Jonathan Berg

• University of Haifa

Suppose Jill utters the sentence (i)Everybody is wearing a hat, thereby meaning only that everybody she sees is wearing a hat. Did she thus say that everybody she sees is wearing a hat? That is, would the indirect discourse report (ii)Jill said that everybody she sees is wearing a hat be true? Given that Jill obviously meant to be talking only abou...

Replies to comments by Wayne Davis, Anthony Everett, Dale Jacquette, Nikolaj Nottelmann, and Tiddy Smith, on my book Direct Belief: An Essay on the Semantics, Pragmatics, and Metaphysics of Belief.

In Direct Belief I argue for the Theory of Direct Belief, which treats having a belief about an individual as an unmediated relation between the believer and the individual the belief is about. After a critical review of alternative positions, I use Grice’s theory of conversational implicature to provide a detailed pragmatic account of substitution...

In the third chapter of LOT 2—"LOT Meets Frege's Problem (Among Others)"—Jerry Fodor argues that LOT (the language-of-thought hypothesis) provides a solution to "Frege's Problem," as well as to Kripke's Paderewski puzzle (Fodor, LOT 2: The language of thought revisited. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008). I argue that most of what Fodor says in...

In ‘A Puzzle about Belief’ Saul Kripke tells the tale of Pierre, whose pronouncements regarding his urban likes and dislikes have become legendary. But the final conclusion of Kripke’s paper seems to remain widely unknown, misunderstood, or neglected. In the last paragraph of the paper Kripke concludes that the case of Pierre ‘lies in an area where...

Jonathan Berg argues for the Theory of Direct Belief, which treats having a belief about an individual as an unmediated relation between the believer and the individual the belief is about. After a critical review of alternative positions, Berg uses Grice's theory of conversational implicature to provide a detailed pragmatic account of substitution...

The apparent conflict between first person authority and externalism arises only from needlessly thinking of first person authority in terms of “knowing what.”

The standard view of semantics—that every disambiguated sentence has a determinate semantic content, relative to an assignment of contents to its indexical expressions, and not necessarily identical to what may be conveyed (pragmatically) by its utterance—is defended against standard objections and is also argued for on independent grounds, which s...

Without Abstract

This paper introduces MDRT, an extension of DRT to a multi-agent dialogue. The main issue handled is cross-speaker anaphora, whereby one speaker refers anaphorically to a discourse entity introduced by another speaker. We present a representation of multispeaker discourses that allows a a non-degenerate solution to the commitment problem: to what c...

The common view of thought as a kind of inner speech, whether in a natural language or in some other language-like representational system, gains much of its intuitive force from the introspective evidence of what appears to be thinking in words. Presumably, silent uttering is a way of thinking something in the same way that vocal uttering is a way...

It is wrong to think that questions of interpretation are significant in informal logic only to the extent that they contribute to the assessment of an argument's conclusion. For one thing, logic is essentially about validity, about that in virtue of which conclusions do or do not follow from given premises, and not about the truth or falsity of co...

Given that conversation is a particular kind of goal-directed behavior, the kind of relevance that is relevant to conversational implicature concerns the utility of conversational contributions, as linguistic acts, with regard to conversational goals. Such relevance is to be distinguished from (and cannot be reduced to) notions of relevance charact...

This paper concerns the status of metaphorical meaning (and not the mechanics of how it is determined). Contra Black and Beardsley, the propositional content of metaphorical meaning must be distinguished from its nonpropositional content. Contra Davidson, nonliteral metaphorical meaning does exist, and contra Searle, it is not equivalent to speaker...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles--Philosophy. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-230). Photocopy of typescript.