When addressing philosophical problems, philosophers
often attempt a descriptive, or hermeneutic, analyses.
That is, philosophers address the problem by making
claims about "how we ordinarily speak" or "how we
ordinarily think" about an issue. My view is that the
best way to discover "how we ordinarily speak" about
a topic F is by a linguistic investigation into our
ordinary discourse concerning F. I believe this methodology
also to be apt in the investigation into the structure
of our thought, since I suspect that the way we talk
reflects the way we think.
Some of my work so far has consisted in applications
of this methodology ("Knowing How", with Timothy Williamson,
"Persons and their Properties", "On the Case for Contextualism").
Other work I have done is in defense of this methodology. For example,
one way to circumvent it is by employing the fictionalist strategy of
claiming that a semantics for a discourse does not give us insight
into the ontological commitments of that discourse; if this is
correct, accounting for the structure of our discourse about Fs
provides no constraint at all upon claims about the actual ontological
commitments of users of that discourse. In "Hermeneutic Fictionalism",
I begin the task of replying to the fictionalist challenge.
Another perhaps more oblique challenge to the methodology
I favor comes from those who think that, given almost any topic F, much of
our discourse about Fs is affected by "top-down" pragmatic processes.
It is unclear to me that such processes would be sufficiently constrained
so as to put any kind of restriction on theorizing about the discourse
(see my "Making it Articulated"). Furthermore, and more
tendentiously, insofar as the top-down" pragmatic processes are simply
the beliefs and intentions of the conversational participants, I am
skeptical of an independent route to the beliefs of the
agents except through an investigation of language.
In a different vein, my work that is directed towards traditional
philosophical questions about linguistic communication involves
questions about the role of context in linguistic interpretation.
Here, my purpose is to defend the view that linguistic communication
involves a rigorous conventionalized system (one appropriate for
reflecting our commitments), pace Austin, the later Wittgenstein, and
their many philosphical heirs. In "Context and Logical Form", I
argue that all effects of extra-linguistic context on the
intuitive content of assertions are mediated by linguistic form.
In "Nominal Restriction", exploiting the theory of quantifier
domain restriction developed in "On Quantifier Domain
Restriction" with Zoltan Gendler Szabo, I argue that many apparently
distinct effects of context on linguistic interpretation are
due to the same source. This project is continued in several
other papers.