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  1. Günter Abel (1994). Indeterminacy and Interpretation. Inquiry 37 (4):403 – 419.
    This paper contains a discussion of Quine's thesis of indeterminacy of translation within the more general thesis that using and understanding a language are to be conceived of as a creative and interpretative-constructional activity. Indeterminacy is considered to be ineliminable. Three scenarios are distinguished concerning, first, the reasons for indeterminacy, second, the kinds of indeterminacy and, third, different levels of a general notion of recursive interpretation. Translational hypotheses are seen as interpretational constructs. The indeterminacy thesis turns out to be a (...)
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  2. Raziel Abelson (1957). Meaning, Use and Rules of Use. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 18 (1):48-58.
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  3. Holger Andreas (2010). Semantic Holism in Scientific Language. Philosophy of Science 77 (4):524-543.
    Whether meaning is compositional has been a major issue in linguistics and formal philosophy of language for the last 2 decades. Semantic holism is widely and plausibly considered as an objection to the principle of semantic compositionality therein. It comes as a surprise that the holistic peculiarities of scientific language have been rarely addressed in formal accounts so far, given that semantic holism has its roots in the philosophy of science. For this reason, a model-theoretic approach to semantic holism in (...)
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  4. Kent Bach, The Lure of Linguistification.
    Think of linguistification by analogy with personification: attributing linguistic properties to nonlinguistic phenomena. For my purposes, it also includes attributing nonlinguistic properties to linguistic items, i.e., treating nonlinguistic properties as linguistic. Linguistification is widespread. It has reached epidemic proportions. It needs to be eradicated. That’s important because the process of communication is not simply a matter of one person putting a thought into words and another decoding them back into the same thought. Much of what a speaker means cannot be (...)
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  5. Kent Bach (2001). You Don't Say? Synthese 128 (1-2):15--44.
    This paper defends a purely semantic notionof what is said against various recent objections. Theobjections each cite some sort of linguistic,psychological, or epistemological fact that issupposed to show that on any viable notion of what aspeaker says in uttering a sentence, there ispragmatic intrusion into what is said. Relying on amodified version of Grice's notion, on which what issaid must be a projection of the syntax of the utteredsentence, I argue that a purely semantic notion isneeded to account for the (...)
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  6. Renate Bartsch (1996). The Relationship Between Connectionist Models and a Dynamic Data-Oriented Theory of Concept Formation. Synthese 108 (3):421 - 454.
    In this paper I shall compare two models of concept formation, both inspired by basic convictions of philosophical empiricism. The first, the connectionist model, will be exemplified by Kohonen maps, and the second will be my own dynamic theory of concept formation. Both can be understood in probabilistic terms, both use a notion of convergence or stabilization in modelling how concepts are built up. Both admit destabilization of concepts and conceptual change. Both do not use a notion of representation in (...)
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  7. Edward F. Becker (2012). The Themes of Quine's Philosophy: Meaning, Reference, and Knowledge. Cambridge University Press.
    Machine generated contents note: Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. Conventionalism and the linguistic doctrine of logical truth; 2. Analyticity and synonymy; 3. The indeterminacy of translation; 4. Ontological relativity; 5. Criticisms and extensions; Concluding remarks: conventionalism and implications; Bibliography; Index.
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  8. Hilan Bensusan & Manuel de Pinedo (2008). Holism and Singularity Towards an Ontology of the Unfitting. Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 17:15-22.
    Holism about thought content – especially coupled with a measure of semantic externalism – can provide us with an attractive account of how thinking relates to the world. It can help us to tell a neat story that starts out with the inseparable entanglement of truth and intelligibility: in order to understand thought, to confront it to the world and to give verdicts about that confrontation, we need to grasp a considerable amount of truths. A variety of positions that emerge (...)
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  9. Rod Bertolet (1981). Referential Uses and Speaker Meaning. Philosophical Quarterly 31 (124):253-259.
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  10. Christian Beyer (2001). A Neo-Husserlian Theory of Speaker's Reference. Erkenntnis 54 (3):277-297.
    It is not well known that in his Göttingen period (1900–1916) Edmund Husserl developed a kind of direct reference theory, anticipating,among other things, the distinction between referential and attributive use of adefinite description, which was rediscovered by Keith Donnellan in 1966 and further analysed by Saul Kripke in 1977. This paper defends the claim that Husserl''s idea of the mental act given voice to in an utterance sheds new light on that distinction and particularly on cases where semantic referent and (...)
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  11. J. Biro (2011). What is 'That'? Analysis 71 (4):651-653.
    Davidson's paratactic account of indirect speech exploits the fact that ‘that’ can be either a demonstrative pronoun or a subordinating conjunction. Davidson thinks that the fact that it is plausible to think that it inherited the latter function from the former lends support to his account. However, in other languages the two functions are performed by unrelated words, which makes the account impossible to apply to them. I argue that this shows that, rather than revealing the underlying form of indirect (...)
