Forthcoming Papers
Scott Soames
° Forthcoming
° Forthcoming
To Appear in a symposium on Trenton Merricks Truth and Ontology
° Forthcoming
To Appear in Philosophical Topics
Truth and Meaning — In Perspective
° Forthcoming
To Appear in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume XXXII: Truth and Its Deformities, edited by Peter French.
The Quine-Carnap Debate on Ontology and
Analyticity
° Forthcoming
To Appear in Metametaphysics: New Essays at the Foundations of Ontology, edited by David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman.
The Possibility of Partial
Definition
° Forthcoming
To Appear in Arche Conference Volume on Vagueness
Interpreting Legal Texts: What is, and What is not, Special about the Law
° Forthcoming
To be presented at an International Conference on Law, Language, and Interpretation, at the University of Akureyri, Akureyri, Iceland, April 1-2, 2007
Analytic Philosophy in America
° Forthcoming in: The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, edited by Cheryl Misak
A history of analytic philosophy in America from its pre-analytic origins to the present.
Drawing the Line Between Meaning and Implicature — and
Relating both to Assertion
° Forthcoming
Sentences containing numerals functioning as quantifiers are used to present a new model of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics
Why Propositions Can't be Sets of Truth-Supporting Circumstances
° Forthcoming in: The Journal of Philosophical Logic
Refutation of an objection to the result — established in Soames (1987), "Direct Reference, Propositional Attitudes, and Semantic Content, Philosophical Topics 15, Reprinted in Salmon and Soames (1988) Propositions and Attitudes — that semantic theories incorporating certain natural assumptions about direct reference and propositional attitude ascriptions cannot identify semantic contents of sentences with circumstances in which they are true — no matter how fine-grained such circumstances are taken to be.
Kripke on Epistemic and Metaphysical Possibility
° Forthcoming in: Saul Kripke, edited by Alan Berger
The paper explains and distinguishes two Kripkean routes to the necessary aposteriori. One, based on essential properties, is philosophically correct and far-reaching. The second, based on strong disquotation and descriptive identification of the referents of names and natural kind terms, is incorrect and philosophically misleading.
The Gap Between Meaning and Assertion
° Forthcoming in: Asserting, Meaning, and Implying, edited by Martin Hackl and Robert Thornton
A conception of meaning as least common denominator is presented according to which the semantic content of S is that which is common to what is asserted by utterances of S in all normal contexts. Although the content of S is often a complete proposition, and, hence, a proper candidate for being asserted and believed, in some cases it is only a skeleton, or partial specification, of such a proposition. In many contexts, the semantic content of S -- whether it is a complete proposition or not -- interacts with an expanded conception of pragmatics to generate a pragmatically enriched proposition that it is the speaker's primary intention to assert. Other propositions count as asserted only when they are relevant, unmistakable, necessary and apriori consequences of the speaker's primary assertions, together with salient presuppositions of the conversational background.
Last updated: 08/20/07