Ernie Lepore

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 a critical exposition of the philosophical system of Donald Davidson (1917-2003)"--Provided by publisher.

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.

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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 Stojnic 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.

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.

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.

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.