Chisholm's
Paradox Revisited (Slides, January 2006) Chisholm's
Paradox Revisited (Slides, January 2006)These are the slides for a talk I gave at the Institut Nicod in Paris on January 13th. Influenced by T. Parsons' Indeterminacy and Identity, it explores the possibility of a uniform solution to various Sorites-type identity puzzles, based on the idea of there sometimes being no fact of the matter about a hypothetical identity.
Substitutivity
and Side Effects (Draft #3, February 2005)This paper was for a session on the philosophy of Ruth Barcan Marcus held at the Eastern Division APA meeting in December 2000. It's about how to formulate the substitutivity principle so that it's immune to various counterexamples, and how to explain the fact that quantifying into contexts that resist substitutivity makes no sense in some cases but seems fine in others. In adapting some of the material for my forthcoming monograph Attitude Problems I made a few revisions, so I am reposting the paper.
Intensional
Transitive Verbs (Published version, Fall 2004)The above link takes you directly to the published article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Verbs
of Creation and Depiction: More Events in the Semantics of English (Final
Draft, Sept 2003)This paper is descended from one written for a symposium on the work of Terence Parsons (Notre Dame University, 7th to 8th February 2003). Creation verbs ('build', 'construct', 'assemble' etc.) and depiction verbs ('sketch', 'draw', 'sculpt', 'imagine' etc.) have certain affinities, and my solution to the unfinished-object problem for creation verbs in the progressive deploys a treatment of intensional transitives I have proposed elsewhere. This turns out to have consequences (hitherto unnoticed, at least by me) for the semantics of notional readings of depiction-verb phrases in the progressive. There is then some discussion of negative quantifiers and Richard's "Literary Example". The paper ends with a theory about why depiction verbs betray a definiteness effect in DP syntactic complements ("Verrocchio painted two/many/no angels" have notional readings, "Verrocchio painted the two/most/all angels" don't).
[This paper is incorporated into my monograph Attitude Problems (OUP June/Sept 2006) as Chapter 7.]
Depiction
Verbs and the Definiteness Effect (Draft 1, June 2003)This paper is about a puzzling aspect of the behavior of depiction verbs ('sketch', 'draw', 'sculpt', 'imagine' etc.). Most groups of intensional transitive verbs form verb phrases with quantified noun phrases in a way that permits a notional reading of the verb phrase, regardless of the quantificational determiner in the noun phrase. For example, "Perseus seeks exactly one gorgon", "Perseus seeks another gorgon", and "Perseus seeks every gorgon" can all be understood notionally (the coda "but no particular gorgon(s)" makes sense in each case). But if we change "seeks" to "drew", the notional reading with "every gorgon" disappears. Similarly with "most gorgons", "the gorgon" and "both gorgons". I offer an account of why this happens in terms of Keenan's classification of determiners vis à vis the definiteness effect.
This short paper (3060 words exc. notes and bibliography) is excerpted from an earlier draft of "Verbs of Creation and Depiction" (see above). It appeared in the Yearbook for Logica 2003.
Meaning
Postulates, Inference, and the Relational/Notional Ambiguity (Draft
3, November 2002)This paper in revised form appears in Facta Philosophica 5:1 (2003) 4975. It addresses some problems about intensional transitives raised by Moltmann and Zimmerman, corrects some oversights in my paper in The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (S.V. for 2002), and adds new material on binary vs. tripartite construals of "relational/notional", bridge inferences, weakening inferences, and the relevance problem. Its other sections are, like the PASS paper, concerned with the conjunctive force of disjunctive NP complements of intensional transitive verbs: "Smith needs a good lawyer or a friendly judge" on its normal reading implies both "a good lawyer could help him" AND "a friendly judge could help him". The reading on which "Smith needs a good lawyer or a friendly judge" is implied just by "Smith needs a good lawyer" (and so doesn't imply a friendly judge could help him) is much less preferred, except when the disjunction is followed by a coda such as "and he doesn't care which".
Intensional Transitive Verbs: The Limitations
of a Clausal Analysis (Updated, November 2001)What is essentially a new version of this whole paper appears as Chapter 4 of Attitude Problems under the title "Propositionalism".
Origins
and Identities (Draft #3.1, September 2000)Responds to (then-) recent discussion in Mind (Robertson, Hawthorne and Gendler) of certain arguments for the necessity of origin. This minor revision of draft 3 fixes a problem on pp.2-3 pointed out to me by Robertson. The final version of the paper appeared in Individuals, Essence and Identity: Themes of Analytic Metaphysics, Andrea Bottani, Daniele Giaretta and Massimiliano Carrara eds., Reidel 2002, 319340.
Canonical
Counterpart Theory (1982/1998)This paper is in Michael Tooley's Analytic Metaphysics Volume 5: Necessity & Possibility: The Metaphysics of Modality (Garland 1999). The version I am posting here is updated in minor ways from the version which appeared in Analysis in 1982.