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  12. Ned Block (1996). [Book Chapter] (Unpublished).
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  13. Ned Block (1996). Holism, Mental and Semantic. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. For (...)
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  14. Raymond Bradley, A Refutation of Quine's Holism.
    For more than four decades, many Anglo-American philosophers have been held in thrall by a captivating metaphor, Quine's holistic image of the man-made fabric (or web) of knowledge and belief within which no statement is absolutely immune to revision. And many have been led to think that the following three distinctions are indefensible: (i) that between sentences and the propositions that they express; (ii) that between necessary and contingent propositions; and (iii) that between a priori and empirical knowledge.
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  15. Manuel Bremer (2012). How Are Semantic Metarepresentations Built and Processed? Kriterion.
    This paper looks at some aspects of semantic metarepresentation. It is mostly concerned with questions more formal, concerning the representation format in semantic metarepresentations, and the way they are processed. §1 distinguishes between metacognition and metarepresentation in a narrow and broad sense. §2 reminds the reader of some main areas where metarepresentations have to be used. The main part considers the ways that metarepresentations are built and processed. §3 introduces some general ideas how semantic metarepresentations are built and processed. §4 (...)
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  16. John P. Burgess (2006). Discussion: Soames on Empiricism. Philosophical Studies 129 (3).
    Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century by Scott Soames reminds me of nothing so much as Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov. Both are works that arose immediately out of the needs of undergraduate teaching, yet each manages to say much of significance to knowledgeable professionals. Each indirectly provides an outline of the history of its field, through a presentation of selected major works, taken in chronological order and including items that are generally recognized as marking decisive turning points. Yet (...)
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  17. Herman Cappelen (2007). Semantics and Pragmatics: Some Central Issues. In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford University Press.
    Introduction to Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics, 2007, Oxford University Press, (eds. Preyer and Peter).
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  18. Prof Antonella Carassa & Prof Marco Colombetti (2009). Joint Meaning. Cogprints.
    In this paper we want to reconcile two apparently conflicting intuitions: the first is that what a speaker means is just a function of his or her communicative intentions, independently of what the hearer understands, and even of the actual existence of a hearer; the second is that when communication is carried out successfully, the resulting meaning is, in some important sense, jointly construed by the speaker and the hearer. Our strategy is to distinguish between speaker’s meaning, understood as a (...)
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  19. C. R. Carr (1978). Speaker Meaning and Illocutionary Acts. Philosophical Studies 34 (3):281 - 291.
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  20. Carleton B. Christensen (1997). Meaning Things and Meaning Others. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (3):495-522.
    At least phenomenologically the way communicative acts reveal intentions is different from the way non-communicative acts do this: the former have an "addressed" character which the latter do not. The paper argues that this difference is a real one, reflecting the irreducibly "conventional" character of human communication. It attempts to show this through a critical analysis of the Gricean programme and its methodologically individualist attempt to explain the "conventional" as derivative from the "non-conventional". It is shown how in order to (...)
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  21. Arthur Cody (1968). On the Creation of a Speaker. Mind 77 (305):68-76.
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  22. Annalisa Coliva (2003). The First Person: Error Through Misidentification, the Split Between Speaker's and Semantic Reference, and the Real Guarantee. Journal of Philosophy 100 (8):416-431.
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  23. Eros Corazza & Jérôme Dokic (2012). Situated Minimalism Versus Free Enrichment. Synthese 184 (2):179-198.
    In this paper, we put forward a position we call “situationalism” (or “situated minimalism”), which is a middle-ground view between minimalism and contextualism in recent philosophy of language. We focus on the notion of free enrichment, which first arose within contextualism as underlying the claim that what is said is typically enriched relative to the logical form of the uttered sentence. However, minimalism also acknowledges some process of pragmatic intrusion in its claim that what is thought and communicated is typically (...)
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  24. Stephen Crain, Rapid Relief of Stress in Dealing with Ambiguity.
    This study investigates the influence of contrastive stress on the on-line interpretation of ambiguous spoken sentences containing the focus operator only. The pattern of phonological stress was manipulated so as to associate different linguistic expressions with the focus operator only and to invoke different interpretations. Sentences with marked and neutral stress were evaluated relative to visually presented scenes, which depicted a situation consistent with alternative interpretations. Using a head-mounted eye-movement recording system, we measured the processing difficulty associated with phonological stress (...)
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  25. Steven Crowell (2008). Measure-Taking: Meaning and Normativity in Heidegger's Philosophy. Continental Philosophy Review 41 (3):261-276.
    Following Marc Richir and others, László Tengelyi has recently developed the idea of Sinnereignis (meaning-event) as a way of capturing the emergence of meaning that does not flow from some prior project or constitutive act. As such, it might seem to pose something of a challenge to phenomenology: the paradox of an experience that is mine without being my accomplishment. This article offers a different sort of interpretation of meaning-events, claiming that in their structure they always involve what the late (...)
