Philosophy 332

Philosophy of Language Fall 2018

Class Information: Instructor Information: GDC 6.202 Josh Dever MW 10:00-11:30 407 Waggener Hall Oce Hrs: W 3:00-4:00 [email protected]

1 Description

Philosophy of language is located on the border between philosophy and lin- guistics. We’ll explore this borderland from both directions. Our central text is a standard linguistics textbook on formal semantic treatments of natural lan- guage, Semantics in Generative Grammar by Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer. Using this book we’ll develop over the course of the semester an increasingly sophisticated formal toolkit that will allow us to give analysis of and make pre- dictions concerning specific fragments of natural language. As we develop this toolkit, we’ll examine and question many of its underlying assumptions, and raise broad and deep questions about how language works, what a theory of meaning should look like, and how questions about content and communication interact with a range of other philosophical issues in metaphysics, epistemology, and other areas of philosophy. We’ll thus read a number of classic papers in philosophy of language alongside the Heim and Kratzer book and explore the interactions between the two streams of texts.

2Texts

The primary text is Semantics in Generative Grammar by Irene Heim and An- gelika Kratzer. It is available at the University Co-op. The various additional philosophical papers are available on Canvas. There are also two optional books, Context and Communication and Puzzles of Reference (both by Herman Cappe- len and Josh Dever) available at the Co-op. Both of these books are reasonably gentle introductions to a range of recent work in philosophy of language that may be helpful in providing further context for our readings and discussions.

1 3 Course Requirements

There will be three short papers (~5-7 pages), and a more substantial final paper (~10-15 pages). The short papers are each worth 20% of the grade, and the final paper is worth 30%. The remaining 10% comes from class participation.

4 Schedule of Events

1. HK Chapter 1, “Truth-Conditional Semantics and the Fregean Program” and Chapter 2, “Executing the Fregean Program”

Philosophical Topic: The Connection Between Truth and Meaning

Donald Davidson, “Truth and Meaning” • Michael Dummett, “What is a Theory of Meaning?” • James Shaw, “Truth, Paradox, and Ine↵able Propositions” • 2. HK Chapter 3, “Semantics and Syntax”

Philosophical Topic: The Nature of Our Linguistic Knowledge Noam Chomsky, “Language and Problems of Knowledge” • Gilbert Harman, “Deep Structure as Logical Form” • Stephen Crain and Paul Pietroski, “Nature, Nurture, and Universal • Grammar” 3. HK Chapter 4, “More of English: Nonverbal Predicates, Modifiers, and Definite Descriptions”

Philosophical Topic: Communication, Meaning, and Intention

H.P. Grice, “Meaning” • Stephen Neale, Chapter 2 of Descriptions • Robert Stalnaker, “Pragmatic Presuppositions” • 4. HK Chapter 5, “Relative Clauses, Variables, Variable Binding”

Philosophical Topic: Language and Ontology

W.V.O. Quine, “On What There Is” • George Boolos, “To Be Is To Be The Value of a Bound Variable (Or • Some Values of Some Bound Variables)” Kit Fine, “The Role of Variables” • 5. HK Chapter 6, “Quantifiers: Their Semantic Type”

Philosophical Topic: Naming and Describing

Delia Gra↵Fara, “Names are Predicates” • Robin Jeshion, “Referentialism and Predicativism about Proper Names” • Anders Schoubye, “Ghosts, Murderers, and the Semantics of Descrip- • tions”

6. HK Chapter 7, “Quantification and Grammar”

Philosophical Topic: Talking About Our Minds W.V.O. Quine, “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes” • David Kaplan, “Quantifying In” • Simon Charlow and Yael Sharvit, “Bound ’De Re’ Pronouns and the • LFs of Attitude Reports” 7. HK Chapter 8, “Syntactic and Semantic Constraints on Quantifier Move- ment”

Philosophical Topic: Modality and Metaphysics

Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity Lecture I • Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity Lecture II • Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity Lecture III • 8. HK Chapter 9, “Bound and Referential Pronouns and Ellipsis”

Philosophical Topic: Context-Sensitivity and Language David Kaplan, “Demonstratives” • David Lewis, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game” • David Lewis, “Elusive Knowledge” • 9. HK Chapter 10, “Syntactic and Semantic Binding”

Philosophical Topic: Metasemantics

Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” • Ofra Magidor and Stephen Kearns, “Semantic Sovereignty” • Je↵rey King, “The Metasemantics of Contextual-Sensitivity” • 10. HK Chapter 11, “E-Type Anaphora”

Philosophical Topic: Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction H.P. Grice, “Logic and Conversation” • Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, “Relevance Theory” • Michael Franke, “Game-Theoretic Pragmatics” •