Recent Papers and Publications

You can find copies of some of my recent work below.  If there are papers or other material of mine you want a copy of, feel encouraged to be in touch at richard4 followed by the at sign and then fas DOT harvard DOT edu.

Please do not read the material below while operating heavy machinery.

Books

I’ve written three books, published a couple of volumes of my papers,  and edited an anthology:

Meanings as Species

Here is the Table of Contents and Introduction to Meanings as Species, published by OUP in 2019.  Two papers below –‘How Do Slurs Mean?’ and ‘The A-project and the B-project’ –contain material from Chapters 3 and 6.  A link to my responses to Josh Armstrong, Dan Dennett, Francois and Laura Schroeter, and Bob Stalnaker’s contributions to a symposium on the book can be found below in the Recent Papers section of this page.

Meanings as Species Contents and Introduction

https://www.amazon.com/Meanings-as-Species-Mark-Richard-ebook/dp/B07V5NXBX8/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1WQP44JZ5KTHV&keywords=meaning+as+species&qid=1565892347&s=books&sprefix=meanings+as+%2Cstripbooks%2C133&sr=1-1

Meaning in Context Volume I:  Context and the Attitudes

Meaning in Context Volume II:  Truth and Truth Bearers

These two volumes collect papers that I wrote between 1980 and 2015.  The first volume is primarily concerned with the ways we talk about attitudes like belief, knowledge, fear, and expectation; there are forays into topics such as the nature of context sensitivity, semantic pretense, and nominalism about abstract objects.  The second volume ranges more widely, though much of it is concerned with (surprise!) truth and truth bearers.  It contains four essays not previously published:  ‘Temporalism and Eternalism Revisited’, ‘What is Disagreement?’, ‘Relativisms’, and ‘Did I Mention What He Said?’  Both books have truly awesome covers, though perhaps not quite as awesome as the cover of Meanings As Species.   Here are links to pages where you can peruse or buy them:

Truth and Truth Bearers: Meaning in Context Volume II

Context and the Attitudes:  Meaning and Context Volume I

When Truth Gives Out

Another awesome cover, with a photograph by Eleanor Richard and a design based on work by Anneliese Bauer Cooper.  Here’s the blurb on the cover:

Is the point of belief and assertion invariably to think or say something true? Is the truth of a belief or assertion absolute, or is it only relative to human interests? Most philosophers think it incoherent to profess to believe something but not think it true, or to say that some of the things we believe are only relatively true. Common sense disagrees. It sees many opinions, such as those about matters of taste, as neither true nor false; it takes it as obvious that some of the truth is relative.

Mark Richard’s accessible book argues that when it comes to truth, common sense is right, philosophical orthodoxy wrong. The first half of the book examines connections between the performative aspects of talk (what we do when we speak), our emotions and evaluations, and the conditions under which talk and thought qualifies as true or false. It argues that the performative and expressive sometimes trump the semantic, making truth and falsity the wrong dimension of evaluation for belief or assertion. Among the topics taken up are: racial slurs and other epithets; relations between logic and truth; the status of moral and ethical talk; vagueness and the liar paradox. The book’s second half defends the idea that much of everyday thought and talk is only relatively true or false. Truth is inevitably relative, given that we cannot work out in advance how our concepts will apply to the world. Richard explains what it is for truth to be relative, rebuts standard objections to relativism, and argues that relativism is consistent with the idea that one view can be objectively better than another. The book concludes with an account of matters of taste and of how it is possible for divergent views of such matters to be equally valid, even if not true or false.

When Truth Gives Out will be of interest not only to philosophers who work on language, ethics, knowledge, or logic, but to any thoughtful person who has wondered what it is, or isn’t, for something to be true.

Here’s an Amazon link:

When Truth Gives Out

Propositional Attitudes

My first book.  It’s pretty darn good, if I do say so myself.  Link:

Propositional Attitudes

Meaning

This is a textbook with a lengthy introduction discussing various issues raised by the dozen or so papers collected in it.  If you want a giggle, you should check out the Amazon page at the end of the link to see what a paperback copy will set you back.