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  26. Steven Davis (1998). Grice on Natural and Non-Natural Meaning. Philosophia 26 (3-4):405-419.
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  27. Steven Davis (1994). The Grice Program and Expression Meaning. Philosophical Studies 75 (3):293 - 299.
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  28. Wayne A. Davis (1992). Cogitative and Cognitive Speaker Meaning. Philosophical Studies 67 (1):71 - 88.
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  29. Michael Devitt (2009). Psychological Conception, Psychological Reality. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 9 (1):35-44.
    My book, Ignorance of Language (2006a), challenges the received Chomskian “psychological conception” of grammars and proposes a “linguistic conception” according to which a grammar is a theory of a representational system. My response to Guy Longworth rejects his claim in “Ignorance of Linguistics” (2009) that there is “mutual determination” between linguistic and psychological facts with the result that both of these conceptions are true. Peter Slezak’s “Linguistic Explanation and ‘Psychological Reality’” (2009) is full of flagrant misrepresentations of my discussion of (...)
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  30. Michael Devitt (1993). A Critique of the Case for Semantic Holism. Philosophical Perspectives 7:281-306.
    At its most extreme, semantic holism is the doctrine that all the inferential properties of an expression constitute its meaning. Holism is supported by the consideration that there is no principled basis for localism's distinction among these properties. The paper rejects four arguments for this. (1) The argument from confirmation holism is dismissed quickly because it rests on verificationism. (2) The argument from the rejection of analyticity fails because it saddles the localist with unacceptable epistemic assumptions. Localism is not committed (...)
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  31. Keith S. Donnellan (1979). Speaker Reference, Descriptions, and Anaphoria. In A. French Peter, E. Uehling Theodore, Howard Jr & K. Wettstein (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language. University of Minnesota Press.
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  32. Michael Dummett (1974). The Significance of Quine's Indeterminacy Thesis. Synthese 27 (3-4):351 - 397.
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  33. Rolf A. Eberle (1978). Semantic Analysis Without Reference to Abstract Entities. The Monist 61 (3):363-383.
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  34. Michael Edwards & Jerrold J. Katz (1985). Sentence Meaning and Speech Acts. Metaphilosophy 16 (1):12–20.
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  35. Paul Faulkner (2007). On Telling and Trusting. Mind 116 (464):875 - 902.
    A key debate in the epistemology of testimony concerns when it is reasonable to acquire belief through accepting what a speaker says. This debate has been largely understood as the debate over how much, or little, assessment and monitoring an audience must engage in. When it is understood in this way the debate simply ignores the relationship speaker and audience can have. Interlocutors rarely adopt the detached approach to communication implied by talk of assessment and monitoring. Audiences trust speakers to (...)
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  36. John Fennell (2013). “The Meaning of 'Meaning is Normative' ”. Philosophical Investigations 36 (1):56-78.
    This paper defends the thesis that meaning is intrinsically normative. Recent anti-normativist objectors have distinguished two versions of the thesis – correctness and prescriptivity – and have attacked both. In the first two sections, I defend the thesis against each of these attacks; in the third section, I address two further, closely related, anti-normativist arguments against the normativity thesis and, in the process, clarify its sense by distinguishing a universalist and a contextualist reading of it. I argue that the anti-normativist (...)
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  37. Tim Fernando, Ambiguous Discourse in a Compositional Context.
    The processing of sequences of (English) sentences is analyzed compositionally through transitions that merge sentences, rather than decomposing them. Transitions that are in a precise sense inertial are related to disjunctive and non-deterministic approaches to ambiguity. Modal interpretations are investigated, inducing various equivalences on sequences.
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  38. Tyrus Fisher (2011). Quine's Behaviorism and Linguistic Meaning: Why Quine's Behaviorism is Not Illicit. Philosophia 39 (1):51-59.
    Some of Quine’s critics charge that he arrives at a behavioristic account of linguistic meaning by starting from inappropriately behavioristic assumptions (Kripke 1982, 14; Searle 1987, 123). Quine has even written that this account of linguistic meaning is a consequence of his behaviorism (Quine 1992, 37). I take it that the above charges amount to the assertion that Quine assumes the denial of one or more of the following claims: (1) Language-users associate mental ideas with their linguistic expressions. (2) A (...)
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  39. Luciano Floridi (2005). Is Semantic Information Meaningful Data? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (2):351-370.
    There is no consensus yet on the definition of semantic information. This paper contributes to the current debate by criticising and revising the Standard Definition of semantic Information (SDI) as meaningful data, in favour of the Dretske-Grice approach: meaningful and well-formed data constitute semantic information only if they also qualify as contingently truthful. After a brief introduction, SDI is criticised for providing necessary but insufficient conditions for the definition of semantic information. SDI is incorrect because truth-values do not supervene on (...)
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  40. Kathrin Glüer & Peter Pagin (1998). Rules of Meaning and Practical Reasoning. Synthese 117 (2):207-227.
