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Heidi Savage [23]Heidi Erika Savage [1]
  1. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 'Sherlock Holmes': A Reply to Garcia-Carpintero.Heidi Savage - 2020 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 1 (XXXIX):105-134.
    In “Semantics of Fictional Terms,” Garcia-Carpintero critically surveys the most recent literature on the topic of fictional names. One of his targets is realism about fictional discourse. Realists about fictional discourse believe that: (a) it contains true sentences that have fictional names as their subjects; (b) sentences containing names can be true only if those names have referents; (c) fictional names have fictional characters – abstract objects – as their referents. The fundamental problem that arises for realists is that not (...)
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  2. Four Problems for Empty Names.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    Empty names vary in their referential features. Some of them, as Kripke argues, are necessarily empty -- those that are used to create works of fiction. Others appear to be contingently empty -- those which fail to refer at this world, but which do uniquely identify particular objects in other possible worlds. I argue against Kripke's metaphysical and semantic reasons for thinking that either some or all empty names are necessarily non-referring, because these reasons are either not the right reasons (...)
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  3. (1 other version)What Matters in Survival: Self-determination and The Continuity of Life Trajectories.Heidi Savage - 2024 - Acta Analytica 39 (1):37-56.
    In this paper, I argue that standard psychological continuity theory does not account for an important feature of what is important in survival – having the property of personhood. I offer a theory that can account for this, and I explain how it avoids the implausible consequences of standard psychological continuity theory, as well as having certain other advantages over that theory.
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  4. You Never Even Called Me by my Name: A Meta-linguistic Analysis of Comptence with Proper Names.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    I suggest a revised meta-linguistic account that distinguishes between the language used to talk about a particular language -- the meta-language -- from direct speech reports made within a language -- the object language. Making this distinction leads to a kind of meta-linguistic analysis of competence with names that is not simply tautologous, so long as competence with names is not construed as knowing this: 'Tyler' is whatever is called 'Tyler'. Rather, it should be this: the name 'Tyler' is whatever (...)
     
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  5. An Integrated Interpretation of Montague Grammar.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    This is what I hope is an illuminating, and to a certain degree, novel exposition of Montague Grammar. It is against many standard interpretations, and perhaps even against things Montague himself says at times. However, it makes more sense of how his various commitments fit together in a systematic way. Why, for instance, is it called "Montague Grammar" rather than "Montague Semantics," and what role does his commitment to Fregeanism plays in his conception of language? It is clear that he (...)
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  6. Names Are Not Predicates.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    There are many examples offered as evidence that proper names are predicates. Not all of these cases speak to a name’s semantic content, but many of them do. Some of these include attributive, quantifier, and ambiguity cases. We will explore those cases here, and we will see that none of them conclusively show that names are predicates. In fact, all of these constructions can be given alternative analyses that eliminate the predicative characteristics of names they feature. These analyses do not (...)
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  7. The Truth and Nothing but the Truth: Non-Literalism and The Habits of Sherlock Holmes.Heidi Savage - 2020 - Southwest Philosophy Review 36 (2).
    Abstract: Many, if not most philosophers, deny that a sentence like ‘Sherlock Holmes smokes’ could be true. However, this attitude conflicts with the assignment of true to that sentence by natural language speakers. Furthermore, this process of assigning truth values to sentences like ‘Sherlock Holes smokes’ seems indistinguishable from the process that leads speakers to assign true to other sentences, those like ‘Bertrand Russell smokes’. I will explore the idea that when speakers assign the value true to the first sentence, (...)
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  8. Why the Predicativist Calling Account Fails: Names Can Never Hurt You.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    Recently, and rather startlingly, given the history of the debate about a name's semantic content, some claim that names are in fact predicates -- predicativism. Some of predicativists claim that a name's semantic content involves the concept of being called -- calling accounts that have been traditionally meta-linguistic. However, these accounts fail to be informative. Inspired by Burge's claim that proper names are literally true of the individuals that have them, Fara develops a non-meta-linguistic concept of being called analysed in (...)
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  9. Descriptive Names and Shifty Characters: A Case for Tensed Rigidity.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    Standard rigid designator accounts of a name’s meaning have trouble accommodating what I will call a descriptive name’s “shifty” character -- its tendency to shift its referent over time in response to a discovery that the conventional referent of that name does not satisfy the description with which that name was introduced. I offer a variant of Kripke’s historical semantic theory of how names function, a variant that can accommodate the character of descriptive names while maintaining rigidity for proper names. (...)
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  10. "No" Means No: Feminist and Victim Understandings of Sexual Assault.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    This was a public talk given in the spring of 2013 during sexual assault awareness week. I believe roughly 800 attended. The philosophy dept was NOT expecting that but at any rate, this is the gist: While there are many different motivations for raising questions about the Sexual Assault Awareness Movement, at least one motivation comes from feminist controversies about what counts as consensual sex. Historically, this controversy arose between those known as "anti-pornography feminists", and "sex positive feminists" whose proponents (...)
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  11. Kypris, Aphrodite, and Venus: More Puzzles about Belief.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    My aim in this paper is to show that the existence of empty names raise problems for the Millian that go beyond the traditional problems of accounting for their meanings. Specifically, they have implications for Millian strategies for dealing with puzzles about belief. The standard move of positing a referent for a fictional name to avoid the problem of meaning, because of its distinctly Millian motivation, implies that solving puzzles about belief, when they involve empty names, do in fact hang (...)
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  12. On Diachronic, Synchronic, and Logical Necessity.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    According to EJ Lowe, diachronic necessity and synchronic necessity are logically independent. Diachronic possibility concerns what could happen to an object over time and therefore concerns future possibilities for that object given its past history. Synchronic possibility concerns what is possible for an object in the present or at a past present moment. These are logically independent, given certain assumptions. While it may true that because I am 38, it is impossible diachronically for me to be 30 (at least once (...)
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  13. The Inevitability of Death: Going from an Is to an Ought.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    Since Hume, many ethicists have assumed that inferring normative claims from descriptive claims is fallacious. Some classic examples that illustrate this fact are those in which everyone commits some act, but we do not therefore conclude that it is the right thing to do. Everyone may jump off a bridge, asserts your mother, but that does not entail that you should. However, not all such claims illustrate this. In fact, some of them illustrate precisely the opposite claim. For example, consider (...)
     
