“Truth and Reference in Fiction” (.pdf file)   (penultimate draft; final version forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language)

   
 “The Propositions We Assert” (.pdf file)   (penultimate draft,; final version forthcoming in Acta Analytica)

According to Scott Soames, proper names have no descriptive meaning. Nonetheless, Soames maintains that proper names are typically used to make descriptive assertions. In this paper, I challenge Soames’ division between meaning and what is asserted, first by arguing that competent speakers always make descriptive assertions with name-containing sentences, and then by defending an account of proper name meaning that accommodates this fact.


"Public Proper Names, Idiolectal Identifying Descriptions" (.pdf file)   (penultimate draft; final version in Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (2009))

Direct reference theorists tell us that proper names have no semantic value other than their bearers, and that the connection between name and bearer is unmediated by descriptions or descriptive information. And yet, these theorists also acknowledge that we produce our name-containing utterances with descriptions on our minds. After arguing that direct reference proponents have failed to give descriptions their due, I show that appeal to speaker-associated descriptions is required if the direct reference portrayal of speakers wielding and referring with names is to succeed.


"Can Frege Pose Frege’s Puzzle?" (.pdf file)  (penultimate draft; final version in The Philosophy of David Kaplan, Oxford University Press (2009))

Gottlob Frege maintained that two name-containing identity sentences, represented schematically as a=a and a=b,can both be true in virtue of the same object’s self-identity but nonetheless, puzzlingly, differ in their epistemic profiles. According to Frege, sentences of the form a=a are knowable a priori and are uninformative; those of the form a=b are often informative, and cannot always be known to be true a priori.  Frege eventually resolved his puzzlement by locating the source of the purported epistemic difference between the identity sentences in a difference in the Sinne, or senses, expressed by the names that the sentences contain. 

Thus, Frege portrayed himself as describing a puzzle that can be posed prior to and independently of any particular theoretical position regarding names, and then resolving that puzzle with his theory of Sinn and Bedeutung. In this paper, I suggest that Frege’s presentation is problematic. If attempt is made to characterize the epistemic status of true identity sentences without appeal to Frege’s theoretical commitments, then what initially seemed puzzling largely dissolves. It turns out that, in order to generate puzzlement, Frege must invoke the theoretical account that he uses the puzzle to establish the purported necessity of.