    Can there be rules of language which serve both to determine meaning and to guide speakers in ordinary linguistic usage, i.e., in the production of speech acts? We argue that the answer is no. We take the guiding function of rules to be the function of serving as reasons for actions, and the question of guidance is then considered within the framework of practical reasoning. It turns out that those rules that can serve as reasons for linguistic utterances cannot be (...)
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  41. Kathrin Glüer-Pagin, Rules of Meaning and Practical Reasoning.
    Can there be rules of language which serve both to determine meaning and to guide speakers in ordinary linguistic usage, i.e. in the production of speech acts? We argue that the answer is no. We take the guiding function of rules to be the function of serving as reasons for actions, and the question of guidance is then considered within the framework of practical reasoning. It turns out that those rules that can serve as reasons for linguistic utterances cannot be (...)
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  42. Mark Greenberg, The Meaning of Original Meaning.
    The view (most prominently advocated by Justice Scalia) that original meaning entails the constitutionality of original practices has strong intuitive appeal and has been broadly assumed by originalists and nonoriginalists alike. But the position is mistaken. We suggest that a failure to distinguish between two different notions of meaning accounts for the position's wide currency. According to the first notion, the meaning of a term is roughly what a dictionary definition attempts to convey--the semantic or linguistic understanding necessary to use (...)
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  43. Walter B. Gulick (1999). Beyond Epistemology to Realms of Meaning. Tradition and Discovery 26 (3):24-41.
    Ultimately Michael Polanyi moved from theorizing about reality in terms of three overlapping frameworks of analysis (personal knowing, evolution/ecology, and tacit knowing) to a yet more comprehensive framework of interpretation: meaning construction. An analysis of the dimensions of embodied, symbol drenched meaning construction suggests that the modernist tendency to tether reality to epistemological analysis be replaced by an exploration of three interpenetrating ontological regions: experiences of existential meaning, cultural forms of meaning, and external reality. In support of this view, I (...)
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  44. Anil Gupta (2002). Partially Defined Predicates and Semantic Pathology. [REVIEW] Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2):402–409.
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  45. John Hawthorne & Ofra Magidor (2009). Assertion, Context, and Epistemic Accessibility. Mind 118 (470):377 - 397.
    In his seminal paper 'Assertion', Robert Stalnaker distinguishes between the semantic content of a sentence on an occasion of use and the content asserted by an utterance of that sentence on that occasion. While in general the assertoric content of an utterance is simply its semantic content, the mechanisms of conversation sometimes force the two apart. Of special interest in this connection is one of the principles governing assertoric content in the framework, one according to which the asserted content ought (...)
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  46. Ole Thomassen Hjortland (forthcoming). Logical Pluralism, Meaning-Variance, and VerbalDisputes. Australasian Journal of Philosophy:1-19.
    Logical pluralism has been in vogue since JC Beall and Greg Restall 2006 articulated and defended a new pluralist thesis. Recent criticisms such as Priest 2006a and Field 2009 have suggested that there is a relationship between their type of logical pluralism and the meaning-variance thesis for logic. This is the claim, often associated with Quine 1970, that a change of logic entails a change of meaning. Here we explore the connection between logical pluralism and meaning-variance, both in general and (...)
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  47. Alexander Hofmann (1995). On the Nature of Meaning and its Indeterminacy: Davidson's View in Perspective. Erkenntnis 42 (1):15 - 40.
    In order to illustrate the nature of the indeterminacy of meaning, Donald Davidson sometimes compares it to the fact that we can measure length or temperature on different scales. In the following paper I try to explain first why we are supposed to expect such an analogy, given the semantics of the word meaning and of the word length or temperature. In the second part I examine how close the analogy is by distinguishing different forms of indeterminacy of meaning (viz., (...)
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  48. Paul Horwich (1995). Meaning, Use and Truth: On Whether a Use-Theory of Meaning is Precluded by the Requirement That Whatever Constitutes the Meaning of a Predicate Be Capable of Determining the Set of Things of Which the Predicate is True and to Which It Ought to Be Applied. Mind 104 (414):355-368.
  49. Paul Ibbotson, Anna L. Theakston, Elena V. M. Lieven & Michael Tomasello (2012). Semantics of the Transitive Construction: Prototype Effects and Developmental Comparisons. Cognitive Science 36 (7):1268-1288.
    This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false-positive recognition of sentences with prototypical transitive semantics, young children showed no such effect. We examined two main implications of the results. First, it adds a novel data point to a growing body of research in cognitive linguistics and construction (...)
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  50. Katarzyna Jaszczolt & Ken Turner (eds.) (1996). Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics. Pergamon.
    v. 1. Meanings and representations -- v. 2. Discourse strategies.
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  51. David Johnston, J.L. Austin on Truth and Meaning.
    The thesis presents a development of J. L. Austin's analysis of truth and its accompanying analysis of sentence structure. This involves a discussion and refinement of Austin's notions of the demonstrative and descriptive conventions of language and of the demonstrative and descriptive devices of sentences. The main point of the thesis is that ordinary language must be treated as an historical phenomenon: one that has evolved its more complex features through a long series of variations upon a small number of (...)
