I suppose that everyone who starts theorizing about language and its use is struck early by
the need for some sort of distinction between what is “semantic” and what is “pragmatic”; …

In this paper, I argue against Davidson's (1986) view that our ability to understand
malapropisms forces us to re-think the standard construal of literal word meaning as …

Gricean intentionalists hold that what a speaker says and means by a linguistic utterance is
determined by the speaker's communicative intention. On this view, one cannot really say …

In this paper, I explore two contrasting conceptions of the social character of language. The
first takes language to be grounded in social convention. The second, famously developed …

In this paper I argue, from the consideration of what I hope is the complete variety of a
hearer's approaches to a speaker's utterance, that (1) the speaker's intention does not settle …

Are there really such things as public languages? Are things like English and Urdu mere
myths? I urge that, despite an intriguing line of thought which may be extracted from …

Donald Davidson denied convention any interesting role in the philosophical theory of
meaning: Conventions are neither necessary nor sufficient to account for communication by …

According to some philosophers, a sentence's semantics can fail to constitute a complete
propositional content, imposing mere constraints on such a content. Recently, Daniel Harris …

This paper offers a defense of Davidson's conclusion in 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs',
focusing on the psychology and epistemology of language. Drawing on empirical studies in …

Conventions are important to a theory of language because they are the typical cause of a
linguistic expression having its meaning. But, contrary to what some seem to think …