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Grice's theory of conversational implicatures, Relevance Theory and other contemporary pragmatic theories, focusing on issues involving singular reference, "pragmatic intrusion," and the semantics - pragmatics "interface." Throughout the seminar will be developing the approach Kepa Korta and Perry call "critical pragmatics."

May be repeated for credit. 2 unit option is for PhD students only.

Fundamental issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind and language: issues relating to the notion (or rather, notions) of an inference. What's inferential justification? What's an inferential reasoning process? What are inference rules, and what distinguishes a good rule of inference from a bad rule? Subtopics to be discussed include: the problem of mental causation, the distinction between personal and sub-personal levels of explanation, preservation of content and warrant, the epistemic support relation, and time permitting the nature of perceptual justification.

2015-16 topic: Logical Consequence.nMay be repeated for credit.

Problems about reference have played a large role in the philosophy of language since the days of Frege and Russell. An approach to reference from the point of view of pragmatics, that Kepa Korta and John Perry have developed in their book CRITICAL PRAGMATICS. Rely on ideas from John Perry's book REFERENCE AND REFLEXIVITY. Also look at other approaches to reference, and to pragmatics.

2 unit option for PhD students only. May be repeated for credit.

Explore various approaches to the difficulties for semantic theories raised by the behavior of propositional attitude sentences. How, if Superman and Clark are the same person, can Lois have different beliefs about them? "Classic" treatments of the issues including Frege, Russell, Quine, Davidson, and Kripke. Contemporary debates about the most promising approaches, including "naive Russellianism" and "unarticulated constituent" accounts.

Course may be repeat for credit. 2 unit option for PhD students only.

One central project in the philosophy of language is to explain the relationships between paradigmatically semantic phenomena like meaning, truth, and reference (as well as entailment, satisfaction, application, and others). Often the pursuit of this project generates orders of explanation in which some notions are privileged as more "fundamental" than others, in what is arguably a metaphysical sense of the expression. The dominant order of explanation in both philosophical and linguistic semantics seems to be Referentialism, according to which word/world relationships like reference and application are taken to be more fundamental than sentential truth or meaning. (Think: correspondence theory + model-theoretic semantics.) Alternatives to the orthodoxy include certain versions of conceptual-role semantics, Brandom's inferentialism, and Horwich's use theory of meaning. The aims of this seminar will be to acquaint ourselves with these and other going concerns in the theory of meaning, to organize logical space so that gaps might more easily be spotted, and to help the instructor develop his own, as yet nascent form of opposition to Referentialism. Of special interest will be the alleged normativity of meaning and the Field/Wright dispute over reference to abstracta. Besides the authors already mentioned, readings will be drawn from Katz, King, Kripke, and perhaps (time permitting) Millikan, Peacocke, and/or Taylor as well. But we should probably begin by rehashing Davidson v. Dummett.