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  52. Brian D. Josephson & David G. Blair, A Holistic Approach to Language.
    The following progress report views language acquisition as primarily the attempt to create processes that connect together in a fruitful way linguistic input and other activity. The representations made of linguistic input are thus those that are optimally effective in mediating such interconnections. An effective Language Acquisition Device should contain mechanisms specific to the task of creating the desired interconnection processes in the linguistic environment in which the language learner finds himself or herself. Analysis of this requirement gives clear indications (...)
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  53. Andreas Kemmerling (1980). How Many Things Must a Speaker Intend (Before He is Said to Have Meant)? Erkenntnis 15 (3):333 - 341.
    Counterexarnples have been presented in which an S fulfils 1——3 in uttering some x but has an additional intention which makes the example a case of not meaning something by x. In the example given by Strawson it is not only true of S that 1——3 but also that 4b—4f: 43 1S{BAUs(BA(Is(7TA}}}}}.
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  54. Arpy Khatchirian (2009). What is Wrong with the Indeterminacy of Language-Attribution? Philosophical Studies 146 (2):197 - 221.
    One might take the significance of Davidson’s indeterminacy thesis to be that the question as to which language we can take another to be speaking can only be settled relative to our choice of an acceptable theory for interpreting the speaker. This, in turn, could be taken to show that none of us is ever speaking a determinate language. I argue that this result is self-defeating and cannot avoid collapse into a troubling skepticism about meaning. I then offer a way (...)
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  55. David Kishik (2008). Wittgenstein on Meaning and Life. Philosophia 36 (1):111-128.
    This is a paper about the way language meshes with life. It focuses on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, and compares it with Leo Tolstoy and Saint Augustine’s confessions. My aim is to better understand in this way what it means to have meaning in language, as well as meaning in life.
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  56. Kepa Korta & John Perry (2006). Three Demonstrations and a Funeral. Mind and Language 21 (2):166–186.
    Gricean pragmatics seems to pose a dilemma. If semantics is limited to the conventional meanings of types of expressions, then the semantics of an utterance does not determine what is said. If all that figures in the determination of what is said counts as semantics, then pragmatic reasoning about the specific intentions of a speaker intrudes on semantics. The dilemma is false. Key points: Semantics need not determine what is said, and the description, with which the hearer begins, need not (...)
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  57. Alex Lascarides (1996). Ambiguity and Coherence. Journal of Semantics 13 (1):41-65.
    Several recent theories of linguistic representation treat the lexicon as a highly structured object, incorporating fairly detailed semantic information, and allowing multiple aspects of meaning to be represented in a single entry (e.g. Pustejovsky, 1991; Copestake, 1992; Copestake and Briscoe, 1995). One consequence of these approaches is that word senses cannot be thought of as discrete units which are in one-to-one correspondence with lexical entries. This has many advantages in allowing an account of systematic polysemy, but leaves the problem of (...)
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  58. Hannes Leitgeb (2008). An Impossibility Result on Semantic Resemblance. Dialectica 62 (3):293-306.
    We show that a set of prima facie plausible assumptions on the relation of meaning resemblance – one of which is a compositionality postulate – is inconsistent. On this basis we argue that either there is no theoretically useful notion of semantic resemblance at all, or the traditional conception of the compositionality of meaning has to be adapted. In the former case, arguments put forward by Nelson Goodman and Paul Churchland in favor of the concept of meaning resemblance are defeated. (...)
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  59. Ernest Lepore with K. Ludwig, Radical Misinterpretation: Reply to Stoutland.
    Frederick Stoutland’s critical notice of Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality appeared in the March 2007 issue of this journal (vol. 15, no. 1). It would be fair to say that it is a hostile review. While we have no wish to engage in polemics, given the tone of the notice and its content, it may be worthwhile to review its main contentions.
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  60. William G. Lycan, Davidson's “Method of Truth” in Metaphysics.
    Davidson made a strikingly distinctive and valuable contribution to the practice of ontology. It was a species of argument for the existence of things of one kind or another. It was inspired by Quine’s doctrine that “To be is to be the value of a bound variable,” but it combined that with Davidson’s own apparently antiQuinean views on semantics and logical form in natural language. Roughly: Suppose truth-conditional analysis of certain English sentences assigns them logical forms containing characteristic quantifiers, and (...)
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  61. Danielle Macbeth (2007). Logical Analysis, Reduction, and Philosophical Understanding. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 7 (3):475-485.
    Russell’s theory of descriptions in “On Denoting” has long been hailed as a paradigm of the sort of analysis that is constitutiue of philosophical understanding. It is not the only model of logical analysis available to us, however. On Frege’s quite different view, analysis provides not a reduction of some problematic notion to other, unproblematic ones -- as Russell’s analysis does -- but instead a deeper, clearer articulation of the very notion with which we began. This difference, I suggest, is (...)
