Ernie Lepore - Böcker

This Handbook represents a collective exploration of the emerging field of applied philosophy of language. The volume covers a broad range of areas where philosophy engages with linguistic aspects of our social world, including such hot topics as dehumanizing speech, dogwhistles, taboo language, pornography, appropriation, implicit bias, speech acts, and the ethics of communication. An international line-up of contributors adopt a variety of approaches and methods in their investigation of these linguistic phenomena, drawing on linguistics and the human and social sciences as well as on different philosophical subdisciplines. The aim is to map out fruitful areas of research and to stimulate discussion with thought-provoking essays by leading and emerging philosophers.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Language introduces readers to the main issues and theories in the philosophy of language as currently practised. Written by leading researchers and covering the central topics in the contemporary philosophical study of language, the twenty-seven chapters provide an overview of the state of the art, and a presentation of cutting-edge developments. Topics covered include: the nature of language; the nature and role of semantic and attitudinal content; the dynamics of communication and speech acts; meta-semantics and reference grounding; tense and modality; discourse dynamics and information structure; and the expressive, evaluative, subjective, and social aspects of language. Although some of the articles focus directly on technical issues following the recent approach of linguistically oriented philosophy of language, the majority of the contributions are primarily focused on foundational questions drawn from traditional philosophy of language. The volume offers a reconsideration of these foundational issues in a new light, while still bearing in mind the formal developments in recent literature, as well as a presentation of new foundational issues that have emerged as a result of these developments.

What do speakers mean? What do they convey? What do they reveal? How do they invite us to think? Communication exploits conventional rules, deliberate choices, and many other faculties. How? A common answer invokes simple meanings and general ways to reinterpret them, as in H. P. Grice's theory of conversational implicature. Lepore and Stone show such answers are unsatisfactory. Instead, they argue that language provides diverse tools for making ideas public, and that communication recruits distinct kinds of imagination. The work synthesizes results from across cognitive science into a profoundly new account of meaning in language.

How do hearers manage to understand speakers? And how do speakers manage to shape hearers' understanding? Lepore and Stone show that standard views about the workings of semantics and pragmatics are unsatisfactory. They offer a new account of language as a specifically social competence for making our ideas public. They argue that this approach is a good way to target the distinctive mechanisms and problems at play in explaining the human faculty of language. At the same time, this view embraces the diverse dimensions of meaning that linguists have discovered. This is the right way to delimit semantics.

Philosophy of language has been at the center of philosophical research at least since the start of the 20th century. Since that 'linguistic turn' much of the most important work in philosophy has related to language. But till now there has been no regular forum for outstanding original work in this area. That is what Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language offers. Anyone wanting to know what's happening in philosophy of language could start with these volumes.

Donald Davidson was one of the most famous and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. The Structure of Truth presents his 1970 Locke Lectures in print for the first time. They comprise an invaluable historical document which illuminates how Davidson was thinking about the theory of meaning, the role of a truth theory therein, the ontological commitments of a truth theory, the notion of logical form, and so on, at a pivotal moment in the development of his thought. Unlike Davidson's previously published work, the lectures are written so as to be presented to an audience as a fully organized and coherent exposition of his program in the philosophy of language. Had they been widely available in the years following 1970, the reception of Davidson's work might have been very different. Given the systematic nature of their presentation of Davidson's semantic program, these lectures will be of interest to anyone working in the philosophy of language.

It's a platitude that words can harm. But some words are more prone to do so than others--they are pejorative by design. Among those, slurs are particularly inflammatory: these are the epithets that derogate purely on the basis of group-membership, for example, on the basis of race, ethnicity, origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or ideology. Inflammatory Language is in large part about pejoratives, but mainly about this subclass of particularly inflammatory words, with a characteristic offensive sting. Slurs are powerful linguistic weapons: slurring someone constitutes a transgression more severe than an insult; it is an act of bigotry, not mere rudeness, derogating the entire group at once. Moreover, the offensive effect of a slur is surprisingly sticky, as even mere mentionings of slurs carry the risk of triggering their sting, so much so that such tokenings often have a full-on taboo status, subject to media censorship, sometimes even legislation.What is the source of this characteristic offensive sting that makes slurs such powerful linguistic weapons? A natural--and predominant--assumption is that it's some aspect of their meaning, semantically encoded or pragmatically conveyed. Consequently, most efforts at understanding slurs have been attempts to characterize their meanings and how they compose with those of other expressions, in a way that generates the offensive sting. However, even those who reject this majority position trace the offensive sting down to slurring words, arguing that it is their taboo status, or offensive tone, that explains their sting. Una Stojnić and Ernie Lepore argue this is a mistake. The distinctive pejorative effect of slurs, their characteristic sting, is not a matter of meaning, nor even language. Rather it is akin to the sting triggered by offensive gestures, symbols, or imagery, in that it is constituted by associations attached to and triggered by slurs' articulatory form--their typical pronunciation or spelling.

Donald Davidson (1917-2003) was one of the most important philosophers of the late twentieth century. His work on language and the theory of meaning has been particularly influential.Two of the world's leading authorities on Davidson's philosophy, Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig, provide a systematic exposition of his work in this field and of his contributions to philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology which spring from it. Their second aim is to assess Davidson's program critically, to mark its successes, but also to identify where its ccomplishments fall short of its ambitions, and, since it is an on-going research program, to assess its prospects for the future, and to contribute to the expansion of that program. Criticizing and extending Davidson's thought, as well as providing an introduction to it, Lepore and Ludwig address a broad academic audience. Their work will be of fundamental importance for those who are coming to Davidson's work for the first time; while some philosophical sophistication and training is presupposed, it is accessible both to advanced undergraduates and to graduate students. It will also be welcomed by professional philosophers, linguists, and anyone wishing to assess and understand Davidson's remarkable intellectual legacy.

Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig present the definitive critical exposition of the philosophical system of Donald Davidson (1917-2003). Davidson's ideas had a deep and broad influence in the central areas of philosophy; he presented them in brilliant essays over four decades, but never set out explicitly the overarching scheme in which they all have their place. Lepore's and Ludwig's book will therefore be the key work, besides Davidson's own, for understanding one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.

Ernie Lepore and Barry Loewer present a series of papers in which they come to terms with three views that have loomed large in philosophy for several decades: that a theory of meaning for a language is best understood as a theory of truth for that language; that thought and language are best understood together via a theory of interpretation; and that the mental is irreducible to the physical. They aim both to offer critical assessment of the views and to develop them. They show that each of these views remains of great significance for current work in philosophy of language and mind.

This volume brings together two series of papers: one began with Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore's 1997 paper 'On an Alleged Connection Between the Theory of Meaning and Indirect Speech'. The other series started with their 1997 paper 'Varieties of Quotation'. The central theme throughout is that only when communicative content is liberated from semantic content will we make progress in understanding language, communication, contexts, and their interconnection. These are the papers in which Cappelen and Lepore introduced speech act pluralism and semantic minimalism, and they provide the foundation for one of the most powerful attacks on contextualism in contemporary philosophy.