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Josh Dever [37]Joshua Dever [4]Joshua Bruce Dever [1]
  1. The Inessential Indexical: On the Philosophical Insignificance of Perspective and the First Person.Herman Cappelen & Josh Dever - 2013 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Edited by Josh Dever.
    Cappelen and Dever present a forceful challenge to the standard view that perspective, and in particular the perspective of the first person, is a philosophically deep aspect of the world. Their goal is not to show that we need to explain indexical and other perspectival phenomena in different ways, but to show that the entire topic is an illusion.
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  2.  76
    Bad Language.Herman Cappelen & Josh Dever - 2019 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Edited by Josh Dever.
    Bad Language is the first textbook on an emerging area in the study of language: non-idealized language use, the linguistic behaviour of people who exploit language for malign purposes. This lively, accessible introduction offers theoretical frameworks for thinking about such topics as lies and bullshit, slurs and insults, coercion and silencing.
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  3. Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations.Herman Cappelen & Josh Dever - 2021 - New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? Making AI Intelligible shows that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they illustrate ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but the answers have pressing practical implications. (...)
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  4.  60
    Puzzles Of Reference.Herman Cappelen & Josh Dever - 2018 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by Josh Dever.
    It is a fundamental feature of language that words refer to things. Much attention has been devoted to the nature of reference, both in philosophy and in linguistics. Puzzles of Reference is the first book to give a comprehensive accessible survey of the fascinating work on this topic from the 1970s to the present day. -/- Written by two eminent philosophers of language, Puzzles of Reference offers an up-to-date introduction to reference in philosophy and linguistics, summarizing ideas such as Kripke's (...)
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  5. AI with Alien Content and Alien Metasemantics.Herman Cappelen & Joshua Dever - 2023 - In Ernest Lepore & Luvell Anderson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  6. Complex demonstratives.Josh Dever - 2001 - Linguistics and Philosophy 24 (3):271-330.
  7. Empathy and transformative experience without the first person point of view.Herman Cappelen & Josh Dever - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (3):315-336.
    In her very interesting ‘First-personal modes of presentation and the problem of empathy’, L. A. Paul argues that the phenomenon of empathy gives us reason to care about the first person point of view: that as theorists we can only understand, and as humans only evince, empathy by appealing to that point of view. We are skeptics about the importance of the first person point of view, although not about empathy. The goal of this paper is to see if we (...)
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  8. (1 other version)Reviving the parameter revolution in semantics.Bryan Pickel, Brian Rabern & Josh Dever - 2018 - In Derek Ball & Brian Rabern (eds.), The Science of Meaning: Essays on the Metatheory of Natural Language Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 138-171.
    Montague and Kaplan began a revolution in semantics, which promised to explain how a univocal expression could make distinct truth-conditional contributions in its various occurrences. The idea was to treat context as a parameter at which a sentence is semantically evaluated. But the revolution has stalled. One salient problem comes from recurring demonstratives: "He is tall and he is not tall". For the sentence to be true at a context, each occurrence of the demonstrative must make a different truth-conditional contribution. (...)
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  9. Compositionality.Josh Dever - 2005 - In Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 633-666.
    Nevertheless, any competent speaker will know what it means. What explains our ability to understand sentences we have never before encountered? One natural hypothesis is that those novel sentences are built up out of familiar parts, put together in familiar ways. This hypothesis requires the backing hypothesis that English has a compositional semantic theory.
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  10. Supervaluations debugged.Nicholas Asher, Josh Dever & Chris Pappas - 2009 - Mind 118 (472):901-933.
