Uncover the latest and most impactful research in Philosophy of Language. Explore pioneering discoveries, insightful ideas and new methods from leading researchers in the field.
Many authors who reject the vacuous truth of counterpossibles still adopt a strangeness of impossibilitycondition (SIC): possible worlds are always closer than impossible ones. Others doubt that SIC holds across the board. I situate the debate...
I will consider a class of cases sometimes said to exemplify the open texture of language. They resemble some cases familiar from the mid-20th century. Consider J. L. Austin’s famous example of a bird that, for all the world, looks like a goldfinch,...
A persistent ambition in artificial intelligence research holds that large language models (LLMs) will eventually become embodied—through attachment to robots, augmentation with multimodal sensors, integration into vision–language–action...
This article draws on a conversation with linguist Federico Faloppa to examine how the language of war is migrating beyond the battlefield and becoming embedded in everyday political life. It explores how militarized metaphors, hyperbole, symbols,...
Michael Titelbaum argues that there is no objective, three-place evidential favoring relation in cases without entailment: inductive inference, unlike deductive inference, always depends on some subjective feature (2010, 2011). This position is...
The concept of strength or weight of an argument appears frequently in argumentation theory. However, there is no commonly accepted definition of argument weighing. Broadly speaking, weighing is understood as either the determination of the degree...
This essay reflects on Michael Eng’s book, The Scene of the Voice: Thinking Language After Affect (2023). The first part of the essay clarifies Eng’s use of Heidegger to articulate what is meant by the “scene of the voice” in its relation to the...
Multimodal semantic communication focuses on transmitting meaning of multimodal data rather than exact bits or symbols. By exploiting semantic correlations and complementarities across modalities, it supports reliable transmission under extremely...
This book explores how translation technologies, such as Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools and machine translation to large language models (LLM), are reshaping the translation profession and society at large. Drawing on case studies from...
This book defends property hyperintensionalism: a view of property individuation according to which properties can be distinct even if they are necessarily had by the exact same entities. J. J. Snodgrass brings order to the debate over property...
Speech liberalism holds that the linguistic output of generative AI is continuous with human speech and should therefore be treated as meaningful in broadly the same way. Strong versions of this view take the fluent behaviour of chatbots to justify...
In this essay, I am inspired by a recent article by ZhangLongxi 張隆溪 in which he uses the work of scholars such as Gadamer (and we can add Wittgenstein and Taylor) to argue that human beings are “language animals,” and as such, that their personal...
In a recent article, Jonathan Seglow and Matteo Bonotti develop an interesting and original relational approach to free speech—one that grounds the value of (protecting) large swathes of speech in the relational need that we have for ‘recognition’...
In this brief comment, I discuss Luke Danagher’s recent warning that language models’ ethical fluency may inspire greater confidence than their demonstrated ethical reliability justifies. I consider three versions of this charge: that people would...
Quine is generally taken to be a paradigmatic defender of the idea that language is a shared public resource, learned by internalizing shared standards. I argue that this misreads him. The correct Quinean picture is what I call the Projection...
Recent philosophical work on large language models (LLMs) has increasingly appealed to theories of assertion to make sense of our conversational interactions with these systems. Two strategies are especially prominent: functionalist accounts, which...
In this paper, I present a philosophical analysis of Biolinguistics, including a number of proposals that point in the direction of its recognition as a full-fledged discipline or, perhaps, an interfield theory. My approach shall be a perspectival...
A growing chorus of AI researchers and philosophers posit internal representations in large language models (LLMs). But how do these representations relate to the kinds of mental states we routinely ascribe to our fellow humans? While some research...
While logical expressivism and logical conventionalism share many commitments, the most prominent versions of these positions diverge in the kind of logical inferentialism they endorse. Jared Warren’s logical conventionalism adopts a form of...
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Synthese is a philosophy journal focusing on contemporary issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and related fields. More specifically, we...
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Linguistics and Philosophyfocuses on issues related to structure and meaning in natural language, as addressed in the semantics, philosophy of...
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Language Policyis relevant to scholars, students, specialists, educators, and policymakers working in the fields of applied linguistics,...