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  62. Ruth Barcan Marcus (1961). Modalities and Intensional Languages. Synthese 13 (4):303-322.
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  63. John Michael McGuire (2007). Malapropisms and Davidson's Theories of Literal Meaning. The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 6:93-97.
    In this paper I show that two conflicting theories of literal meaning can be found in Donald Davidson's philosophy of language. In his earlier writings, Davidson espoused the common sense idea that words have literal meanings independently of particular contexts of use. In his later writings, however, Davidson insisted that the literal meaning of a word is a function of the speaker's intentions in using it, from which it follows that words do not have literal meanings independently of particular contexts. (...)
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  64. Eduardo Mendieta (2007). The Meaning of Being is the Being of Meaning: On Heidegger’s Social Pragmatism. Philosophy and Social Criticism 33 (1):99-112.
    Heidegger has been taken by many as a prophet of extremity, a nihilist, an existentialistic individualist, and a destroyer of normativity. This article offers a sympathetic reading of Brandom’s efforts to extricate Heidegger from such readings and to set out a way to read Heidegger’s philosophy of language and action that underscores their fundamental sociality and normativity. Herein it is shown specifically why Brandom must turn to Heidegger’s work as a testing ground for his own proposal of an inferentialist semantics. (...)
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  65. Alice G. B. ter Meulen (2003). From Frege to Dynamic Theories of Meaning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (6):691-692.
    In designing stratified models of human language, understanding notions of logical consequence and validity of inference require separating the aspects of meaning that vary between models from logical constants. Modelling meaning requires choices regarding the primitives, where the Fregean program is still offering us the fundamental insights on the role of truth, judgement, and grasping or sharing of thoughts.
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  66. Olaf Müller (1996). Zitierte Zeichenreihen. Erkenntnis 44 (3):279 - 304.
    We use quotation marks when we wish to refer to an expression. We can and do so refer even when this expression is composed of characters that do not occur in our alphabet. That's why Tarski, Quine, and Geach's theories of quotation don't work. The proposals of Davidson, Frege, and C. Washington, however, do not provide a plausible account of quotation either. (Section I). The problem is to construct a Tarskian theory of truth for an object language that contains quotation (...)
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  67. Reinhard Muskens, Order-Independence and Underspecification.
    In standard Montague Semantics we find a very close correspondence between syntactic and semantic rules (the ‘Rule-to-Rule Hypothesis’). This is attractive from a processing point of view, as we like to think of syntactic and semantic processing as being done in tandem, with information flowing in both directions, from parsing to interpretation and vice versa. The parsing procedure erects the necessary scaffolding for interpretation, while semantics (and via semantics context and world knowledge) ideally rules out wrong parses at an early (...)
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  68. Christopher Norris (1997). Ontological Relativity and Meaning-Variance: A Critical-Constructive Review. Inquiry 40 (2):139 – 173.
    This article offers a critical review of various ontological-relativist arguments, mostly deriving from the work of W. V. Quine and Thomas K hn. I maintain that these arguments are (1) internally contradictory, (2) incapable of accounting for our knowledge of the growth of scientific knowledge, and (3) shown up as fallacious from the standpoint of a causal-realist approach to issues of truth, meaning, and interpretation. Moreover, they have often been viewed as lending support to such programmes as the 'strong' sociology (...)
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  69. Timothy J. Nulty (2003). Davidson and Disclosedness. Idealistic Studies 33 (1):25-38.
    Donald Davidson assigns truth a central role in his theory of meaning but he also makes truth a guiding methodological principle in metaphysics. Truth is inexorably connected to belief and meaning, and no one of these concepts has theoretical priority over the others. I argue that there is a methodological circularity in Davidson’s account of how the world contributes to the truth of our beliefs and utterances. The difficulty for Davidson is in providing an account of how speakers share a (...)
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  70. S. Okasha (2000). Holism About Meaning and About Evidence: In Defence of W. V. Quine. Erkenntnis 52 (1):39-61.
    Holistic claims about evidence are a commonplace inthe philosophy of science; holistic claims aboutmeaning are a commonplace in the philosophy oflanguage. W. V. Quine has advocated both types ofholism, and argued for an intimate link between thetwo. Semantic holism may be inferred from theconjunction of confirmation holism andverificationism, he maintains. But in their recentbook Holism: a Shopper's Guide, Jerry Fodor andErnest Lepore (1992) claim that this inference isfallacious. In what follows, I defend Quine's argumentfor semantic holism from Fodor and Lepore'smulti-pronged (...)
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  71. Samir Okasha (2002). Underdetermination, Holism and the Theory/Data Distinction. Philosophical Quarterly 52 (208):303-319.
