Brian Rabern Australian National University
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About me
I am a PhD student in philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, at the Australian National University. My dissertation project is on indexical and intensional semantics, under the supervision of David Chalmers, Jonathan Schaffer, and Daniel Nolan.
My works
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  1. Brian Rabern (forthcoming). Against the Identification of Assertoric Content with Compositional Value. Synthese.
    This essay investigates whether or not we should think that the things we say are identical to the things our sentences mean. It is argued that these theoretical notions should be distinguished, since assertoric content does not respect the compositionality principle. As a paradigmatic example, Kaplan's formal language LD is shown to exemplify a failure of compositionality. It is demonstrated that by respecting the theoretical distinction between the objects of assertion and compositional values certain conflicts between compositionality and contextualism are (...)
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  2. Brian Rabern (forthcoming). Monsters in Kaplan's Logic of Demonstratives. Philosophical Studies:-.
    Kaplan (1989) insists that natural languages do not contain displacing devices which operate on character---such displacing devices are called monsters. This thesis has recently faced various empirical challenges (e.g. Schlenker 2003 and Anand & Nevins 2004). In this note, the thesis is challenged on grounds of a more theoretical nature. It is argued that the standard compositional semantics of variable binding employs monstrous operations. As a dramatic first example, Kaplan's formal language LD ("Logic of Demonstratives") is shown to contain monsters. (...)
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  3. Brian Rabern & Landon Rabern (2008). A Simple Solution to the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever. [REVIEW] Analysis 68 (2):105-112.
    We present the simplest solution ever to 'the hardest logic puzzle ever'. We then modify the puzzle to make it even harder and give a simple solution to the modified puzzle. The final sections investigate exploding god-heads and a two-question solution to the original puzzle.
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    Export citation  | Other links: interscience.wiley.com blackwell-synergy.com analysis.oxfordjournals.org onlinelibrary.wiley.com dx.doi.org   | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
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