    Supervaluational accounts of vagueness have come under assault from Timothy Williamson for failing to provide either a sufficiently classical logic or a disquotational notion of truth, and from Crispin Wright and others for incorporating a notion of higher-order vagueness, via the determinacy operator, which leads to contradiction when combined with intuitively appealing ‘gap principles’. We argue that these criticisms of supervaluation theory depend on giving supertruth an unnecessarily central role in that theory as the sole notion of truth, rather than (...)
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  11. The conditional fallacy.Daniel Bonevac, Josh Dever & and David Sosa - 2006 - Philosophical Review 115 (3):273-316.
    To say that this lump of sugar is soluble is to say that it would dissolve, if submerged anywhere, at any time and in any parcel of water. To say that this sleeper knows French, is to say that if, for example, he is ever addressed in French, or shown any French newspaper, he responds pertinently in French, acts appropriately or translates correctly into his own tongue.
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  12.  29
    Context and Communication.Herman Cappelen & Josh Dever - 2016 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press UK. Edited by Josh Dever.
    Context and Communication offers an introduction to a central theme in the study of language: the various ways in which what we say depends on the context of speech and thought. The period since 1970 has produced a vast literature on this topic, both by philosophers and by linguists. This book explores key data, questions, concepts, and theories of context sensitivity. It is written to be accessible to someone with no prior knowledge of the material or, indeed, any prior knowledge (...)
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  13. Acting Without Me: Corporate Agency and the First Person Perspective.Herman Cappelen & Joshua Dever - 2021 - In Heimir Geirsson & Stephen Biggs (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Reference. New York: Routledge. pp. 599-613.
    In our book The Inessential Indexical we argue that the various theses of essential indexicality all fail. Indexicals are not essential, we conclude. One essentiality thesis we target in the third chapter is the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action. Our strategy is to give examples of what we call impersonal action rationalizations , which explain actions without citing indexical attitudes. To defeat the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action, it suffices that there could be even (...)
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  14. The revenge of the semantics‐pragmatics distinction.Josh Dever - 2013 - Philosophical Perspectives 27 (1):104-144.
  15. On the Uselessness of the Distinction between Ideal and Non-Ideal Theory (at least in the Philosophy of Language).Herman Cappelen & Joshua Dever - 2021 - In Rebecca Mason (ed.), Hermeneutical Injustice. Routledge.
    There’s an interesting debate in moral and political philosophy about the nature of, and relationship between, ideal and non-ideal theory. In this paper we discuss whether an analogous distinction can be drawn in philosophy of language. Our conclusion is negative: Even if you think that distinction can be put to work within moral and political philosophy, there’s no useful way to extend it to work that has been done in the philosophy of language.
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  16. Compositionality as methodology.Josh Dever - 1999 - Linguistics and Philosophy 22 (3):311-326.
  17. Eternalism, Temporalism, Neutralism.Josh Dever - 2015 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (6):608-618.
    In her Transient Truths, Berit Brogaard defends temporalism about proposition content from the more traditional eternalist views. I argue that both temporalism and eternalism are equally capable of accommodating all the data, and thus suggest that we should adopt a neutralism that holds there is no serious or resolvable dispute. Contra Brogaard, I argue that neither disagreement patterns nor belief dynamics favor temporalism over eternalism. I also suggest that Brogaard's defense of operator over quantificational semantics for tense is unnecessary, because (...)
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  18. Believing in Words.Herman Cappelen & Josh Dever - 2001 - Synthese 127 (3):279 - 301.
    The semantic puzzles posed by propositional attitude contexts have, since Frege, been understood primarily in terms of certain substitution puzzles. We will take as paradigmatic of such substitution puzzles cases in which two coreferential proper names cannot be intersubstituted salva veritate in the context of an attitude verb. Thus, for example, the following sentences differ in truth value: (1) Lois Lane believes Superman can fly. (2) Lois Lane believes Clark Kent can fly. despite the fact that "Superman" and "Clark Kent" (...)
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  19. Living the life aquatic.Josh Dever - unknown
    • The Static Conception of Semantics (Preliminary Version): A semantic theory should assign a proposition, conceived of as some carrier of meaning that can play the role of truth condition determination, to each (or at least each declarative) sentence.
     