    I examine the argument that scientific theories are typically 'underdetermined' by the data, an argument which has often been used to combat scientific realism. I deal with two objections to the underdetermination argument: (i) that the argument conflicts with the holistic nature of confirmation, and (ii) that the argument rests on an untenable theory/data dualism. I discuss possible responses to both objections, and argue that in both cases the proponent of underdetermination can respond in ways which are individually plausible, but (...)
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  72. Jaroslav Peregrin, Pragmatization of Semantics.
    The aim of this paper is to summarize some recent considerations of the nature of language and linguistic theory which seem to challenge the usefulness and adequacy of such a division and to indicate that these considerations may provide for a new paradigm. I attempt to show that these considerations indicate that the Carnapian boundary between syntax and semantics is, in the case of natural languages, misconceived; while that between semantic and pragmatics is more stipulated than discovered.
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  73. Jaroslav Peregrin, Pragmatism & Semantics.
    Theories of language in the twentieth century tend towards one of two radically different models. One paradigm holds that expressions ‘stand for’ entities and their meanings are the entities stood for by them. According to the other, expressions are rather tools of interaction and their meanings are their functions within the interaction, their aptitudes to serve it in their distinctive ways.
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  74. Eva Picardi (2006). Colouring, Multiple Propositions, and Assertoric Content. Grazer Philosophische Studien 72 (1):49-71.
    The paper argues that colouring is a conventional ingredient of literal meaning characterized by a considerable degree of semantic under-determination and a high degree of context-sensitivity. The positive, though tentative, suggestion made in the paper is that whereas in the case of words such as "but" and "damn" we are dealing with words lacking in specificity, in the case of pejoratives in general, and racist jargon in particular, we are dealing with words that express concepts that purport to describe the (...)
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  75. Paul M. Pietroski (2006). Character Before Content. In Judith Jarvis Thomson (ed.), Content and Modality: Themes From the Philosophy of Robert Stalnaker. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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  76. Paul Pietrowski, Character Before Content Paul M. Pietroski, University of Maryland.
    Speakers can use sentences to make assertions. Theorists who reflect on this truism often say that sentences have linguistic meanings, and that assertions have propositional contents. But how are meanings related to contents? Are meanings less dependent on the environment? Are contents more independent of language? These are large questions, which must be understood partly in terms of the phenomena that lead theorists to use words like ‘meaning’ and ‘content’, sometimes in nonstandard ways. Opportunities for terminological confusion thus abound when (...)
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  77. Joachim Quantz & Birte Schmitz (1994). Knowledge-Based Disambiguation for Machine Translation. Minds and Machines 4 (1):39-57.
    The resolution of ambiguities is one of the central problems for Machine Translation. In this paper we propose a knowledge-based approach to disambiguation which uses Description Logics (dl) as representation formalism. We present the process of anaphora resolution implemented in the Machine Translation systemfast and show how thedl systemback is used to support disambiguation.The disambiguation strategy uses factors representing syntactic, semantic, and conceptual constraints with different weights to choose the most adequate antecedent candidate. We show how these factors can be (...)
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  78. C. M. R. (1968). Speaker's Meaning. The Review of Metaphysics 21 (3):548-548.
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  79. Marga Reimer (1998). What is Meant by 'What is Said'? A Reply to Cappelen and Lepore. Mind and Language 13 (4):598–604.
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  80. Eisuke Sakakibara (2013). Incarnating Kripke's Skepticism About Meaning. Erkenntnis 78 (2):277-291.
    Although Kripke’s skepticism leads to the conclusion that meaning does not exist, his argument relies upon the supposition that more than one interpretation of words is consistent with linguistic evidence. Relying solely on metaphors, he assumes that there is a multiplicity of possible interpretations without providing any strict proof. In his book The Taming of the True, Neil Tennant pointed out that there are serious obstacles to this thesis and concluded that the skeptic’s nonstandard interpretations are “will o’ wisps.” In (...)
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  81. Jennifer M. Saul (2002). Speaker Meaning, What is Said, and What is Implicated. Noûs 36 (2):228–248.
    [First Paragraph] Unlike so many other distinctions in philosophy, H P Grice's distinction between what is said and what is implicated has an immediate appeal: undergraduate students readily grasp that one who says 'someone shot my parents' has merely implicated rather than said that he was not the shooter [2]. It seems to capture things that we all really pay attention to in everyday conversation'this is why there are so many people whose entire sense of humour consists of deliberately ignoring (...)
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  82. F. C. S. Schiller (1921). The Meaning of `Meaning'. Mind 30 (118):185-190.
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  83. Gabriel Segal (2003). Ignorance of Meaning. In Alex Barber (ed.), Epistemology of Language. Oxford University Press.
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  84. N. Shanks & R. Gardner (eds.) (2000). Logic, Probability and Science. Atlanta: Rodopi.
    Otdvio Bueno, Empiricism, Mathematical Truth and Mathematical Knowledge 219 Commentary by Chuang Liu. Reply by Bueno. Chuang Liu, Coins and Electrons: A ...
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  85. Scott Soames (2008). Truth and Meaning: In Perspective. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 32 (1):1-19.
