 "Perspectives
in Imaginative Engagement with Fiction" (version delivered
at BSPC
in August 2006; revised version soon (really!).)
I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative
responses to fiction which have been discussed, largely separately, by
philosophers: the puzzles of fictional emotions, of imaginative
resistance, and of alternative personality. Solving these puzzles
requires the
notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I argue that an
analogy to metaphor helps to clarify this intuitive but frustratingly
amorphous notion. Perspectives are tools for organizing our
thinking, which in turn produce certain emotional and evaluative
responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining,
or corrupting — or all three at once.
"Why
Isn't Sarcasm Semantic, Anyway?" (Short, rather outdated
version from the 2006 Pacific APA; longer version available upon
request.)
Orthodoxy
classifies
sarcasm as a paradigmatically pragmatic phenomenon; and sarcasm does
behave in ways that preclude a fully semantic analysis.
At the same time, though, sarcasm appears to behave semantically
according to several classic tests, including cancelability,
conjunction reduction, and embedding. More importantly, some cases of
sarcasm seem to have undeniably semantic effects. Disentangling these
phenomena forces us to become clearer about the various ways in which
speaker meaning and linguistic meaning can come apart.
"Poesis
Without Metaphor" (Draft)
Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with
metaphor — most especially, open-endedness, evocativeness, imagery and
affective power. However, these qualities are neither
necessary nor sufficient for metaphor. I argue that many of the
distinctively “poetic” qualities of metaphor are in fact qualities of
aspectual thought, and that they are also exemplified by parables,
“telling
details,” and “just so” stories. Thinking about these other cases
in which language is used to produce aspectual thought forces us to
pinpoint what is
distinctive about metaphor, and also thereby reveals the weaknesses of
three established views of metaphor: Davidsonian non-cognitivism,
contextualist "continualism", and Waltonian pretense.
"Putting
Thoughts to Work: Concepts, Systematicity, and Stimulus-Independence"
(forthcoming, Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research.)
I argue that we can reconcile two seemingly incompatible
traditions for thinking about conceptual thought. On the one
hand, many cognitive scientists maintain that the systematic deployment
of representational capacities is sufficient for conceptual thought; on
the other hand, a long philosophical tradition claims that language is
necessary for conceptual thought. I argue that it is necessary and
sufficient for conceptual thought that one be able to entertain many of
the thoughts produced by recombining one’s representational capacities
apart from a direct confrontation with the states of affairs being
represented.
"Contextualism,
Metaphor, and What is Said" (Mind
& Language 21:3 (June 2006), 280–309.)
On a familiar and prima facie plausible view of metaphor,
speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean
another. Several theorists have recently challenged this view; they
offer criteria to distinguish what is said from what is merely meant,
and argue that these criteria support classifying metaphor within 'what
is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly
understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I
conclude by sketching how we might extract a workable notion of ‘what
is said’ from ordinary intuitions about saying.
"Metaphor
and That Certain 'Je Ne Sais Quoi'" (Philosophical
Studies 129:1 (May 2006), 1-25.)
Contrary to what many proponents of metaphor have claimed,
metaphors don't do anything different in kind from what can be done
with literal speech. But this does not render metaphor theoretically
dispensable or irrelevant, as many analytic philosophers have assumed.
In certain circumstances, I argue, metaphors can enable speakers to
communicate contents that cannot be stated in fully literal and
explicit terms. These cases thus serve as counterexamples to John
Searle's 'Principle of Expressibility', the idea that whatever can be
meant can be said. Indeed, metaphors can sometimes provide us with our
only cognitive access to certain properties. Thinking about
metaphor is useful because it draws our attention to patterns and
processes of thought that play a pervasive role in our ordinary thought
and talk, and that extend our basic communicative and
cognitive resources.
"Metaphor"
with Marga Reimer (Handbook of
Philosophy of Language, ed. Lepore & Smith, OUP 2006,
845-863.)
A survey of recent theories of metaphor from the perspective
of philosophy of language.
"Metaphor
in the Mind: The Cognition of Metaphor" (Philosophy
Compass 1:2
(March 2006), 154-170.)
A review of recent empirical work on metaphor in cognitive
science and psycholinguistics.
"Critical
Study of Josef Stern’s Metaphor in Context"
(Nous
39:4 (December 2005), 715-731.)
A critical discussion of Stern's 2000 book postulating a
metaphoricity
operator 'Mthat' modeled on Kaplan's 'Dthat'. I focus on Stern's claim
that we need to adopt a semantic analysis of metaphor because metaphor
exhibits interpretive constraints which cannot be explained on a
pragmatic view; I argue that in each case the 'constraint' is merely
defeasible, and that a pragmatic analysis can accomodate the data more
parsimoniously and in greater generality than Stern's theory can.
"The
Generality Constraint and Categorial Restrictions" (Philosophical
Quarterly 54:215 (April 2004), 209-231.)
We should not admit categorial restrictions on the
significance of syntactically well-formed strings. Syntactically
well-formed but semantically absurd strings, such as 'Life's but a
walking shadow' and 'Caesar is a prime number', can express thoughts;
and competent thinkers both are able to grasp these thoughts and should
to be able to grasp them. Gareth Evans' Generality Constraint should be
viewed as a fully general constraint on concept possession and
propositional thought, even though Evans himself restricted it. This is
because (a) even well-formed but semantically cross-categorial strings
typically do possess substantive inferential roles; (b) hearers exploit
these inferential roles in interpreting such strings metaphorically;
(c) there is no good reason to deny truth-conditions to strings that
have inferential roles.
An abstract
of my dissertation, Saying and Seeing-as: The Linguistic Uses and
Cognitive Effects of Metaphor.
|
