Zoltán Gendler Szabó

Expressions and their Representations

It is plausible to think that our knowledge of linguistic types can bejustified by what we know about the tokens of these types. But one then hasto explain what it is about the relation a type bears to its tokens that makespossible the move from knowledge of the concrete to knowledge of theabstract. I argue that the standard solution to this difficulty, that the relevant relation is instantiation and that the transition is inductive generalization, is inadequate. I propose an alternative, according to which tokens are representations of the type they belong to. I also defend this view against the charge that it cannot account for the systematic ambiguity of expressions like ‘word’ or ‘sentence’, and the objection that it leads to an implausible form of Platonism.

Specific, yet opaque

In her dissertation, Janet Fodor has argued that the quantificational force and the intensional status of certain quantifier phrases can be evaluated independently. The proposal was only halfway accepted: the existence of non-specific transparent readings is well-established today, but specific opaque readings are deemed illusory. I argue that they are real and outline a semantic framework that can generate them. The idea is to permit two types of quantifier raising: one that carries the restrictor of the determiner along and another that does not. When the second is applied the restrictor can be stranded within the scope of an intensional operator as the quantificational determiner itself takes wider scope.

In Defense of Indirect Communication

Abstract In Imagination and Convention, Ernest Lepore and Matthew Stone claim that there are no conversational implicatures. They argue that the scope of the conventional is wider and the scope of communication narrower than followers (or even critics) of Grice tend to assume, and so, there is simply no room for the sort of indirect communication based on reasoning about intentions conversational implicatures are supposed to exemplify. This way they seek to rehabilitate the old Lockean model of linguistic communication. I argue that while the book is successful in undermining a number of Gricean analyses, the core cases of conversational implicature resist recasting in terms of disambiguation or creative interpretation. Granting that linguistic communication relies more heavily on conventions and that interpretation is more frequently open-ended than it is usually thought cannot save the Lockean model.