Professor of Logic & Philosophy of
Science Linguistics and Philosophy
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R. Fiengo and R. May, De
Lingua Belief, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006.
Cover Blurb:
Speakers, in their everyday conversations, use language to talk about
language. They may wonder about what words mean, to whom a name refers,
whether a sentence is true. They may worry whether they have been clear,
or correctly expressed what they meant to say. That speakers can make
such inquiries implies a degree of access to the complex array of
knowledge and skills underlying our ability to speak, and though this
access is incomplete, we nevertheless can form on this basis beliefs
about linguistic matters of considerable subtlety, about ourselves and
others. It is beliefs of this sort--de lingua beliefs--that Robert
Fiengo and Robert May explore in this book.
Fiengo and May focus on the beliefs speakers have about the semantic
values of linguistic expressions, exploring the genesis of these beliefs
and the explanatory roles they play in how speakers use and understand
language. Fiengo and May examine the resources available to speakers
for generating linguistic beliefs, considering how linguistic theory
characterizes the formal, syntactic identity of the expressions
linguistic beliefs are about and how this affects speakers' beliefs
about coreference. Their key insight is that the content of beliefs
about semantic values can be taken as part of what we say by our
utterances. This has direct consequences, examined in detail by Fiengo
and May, for explaining the informativeness of identity statements and
the possibilities for substitution in attributions of propositional
attitudes, cases in which speakers' beliefs about coreference play a
central role.
Frege's
Contribution to Philosophy of Language, with Richard Heck.
Published in E. Lepore and B. Smith, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of
Language, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006.
Frege
on Indexicals. Reprint from The
Philosophical Review, Vol. 115, 487 - 516, 2006.
Frege's Other Program, with Aldo
Antonelli. Reprint from Notre
Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Vol. 46, 1 - 17, 2005.
Inverse
Linking, with Alan Bale. In M. Everaert and H. van
Riemsdijk, eds., The Blackwell
Companion to Syntax, Blackwell, Oxford., 2005.
Frege's New
Science, with Aldo Antonelli. Reprint from Notre Dame Journal
of Formal Logic, Vol. 41, 242 - 270, 2000 (published 2002).
Frege on
Identity Statements. Published in C. Cecchetto, G. Chierchia
and M. T. Guasti, eds., Semantic Interfaces: Reference,
Anaphora and Aspect, Stanford, CSLI Publications, 2001.