    My topic is the attempt by Donald Davidson, and those inspired by him, to explain knowledge of meaning in terms of knowledge of truth conditions. For Davidsonians, these attempts take the form of rationales for treating theories of truth, constructed along Tarskian lines, as empirical theories of meaning. In earlier work1, I argued that Davidson’s two main rationales – one presented in “Truth and Meaning”2 and “Radical Interpretation,”3 and the other in his “Reply to Foster”4 – were unsuccessful. Here, (...)
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  86. Dan Sperber & Deirdre Wilson (2002). Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind-Reading. Mind and Language 17 (1&2):3–23.
    The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated comprehension module, (...)
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  87. Dan Sperber & Deirdre Wilson (2002). Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind-Reading. Mind and Language 17 (1&2):3-23.
    The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated comprehension module, (...)
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  88. Robert J. Stainton (2003). Speaker Meaning and Davidson on Metaphor: A Reply to McGuire. Dialogue 42 (02):345-.
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  89. Isidora Stojanovic (2006). What is Said, Linguistic Meaning, and Directly Referential Expressions. Philosophy Compass 1 (4):373–397.
  90. C. A. Strong (1922). The Meaning of `Meaning'. Mind 31 (121):69-71.
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  91. C. A. Strong (1921). The Meaning of `Meaning'. Mind 30 (119):313-316.
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  92. Donna M. Summerfield & Pat A. Manfredi (1998). Indeterminacy in Recent Theories of Content. Minds and Machines 8 (2):181-202.
    Jerry Fodor has charged that Fred Dretske's account of content suffers from indeterminacy to the extent that we should reject it in favor of Fodor‘s own account. In this paper, we ask what the problem of indeterminacy really is; we distinguish a relatively minor problem we call ‘looseness of fit’ from a major problem of failing to show how to point to what is not there. We sketch Dretske's account of content and how it is supposed to solve the major (...)
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  93. J. Robert Thompson (2008). Grades of Meaning. Synthese 161 (2):283 - 308.
    In this paper, I lend novel support to H. P. Grice’s account of speaker meaning (GASM) by blunting the force of a significant objection. Stephen Schiffer has argued that in order to make GASM sufficient, one must add restrictions that are psychologically impossible to fulfill, thereby making GASM untenable. In what follows, I explain the elements of GASM that require it to invoke these psychologically unrealizable restrictions. I then accept Schiffer’s criticism, but modify its significance to GASM. I argue that (...)
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  94. Kees Van Deemter (1998). Domains of Discourse and the Semantics of Ambiguous Utterances: A Reply to Gauker. Mind 107 (426):433-445.
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  95. Arnim von Stechow, German Seit 'Since' and the Ambiguity of the German Perfect.
    The meanings of temporal adverbials seem easy to describe, but the compositional interaction with tense and aspect is notoriously difficult to analyse because we (more accurately: I) do not understand yet the principles governing the tense/aspect architecture of natural languages well enough. One of the most difficult areas of temporal structure is the perfect, and the literature quoted in this article shows that there is little agreement on its meaning(s). I believe that we will make progress only by a careful (...)
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  96. Patricia H. Werhane (1987). Some Paradoxes in Kripke's Interpretation of Wittgenstein. Synthese 73 (2):253 - 273.
    Kripke's skeptical interpretation of Wittgenstein's project in the Philosophical Investigations attributes to Wittgenstein a radical skepticism about the objectivity of rules and thus the meanings of words and the existence of language as well as a skepticism about the truth conditions underlying our alleged facts about the world. Kripke then contends that Wittgenstein solves this skeptical paradox by committing himself to what I shall call a Communitarian View of language. There are a number of difficulties with Kripke's interpretation of the (...)
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  97. Timothy Williamson (2012). Wright and Casalegno on Meaning and Assertibility. Dialectica 66 (2):267-271.
    In Crispin Wright's ‘Meaning and Assertibility’, the main point of disagreement with Paolo Casalegno's critique of verificationist semantics in ‘The Problem of Non-conclusiveness’ concerns Wright's diagnosis of one of Casalegno's arguments as depending on an over-estimation of the proper explanatory task of a semantic theory. The present note argues that there is no such dependence.
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  98. Crispin Wright (2010). Theories of Meaning and Speakers' Knowledge. In Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Arguing About Language. Routledge.
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  99. James O. Young (1992). Holism and Meaning. Erkenntnis 37 (3):309 - 325.
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  100. Urszula M. Żegleń (ed.) (1999). Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning, and Knowledge. Routledge.
    Donald Davidson has made enormous contributions to the philosophy of action, epistemology, semantics and philosophy of mind and today is recognized as one of the most important analytical philosophers of the late twentieth century. Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge addresses several issues including Davidson's writings on epistemology and theory of language with their implications of ontology and philosophy of mind and his advances in the philosophy of mind in relation to the views of Williard V. Quine, John McDowell and (...)
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