Meaning

Here are some reviews of When Truth Gives Out.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

The Philosophical Quarterly

Mind

Protosociology

Ethics

Philosophical Review 123 (3):367-371 (2014)

 

Recent Papers

Austin, Cavell, and Meaning What We Say

This is a short paper Nancy Bauer and I gave at the Liberal Naturalism and Non-Scientific Explanation conference.  Nancy does not agree with all (perhaps much) of it.

Austin, Cavell, and Meaning What We Say

Conceptual Engineering:  Be Careful What You Wish For

This paper discusses issues which  the (social) construction of social identities, in particular gender identities, raises for the idea that such identities and concepts of them are apt targets of conceptual engineering.  It gives (the beginnings of) an account of how such identities are constructed and of how a person may acquire such an identity when it is not socially assigned (in the way that, for example, gender identities are assigned at birth).  It argues that Hilary Putnam’s ‘pragmatic realism’ provides a useful (and, I think, correct) framework for thinking about both conceptual engineering (and how engineering can change conceptions and what they are conceptions of) and disputes about gendered identity.  It took me a long time to write this paper.  Comments much appreciated. 

Click to access topoi-conceptual-engineering.pdf

Replies to Armstrong, Dennett, the Schroeters, and Stalnaker.

Replies to four papers from a symposium on Meanings as Species.  I wish I was half as smart (and a quarter as generous) as each of them are.

Inquiry symposium responses.

Superman and Clark Walk into a Phone Booth

Superman and Clark Final with abstract

This and the next paper are outgrowths of Meaning As Species.  After I finished it, I became interested in a collection of views variously labelled ‘usage based grammar’, ‘construction grammar’, and ‘cognitive grammar’.  These are views of what underlies linguistic competence on which (focusing for brevity on Joan Bybee’s version of usage based grammar) language acquisition is a matter in the first instance of applying domain general cognitive processes: recording exemplars of uses of phrases, categorizing them, generalizing over categorized exemplars to create interpretive rules of thumb of the form in a situation of kind K, phrase P may be used to mean M, and concatenating such rules (“chunking” them) to form templates for pairing complex sounds with complex meanings.  On such views, we are continually updating and often altering our information about syntax, semantics, and so on.  Such views are a good fit with the view in Meanings As Species, which, I suppose, is why I like them.

This paper assumes the correctness of such a view of how meaning gets paired with sound.   It then considers what such a view might say about the sorts of examples that Jenny Saul pointed out a quarter of century back, examples of ‘simple sentences’ in which Substitutivity seems to fail such as ‘Clark Kent walked into a phone booth and Superman walked out’.  It argues that if anything like a usage based view is correct, Subsitutivity indeed fails.

Is Reference Essential to Meaning?

Is Reference Essential to Meaning?

No.  Or so this paper argues, developing an argument which didn’t occur to me until after Meanings As Species was published.

The A-Project and the B-Project

A-project and the B-project Final June ’18

This appears in Burgess, Cappelen and Plunkett, eds., Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics.   It discusses Sally Haslanger’s notion of ameliorative philosophical analysis and draws conclusions that I think relevant to some of the literature about ‘conceptual engineering’.  A somewhat different version of it appears in Meanings as Species.

Is Reasoning a Form of Agency?

Is Reasoning a Form of Agency? 

You’ll just have to read it to find out.  This appears in  Reasoning:  New Essays on Theoretical and Practical Thinking, edited by Magdalena and Brendan Balcerak Jackson (OUP 2019). 18, 2019

 

How do Slurs Mean?

Bad Words volume Final Nov ’16

A short paper that applies some of the ideas in Meanings As Species  to the questions, How should we describe the meanings of slurs?  Why do slurs, even when not used slurringly, tend to cause a distinctive sort of offense?  It appears in D. Sosa, ed., Bad Words (OUP).

What are Propositions?

What are Propositions?

This one argues that we should identify states of affairs with finely individuated properties, propositions with states of affairs so individuated.  It responds to various objections to this idea and then criticizes Scott Soames’ views on the matter.  In terms of plot and sharpness of wit it is superior to Mean Girls (sorry Tina), but inferior to the best of Daniel Sada.  It is published in a supplemental volume on the nature of propositions for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.  

