Selected Publications
Scott Soames
° Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume LXXXI, 2007, Mark Kalderon, ed.
This is an essay on the metaphysics, epistemology, semantics, and pragmatics of actuality and possibility.
° On Sense and Direct Reference, Matthew Davidson, ed. McGraw Hill, 2007.
The paper explains the motivations and contents of the pragmatic two-dimensionalism of Robert Stalnaker, the strong and weak semantic versions of two-dimensionalism suggested by many of the writings of Frank Jackson and David Chalmers, and the more recent hybrid version of two-dimensionalism advocated by Chalmers in "Components of Content", 2002. Refutations are presented of all these versions of two-dimensionalism.
Descriptive Names vs. Descriptive Anaphora
° A Symposium on Alan Berger's Terms and Truth, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXXII, No. 3, 2006.
This is a contribution to a symposium on Alan Berger's Terms and Truth. There, Berger presents analyses of descriptive names (the referents of which are fixed by description) and pronouns in discourses that are anaphoric on expressions occurring in preceding sentences. Although each analysis has much to be said for it, in my opinion Berger goes wrong in treating descriptive names as if they were anaphoric on expressions used in their original introduction, and discourse anaphors as if they were rigid singular terms.
Facts, Truth Conditions, and the Skeptical Solution to the
Rule-Following Paradox
° Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 12, Language, Mind, and Ontology, 1998
Skepticism about Meaning: Indeterminacy, Normativity, and the
Rule-Following Paradox
° Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Vol. 23, 1998
Philosophical Implications of the Kripkean Necessary
Aposteriori
° Philosophical Issues, Vol. 16, Blackwell Publishing Co., 2006
Kripke's discovery of the necessary aposteriori is placed in historical and philosophical perspective. I argue that his first, essentialist, route to the necessary aposteriori has led to a distinction between metaphysical and epistemic possibility that is an important advance, while his second route to the necessary aposteriori has led to an attempted revival of pre-Kripkean orthodoxy which both threatens that advance, and leads to suspect philosophical results - including his own flawed argument against mind-body identity theories.
° Content and Modality: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Stalnaker, Oxford University Press, 2006, 222-250. Editors: Judith Thompson and Alex Byrne
In "Assertion", Robert Stalnaker presents a two-dimensional model of discourse designed (i) to accommodate cases in which utterances assert propositions other than those they semantically express, and (ii) to solve philosophical problems posed by the Kripkean necessary aposteriori for Stalnaker's identification of propositions with functions from possible world-states to truth values, and his restriction of the epistemically possible to the metaphysically possible. I argue that the model cannot succeed, and propose alternative non-2D explanations of the relevant cases.
Why Incomplete Definite Descriptions do not Defeat Russell's Theory
of Descriptions
° Teorema Vol XXIV No. 3. 2005
According to Russell, a simple sentence S containing a definite description, the F, is true only if a single object in the domain of discourse satisfies F. The problem posed by incomplete definite descriptions is that often uses of such sentences are true even though more than one object satisfies F. I argue (i) that non-Russellian semantic analyses cannot solve this problem, and (ii) that Russellian approaches can, provided that a new, and independently motivated, conception of the relationship between meaning and assertion is adopted.
° The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, 2005.
A review of the antidescriptivist revolution of the 1970's, plus a chronicle and critique of the subsequent neodescriptivist revival based on a causal-descriptivist theory of reference fixing, rigidification, and a two-dimensional semantic theory of the necessary aposteriori and the contingent apriori.
° Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd Edition, Macmillan Publishing Co., 2006
A brief historical summary of the most important developments in analytic philosophy from Moore and Russell to Kripke.
° Semantics vs. Pragmatics, Oxford University Press, 2004, 356-382.
In Beyond Rigidity it was proposed that a speaker who utters S often asserts multiple pragmatically enriched propositions, and that the semantic content of S is a proposition which, for every normal context C in which S is uttered, is among the propositions asserted. In this paper I explain in detail why this view must be modified. According to the new view, the semantic content of S is not always a complete proposition, but rather is a set of conditions that constrains the candidates for assertion, while allowing speakers a measure of freedom for pragmatic enrichment within those constraints. On the new view, assertions must be pragmatic enrichments of semantic content, but when the semantic content of S in C is a complete proposition it counts as asserted by an utterance of S in C only if it is a consequence of the pragmatically enriched propositions asserted by the utterance.
° Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 17, 2003, 369-383.
The paper gives an account of what it is for a truth predicate to be deflationary. It attempts to say what is right about deflationism, and to clarify the notion of truth in a way that gives us most of what we need for ordinary philosophical purposes, without resolving the contentious issues raised by any complete and precise theory (which would involve, among other things, a definitive solution to the Liar Paradox, plus a non-circular account of what it is to understand the truth predicate). It is argued that our ordinary truth predicate of propositions is deflationary, but that deflationary theories of truth for sentences don't tell the whole story about sentential truth.
° Liars and Heaps: New Essays on Paradox, Oxford University Press, 2003, 128-50.
A theory of higher-order vagueness for partially-defined,
context-sensitive predicates like is blue is offered. According to
the theory, the predicate is determinately blue means roughly is
an object o such that the claim that o is blue is a necessary consequence
of the rules of the language plus the underlying non-linguistic facts in
the world. Because the question of which rules count as rules of the
language is itself vague, the predicate is determinately blue is
both vague and partial in a sense analogous (though not completely
identical) to the sense in which is blue is vague and partial.
However, higher-order vagueness stops there. Although the anti-extension
of is determinately blue differs from that of is blue,
further iterations of determinately have no semantic effect.
The paper closes with a discussion of the need to posit sharp and precise
lines dividing the range of potential application of a vague predicate
into semantically distinct categories. It is argued that this is less of a
problem for the present theory than for many others, because the
categories into which the range is divided by the present theory -- like
the category of counting as blue because the rules of the language offer
speakers no discretion, as opposed to the category of counting as blue
because speakers have invoked an absolute minimum of discretion in
adjusting the contextually sensitive boundaries of the predicate -- are
not those that the linguistic competence of ordinary speakers equips them
to make highly accurate and
reliable judgments about.
Knowledge of Manifest Natural Kinds
° Facta Philosophica, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004, 159-181.
Manifest kinds are natural kinds designated by terms like water, tiger, gold, and green, instances of which are objects of our potential acquaintance. Manifest kind terms figure in statements of theoretical identification, many of which are both necessary and knowable only aposteriori. The necessity of many of these statements follows from their truth, plus the way in which the reference of the terms they contain is standardly fixed. The explanation of their aposteriority is based on the fact that our knowledge of manifest kinds parallels our knowledge of individuals. Just as our de re knowledge of individuals standardly depends either on our own acquaintance with them, or on the acquaintance of others who pass important parts of their knowledge on to us, so our de re knowledge of manifest kinds standardly depends either on own acquaintance with members of these kinds, or on the acquaintance of others who pass aspects of their knowledge on to us. Because of this acquaintance requirement, most of our knowledge of individuals, and of manifest kinds, is aposteriori. It is not possible to circumvent this result by using descriptions to introduce or to semantically fix the reference of names or manifest kind terms. In both cases, the requirement that we antecedently believe of the object to be named, or the kind to be designated, that it is denoted by the description used to introduce the term renders our knowledge of the propositions expressed by relevant sentences containing the term aposteriori, rather than apriori.
Last updated: 02/15/07