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  20. Slingshots and boomerangs.Stephen Neale & Josh Dever - 1997 - Mind 106 (421):143-168.
    A “slingshot” proof suggested by Kurt Gödel (1944) has been recast by Stephen Neale (1995) as a deductive argument showing that no non-truthfunctional sentence connective can permit the combined use, within its scope, of two truth-functionally valid inference principles involving defi- nite descriptions. According to Neale, this result provides indirect support for Russell’s Theory of Descriptions and has broader philosophical repercussions because descriptions occur in non-truth-functional constructions used to motivate talk about (e.g.) necessity, time, probability, causation, obligation, facts, states of (...)
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  21. Binding into Character.Joshua Dever - 2004 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (Supplement):29-80.
    Since Kaplan’s "Demonstratives", it has become a common-place to distinguish between the character and content of an expression, where the content of an expression is what it contributes to "what is said" by sentences containing that expression, and the character gives a rule for determining, in a context, the content of an expression. A tacit assumption of theories of character has been that character is autonomous from content – that semantic evaluation starts with character, adds context, and then derives content. (...)
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  22. Formal Semantics.Josh Dever - 2012 - In Manuel García-Carpintero & Max Kölbel (eds.), The Continuum companion to the philosophy of language. New York: Continuum International.
     
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  23. Semantic Value.Josh Dever - 2005 - In The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier.
    A total theory of linguistic understanding is often taken to require three subtheories: a syntactic theory, a semantic theory, and a pragmatic theory. The semantic theory occupies an intermediary role – it takes as input structures generated by the syntax, assigns to those structures meanings, and then passes those meanings on to the pragmatics, which characterizes the conversational 1 impact of those meanings. Semantic theories thus seek to explain phenomena such as truth conditions of and inferential relations among sentences/utterances, anaphoric (...)
     
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  24. This paper might change your mind.Josh Dever & Henry Ian Schiller - 2020 - Noûs 55 (4):863-890.
    Linguistic intervention in rational decision making is standardly captured in terms of information change. But the standard view gives us no way to model interventions involving expressions that only have an attentional effects on conversational contexts. How are expressions with non‐informational content – like epistemic modals – used to intervene in rational decision making? We show how to model rational decision change without information change: replace a standard conception of value (on which the value of a set of worlds reduces (...)
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  25. The Two Envelope Paradox and Using Variables Within the Expectation Formula.Eric Schwitzgebel & Josh Dever - 2008 - Sorites:135-140.
    You are presented with a choice between two envelopes. You know one envelope contains twice as much money as the other, but you don't know which contains more. You arbitrarily choose one envelope -- call it Envelope A -- but don't open it. Call the amount of money in that envelope X. Since your choice was arbitrary, the other envelope (Envelope B) is 50% likely to be the envelope with more and 50% likely to be the envelope with less. But, (...)
     
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  26. Must or might.Josh Dever - unknown
    Sententialism: An adequate semantic theory for a language assigns semantic values to complex expressions (typically on the basis of the semantic values of the syntactic parts of those complex expressions), with the assignment process culminating in the assignment of appropriate semantic values (typically propositions or truth conditions) to entire sentences. Sententialism is so-called because it takes the task of semantic theory proper to be exhausted once semantic values have been assigned to full sentences. Beyond the sentence may lay further linguistic (...)
     
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  27. Modal fictionalism and compositionality.Josh Dever - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 114 (3):223 - 251.
    Modal fictionalists propose to defuse the unwanted ontological commitments of modal realism by treating modal realism as a fictional story, and modal assertions as assertions, prefixed by a fictionalist operator, that something is true in that story. However, consideration of conditionals with modal antecedents raises the problem ofembedding, which shows that the simple prefixing strategy cannotsucceed. A compositional version of the fictionalist strategy isdeveloped and critiqued, and some general semantic morals aredrawn from the failures of both strategies.
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  28. The disunity of truth.Josh Dever - 2008 - In Robert Stainton & Christopher Viger (eds.), Compositionality, Context, and Semantic Values: Essays in Honor of Ernie Lepore. Springer. pp. 174-191.
    §§3-4 of the Begriffsschrift present Frege’s objections to a dominant if murky nineteenth-century semantic picture. I sketch a minimalist variant of the pre-Fregean picture which escapes Frege’s criticisms by positing a thin notion of semantic content which then interacts with a multiplicity of kinds of truth to account for phenomena such as modality. After exploring several ways in which we can understand the existence of multiple truth properties, I discuss the roles of pointwise and setwise truth properties in modal logic. (...)
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  29.  7
    What is Philosophical Methodology?Josh Dever - 2016 - In Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This article discusses what kind of thing a philosophical methodology is or would be, and what kind of questions would count as methodological. The primary focus is on a “higher-order” reading, on which admissible answers are the epistemological methods that distinguish philosophy from the natural sciences and the humanities, or the pursuit of a description of reality at the most fundamental level. The article uses the term “Philosophical Methodology” to pick out questions of the higher order, and “philosophical methodology” for (...)
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  30. Worlds apart: On the possibility of an actual infinity.Josh Dever - unknown
    Cosmological arguments attempt to prove the existence of God by appeal to the necessity of a first cause. Schematically, a cosmological argument will thus appear as: (1) All contingent beings have a cause of existence. (2) There can be no infinite causal chains. (3) Therefore, there must be some non-contingent First Cause. Cosmological arguments come in two species, depending on their justification of the second premiss. Non-temporal cosmological arguments, such as those of Aristotle and Aquinas, view causation as requiring explanatory (...)
     
