Philosophy of Language

Course Description

This course is a graduate-level introduction to the philosophy of language. My hope is that the course will serve to both bring graduate students without training in philosophy of language up to speed on some of the important arguments, concepts, and formal tools from the field, while also deepening the knowledge of those graduates who have more familiarity with these topics. The course also favors breadth over depth, covering a range of topics such as names, definite descriptions, context-sensitivity, implicature, compositional semantics, and de se cognition.

Syllabus

• Syllabus

Readings

• Sense and Reference, Frege
• On Denoting, Russell
• A Puzzle about Belief, Kripke
• Demonstratives, Kaplan
• Attitudes De Dicto and De Se, Lewis
• The Problem of the Essential Indexical, Perry
• Semantics in Generative Grammar, Selections, Heim and Kratzer
• Logic and Conversation, Grice
• Assertion, Stalnaker
• Scorekeeping in a Language Game, Lewis
• File Change Semantics and the Famliarity Theory of Definiteness, Heim
• Pragmatics, Travis
• Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (selections), Kripke
• Kripkean Necessity A Posteriori: Some Doubts, Yours Truly