Peter Ludlow
Current Areas of Research in the Philosophy of Language.
I have several interrelated areas of interest in the philosophy of language, which can be roughly broken down as follows:
1. The syntax and semantics of intensional environments.
This includes work on propositional attitude environments with Richard Larson, and in particular on the idea that that-clauses of attitude reports denote "Interpreted Logical Forms." This theory has given rise to a number of misunderstandings (see the recent Soames book Beyond Rigidity for examples) so right now I am partly engaged in trying to set things straight. One part of that project involves the idea that attitude reports are not supposed to correspond to what is going on inside the agent's head but rather are created by a Speaker S, for the benefit of a hearer H, to help H form some theory about the agent being reported on. Crucial to this account is the idea that the lexicon is dynamic and that speakers engaged in conversation will negotiate the coinage of terms "on the fly" in constructing attitude reports. A version of this account can be found in my paper "Interpreted Logical Forms, Belief Attribution, and the Dynamic Lexicon,"
Also under this heading, I should include work with Richard Larson and Marcel den Dikken on Intensional Transitive Verbs like 'wants', 'seeks', 'looks for' etc. The idea is that Quine's idea of positing a hidden clause ('John is endeavoring to find a unicorn') actually makes sense as a thesis about the syntax and semantics of these environments. We have been banging away at this for some time now, but the only thing we have on paper is our 1996 draft of "Intensional Transitive Verbs and Abstract Clausal Complementation". As that paper shows, the syntactic story is intricate, particularly when cross-linguistic data is folded in. The thought is that if this works out, then intensional transitives can be assimilated to propositional attitudes and those can in turn be analyzed with an ILF analysis.
I suppose that also related to this is an exchange that Stephen Schiffer and I had on the hidden indexical theory and propositional attitudes. He claimed there was linguistic evidence to suppose that there is no argument position for mode of presentation in belief reports. I argued that there was good linguistic evidence for this. Here is the latest go-round of that exchange (my side): "The Adicity of 'Believes' and the Hidden Indexical Theory," Related to this is an issue that has arisen at the borders of epistemology and the philosophy of language about whether there is an argument position for "standards of knowledge" in knowledge reports. Like everyone and his uncle in epistemology I'm working on that question too.
2. The semantics of tense.
This project, which is sketched in my 1999 book, Semantics, Tense and Time, pursues an alternative to the usual way of doing the semantics of tense in natural language – which is essentially to give the semantics in a detensed metalanguage. I am pursuing the possibility of giving the semantics of tense in a tensed metalanguage. The most natural way to do this (i.e. the way that avoids the most philosophical puzzles) is A.N. Prior's strategy of opting for the metaphysical thesis of presentism (there is no future or past). But now if there is no future or past, what are we to do about temporal anaphors and complex tenses etc. etc. You see the problem. I'm not sure the presentist strategy can be sustained in a serious semantics for natural language, but I am to date impressed with how well it holds up. There are lots of puzzles remaining to deal with, however.
3. The semantics of quantified noun phrases.
A lot of my work falls under this category. There is some joint work with Stephen Neale and with Gabe Segal on definite and indefinite descriptions and on to what extent referential uses of descriptions are reflexes of semantics and to what extent they are reflexes of pragmatics. Here's the paper with Segal: " On a Unitary Semantical Analysis for Definite and Indefinite Descriptions."
I've also written a series of papers on the logical form of determiners and languages in which the interesting properties of generalized quantifiers are reflexes of the syntactic or formal properties of the determiners. Some years ago David Law and I defined a language in which they could, and since then I've been exploring some of the properties of such languages. One property of interest is the fact that in the language we defined, upward and downward entailing environments can be defined in terms of scope of negation. The second part of this project is to show that natural language is like our formal language in relevant ways and thus, that upward and downward entailing environments can be specified syntactically in natural languages too.
4. Conceptual Issues in Linguistic Theory
This is long-standing interest of mine and is currently gelling into a book manuscript. Some of the topics of interest are reflected in my papers "Formal Rigor and Linguistic Theory," "Simplicity and Linguistic Theory," and "Referential Semantics for I-languages." Oh yeah, egged on by Jason Stanley, I've also done some stuff on whether there really is such a thing as nonsentential speech: "A Note on Alleged Cases of Non-sentential Speech,"