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  31. Continuities classical, constructivist, and vague.Josh Dever - unknown
    Vague predicates are subject to forced-march sorites reasoning. Given a vague predicate Π, it is thus at least possible that there be a sequence of objects each of which is potentially predicable with Π meeting the following two conditions.
     
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  32. Unconditionals.Josh Dever, David Sosa & Daniel Bonevac - unknown
    Conditionality is a modal feature (in only the trivial sense, in the case of the material conditional). For φ to be conditioned on ψ is for the appearance of φ and ψ to be connected in some way over some region of modal space.
     
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  33.  98
    Antiobjects.Josh Dever - 2018 - Philosophical Issues 28 (1):89-106.
    Aristotle observes that substances have no contraries. Consider one possible role that the contrary of a substance might play, were it to exist. Just as objects serve as guarantors of the instantiation of properties, contraries of objects could serve as guarantors of the non‐instantiation of properties. By first considering a reframing of deontic logic that takes ‘being permitted’ rather than ‘being forbidden’ as the default state, I develop logical tools that allow the construction of extremal models in which everything is (...)
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  34. 680 ACKNOWLEDGMENT Fiona Cowie Max Cresswell Mark Crimmins.Oesten Dahl, Mary Dalrymple, Paul Dekker, Josh Dever, Walter Edelberg, Kai von Fintel, Gilles Fauconnier, Nissim Francez, Peter Gärdenfors & Bart Geurts - 1999 - Linguistics and Philosophy 22:679-680.
  35. Three modes of, and five morals regarding, displaced semantic processing, with special attention to the role of variables (and a final plug for dynamic semantics).Josh Dever - unknown
    There is a puzzle regarding the semantics of quantification that is well-known among linguists and formal semanticists, but which has received relatively little attention from philosophers. The puzzle emerges most naturally if our semantic theory is categorical, satisfying two mutually supporting requirements.
     
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  36. 802 ACKNOWLEDGMENT Aaron Broadwell Miriam Butt Alex Byrne.Greg Carlson, Lisa Cheng, Gennaro Chierchia, Östen Dahl, Mary Dalrymple, Veneeta Dayal, Paul Dekker, Josh Dever, Markus Egg & Martina Faller - 2002 - Linguistics and Philosophy 25:801-802.
  37. Problems of Compositionality.Josh Dever - 2003 - Philosophical Review 112 (2):254-258.
    Problems of Compositionality is a revised version of Zoltán Szabó’s 1995 doctoral dissertation. Of its five chapters, three have appeared in print independently, so I will concentrate most of my remarks on the second and third chapters, which remain unpublished outside the book. As it happens, I find these two chapters to be the most philosophically rewarding of the book.
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  38. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics.Josh Dever - 2005 - Elsevier.
     
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  39. Low‐grade two‐dimensionalism. [REVIEW]Josh Dever - 2007 - Philosophical Books 48 (1):1-16.
    As tends to be the way with philosophical positions, there are at least as many two-dimensionalisms as there are two-dimensionalists. But painting with a broad brush, there are core epistemological and metaphysical commitments which underlie the two-dimensionalist project, commitments for which I have no sympathies. A sketch of three signi?cant points of disagreement.
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  40. Review of problems of compositionality. [REVIEW]Josh Dever - unknown
    Problems of Compositionality is a revised version of Zolt´an Szab´o’s 1995 doctoral dissertation. Of its five chapters, three have appeared (in heavily modified form) in print independently1, so I will concentrate most of my remarks on the second and third chapters, which remain unpublished outside the book. As it happens, I find these two chapters to be the most philosophically rewarding of the book. The principle of compositionality is a general constraint on the shape of a theory of meaning. Szab´o (...)
     
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