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  14.  63
    The Meaning Of Language, Second Edition.Heidi Savage, Melissa Ebbers & Robert M. Martin - 2020 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
    A new edition of a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of language, substantially updated and reorganized. The philosophy of language aims to answer a broad range of questions about the nature of language, including “what is a language?” and “what is the source of meaning?” This accessible comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of language begins with the most basic properties of language and only then proceeds to the phenomenon of meaning. The second edition has been significantly expanded and reorganized, putting (...)
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  15. Against False Pretences.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    Any plausible account of the act of pretending, either by presupposition or constitution, involves an assumption that the facts are other than what they are. An examination of various accounts of pretence shows this to be the feature that distinguishes it from other actions such as imagining, fantasizing, creating, or hypothesizing. This discovery has implications for standard analyses of the nature of fiction. To wit, whatever is occurring when engaged in reading a work of fiction, it is not an act (...)
     
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  16. Fictional Names: The Achilles Heel of Kripke's Theory of Names.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    That the existence of empty names poses a challenge for Kripke’s theories of proper names is well recognized, however, the strongest form of that challenge is not. I argue that the type of empty name posing the strongest challenge to Kripke’s theory are those drawn from works of fiction. More specifically, the challenge occurs when those names appear in sentences like this: Sherlock Holmes smokes.
     
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  17. Naming and Referring: Table of Contents.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    This book is about whether reference to an individual is the essential feature of a proper name -- a widely held view -- or whether referring to an individual is simply a contingent feature. Three questions need resolving, then. First, whether all names in particular contexts are themselves referring devices. Second, whether recognizing names types and the consequent issue of their ambiguity can be resolved simply by distinguishing between name types and tokens thereof. Last, whether names are ever referential in (...)
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  18. It's Easy Being Free: Notes on Frankfurt-Style Real Self Conceptions of Free Will.Heidi Savage & Noah Sider - manuscript
    On Frankfurt's view of free will, in its simplest form, an agent is free just in case her second-order volitions -- those second-order desires she wishes to be effective -- are in accord with her first-order volitions -- those first-order desires that one actually acts upon. That is, an agent has free will just in case she has the desires she wants to have and they are the desires she acts upon. But now consider an agent who lacks free will (...)
     
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  19. The Contingencies of Ontological Commitment.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    Some time ago, Quine asserted that to be is to be value of a variable. This entails that if one wishes to accept any theory as true, we must be committed to the existence of those objects over which we existentially quantify. I suggest instead that we are committed only to the existence of things for which certain intrinsic properties are contingent (those that an object can have independent of the properties that make it a member of a certain kind). (...)
     
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  20. The Metaphysics and Politics of Being a Person.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    This book addresses the topic of the explicit and implicit commitments about persons as a kind in the literature on personal identity and draws out their political implications. I claim that the political implications of a metaphysical account can serve as a test on its veracity in cases in which the object-kind under analysis is itself constitutively normative, as the kind person might be, or in those cases in which counting as a member of the kind in question confers a (...)
     
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  21. The Voluntarist's Argument Against Ethical and Semantic Internalism.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    A parallel argument to the doxastic voluntarist argument -- a general voluntarism argument -- can be constructed against both ethical and semantic internalism. In the ethical case, the parallel argument begins with the idea that if ethical internalism is true, that is, if we cannot help but be motivated to do the right thing internally, then it would appear that our being moved to do the right thing is involuntary in the same was as our beliefs are involuntary. If correct, (...)
     
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  22.  55
    Not just another philosophy of language book: Margaret Cameron, Benjamin Hill, and Robert J. Stainton : Sourcebook in the history of philosophy of language. Springer graduate texts in philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer, 1102pp, $129 HB. [REVIEW]Heidi Savage - 2017 - Metascience 26 (3):519-521.
  23.  31
    Review of Brian Hedden's Reason Without Persons: Rationality, Identity, and Time. [REVIEW]Heidi Savage - 2016 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
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