985, Larson 1990). (C) Plural descriptions may contain negative polarity items, as in the following example, from May (1985): (1) The students who had ever read anything about phrenology attended Gall’s lecture.

What is Logical Form

I want to motivate and develop a version of the idea that the level of syntactical representation called “LF’ in Chomskyan grammar should be construed as instantiating the properties that philosophers have traditionally ascribed to logical form and as such makes a substantial contribution to semantics.1

La théorie des descriptions : passé et présent

Exposee pour la premiere fois dans un article de 1905 (On Denoting), la theorie russellienne des « expressions denotantes » et des descriptions definies passe, depuis Ramsey, pour le paradigme de la methode analytique en philosophie. En depit des critiques qui lui ont ete adressees par Strawson, elle detient toujours une place eminente en philosophie du langage. L’article de S. Neale est entierement consacre a l’exposition et a l’evaluation de cette theorie particulierement celebre. L’A. souligne avec force l’apport de Russell a la semantique des expressions singulieres.

Papers from the 1993 Joint Session: The Place of Language

It is a platitude that we use language to describe the world and to express, communicate, and discuss our thoughts, aims, and problems (whether of a philosophical or nonphilosophical nature). There is, then, an obvious, perhaps even trivial, sense in which language is central to philosophical inquiry: philosophical claims, problems, ideas, and arguments are couched in sentences of a language; and to the extent that they are to be communicated and discussed with others, clarity and precision of expression and consistency of usage will be highly valued, whereas ambiguity, vagueness, and inconsistency-unless serving rhetorical or metaphilosophical purposes-will be frowned upon. Only where there is clarity and precision, and consistency of usage can we enjoy the content of a philosophical claim and explore its connections to others. In this sense, at least, the philosopher must pay careful attention to the language he or she is using. To say this much is not to say anything that distinguishes philosophy from many other activities. The statements made by physicists, mathematicians, surgeons, and judges must also be clear and precise. But philosophers have been concerned with language in ways that others have not. Philosophers at one time or another have supposed questions about language to be central to philosophical inquiry. For example, in the present century it has been suggested that all of the problems of philosophy can be solved or dissolved by a critique of language; that all meaningful or all tractable philosophical questions ultimately reduce to questions of language (or its use); that if we pay close attention to the nature, the logic, or the use of language, we will be able to delimit the range of sensible