Marcus on Believing the Impossible

Marcus on Belief and Believing the Impossible

A paper for a memorial symposium for Ruth Barcan Marcus that was held at the APA Eastern Division Meetings, December 2012.  It examines Ruth’s arguments that impossible beliefs aren’t possible (I don’t think they work), defends a version of her view that the objects of belief are not truth bearers, and examines her dispositionalism about belief.  It appears in Theoria in a special memorial issue on Marcus.

Older Papers

Content Inside Out

A lightly edited version of a paper given at an APA symposium on Joe Mendola’s Anti-Externalism.  It appears in Analytic Philosophy.

Reply to MacFarlane, Scharp, Sharpiro, and Wright

This is a reply to papers by John MacFarlane, Kevin Scharp, Stewart Shapiro, and Crispin Wright about When Truth Gives Out.  Their papers and my reply compose a symposium in Philosophical Studies.  The paper was published online in September 2011 at http://www.springerlink.com.

Topics discussed in this paper include:  expressivist semantics; vagueness; the semantic paradoxes (with a bit about Curry’s Paradox that I especially like);  relativism and disagreement.

Reply to Lynch, Miscevic, and Stojanovic

This is a reply to papers by Michael Lynch, Nenad Miscevic, and Isidora Stojanovic about When Truth Gives Out.  Their papers and my reply are pulbished as a symposium in the Croatian Journal of Philosophy.

Topics discussed in this paper include:  the coherence of relativism; the semantics of slurring speech; faultless disagreement.

Relativistic Content and Disagreement

A contribution to a Philosophical Studies symposium on Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne’s Relativism and Monadic Truth.  This paper appears in Volume 156 of the journal, pp. 421-431; please use the published version for citation.

Kripke’s Puzzle About Belief

This appears in the Cambridge University Press volume on Kripke’s work:  Kripke.

If you cite this, please use the published pagination.

Attitude Ascription:  Algorithmic or Artistic?

This is a talk I gave at the SEP meetings in Bochum in October 2011.  Some of it is concerned with whether the truth of X believes that S requires identity of content between the sentence S and some state of X‘s –that is, whether the dog believes that I threw a ball only if some state of the dog has the content of my use of the sentence ‘I threw a ball’.  Some of the paper responds to various arguments that the objects of belief and other attitudes must be unstructured –the idea that content is best thought of as a set of possible worlds (or something of the sort), as opposed to a Russellian proposition or a structured bunch of senses.

A more elaborate version of this paper, along with some technical asides, appears as part of the introduction to Volume I of Meaning in Context.

What follows are summaries of the four papers first published in Truth and Truth Bearers and another photograph by Eleanor Richard.

What is Disagreement?

It is somewhat more complicated than we are prone to think.  So, anyway, I argue in this paper.  The paper corrects some things I said about “faultless disagreement” in When Truth Gives Out, distinguishing two sorts of things that might be called disagreement.  It also discusses some broadly logical issues having to do with ‘thick terms’ like ‘chaste’.

What Would an Expressivist Semantics Be?

This begins with a critical discussion of Mark Schroeder’s Being For; my primary worry about Schroeder’s book is that he has an impoverished view of how an expressivist might explain how mental states are related to the sentences that in one or another way express them.  I sketch very informally  the account of this I think the expressivist ought to give.  An appendix gives a few quasi-technical details.  It appears in Gross, et. al, eds., Meaning without Representation (OUP, 2015).

Did I Mention What He Said?

This paper is about “mixed quotation” –the sort of use of quotation we find in

Davidson said that reference can’t be relativized “in the way Quine wants.”

It begins with a discussion of some of Francois Recanati’s work on quotation.  It then presents a view of mixed quotation that I developed five or so years ago, one that LePore and Cappelen present with approval in their book Language Turned on its Head.  I no longer think that view is tenable, and I explain why.  I then present what I think is the correct account of the matter.  This paper contains mature themes and language, including the phrase ” ‘horse’s patoot’ “, and is not recommended for philosophers under the age of 14.   A version of this appears in Volume II of my collected papers (OUP, 2015).

Temporalism and Eternalism Revisited

This paper revisits the issue of whether (some of) the objects of the attitudes change truth value over time.  Whether this is so bears on the question of whether natural language is hospitable to various sorts of relativism; thinking about the issue requires thinking pretty hard about interesting issues in syntax.

This, obviously, is a sorites under construction.

And this is another collage.