Josh Dever
Books
The Inessential Indexical (with Herman Cappelen)
Context and Communication (with Herman Cappelen)
Puzzles of Reference (with Herman Cappelen)
Bad Language (with Herman Cappelen)
Making AI Intelligible (with Herman Cappelen)
Papers
On the Uselessness of the Distinction Between Ideal and Non=Ideal Theory (At Least in the Philosophy of Language) (with Herman Cappelen) (2021, in The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language)
Acting Without Me: Corporate Agency and the First-Person Perspective (with Herman Cappelen) (2021, in The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Reference)
This Paper Might Change Your Mind (with Henry Schiller) (2020 , Nous forthcoming)
Antiobjects (2018, Philosophical Issues 28.1, 89-106)
Reviving the Parameter Revolution in Semantics (with Bryan Pickel and Brian Rabern) (2018, in The Science of Meaning: Essays on the Metatheory of Natural Language Semantics)
Review of José Bermúdez, Understanding 'I': Language and Thought (with Herman Cappelen) (2017, )
Empathy and Transformative Experience Without the First-Person Point of View (with Herman Cappelen) (2017, Inquiry 60.3, 315-336)
What is Philosophical Methodology? (2016, In the Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology)
Eternalism, Temporalism, Neutralism (2015, Inquiry 54.6, 608-618) (final prepublication draft)
The Revenge of the Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction (2013, Philosophical Perspectives 27, 104-144)
Formal Semantics (2012, in the Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Language, 47-83)
Compositionality (2012, in The Routledge Handbook to the Philosophy of Language, 91-102)
History of Connectives (with Dan Bonevac) (2012, in Handbook of the History of Logic Volume XI, 175-234)
Epistemic Modals (2011, in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemology)
The Counterexample Fallacy (with Dan Bonevac and David Sosa) (2011, Mind 120:1143-1158)
The Disunity of Truth (2009, in Compositionality, Context, and Semantic Values)
Supervaluations Debugged (2009, Mind 118:901-933) [Pre-publication version]
The Two-Envelope Paradox and Using Variables Within the Expectation Formula (with Eric Schwitzgebel) (2008, Sorites 20:136-141)
Low-Grade Two-Dimensionalism (2007, Philosophical Books 48:1-16)
Compositionality (2006, in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Language, 633-666). Also, the extended mix.
The Conditional Fallacy (with Dan Bonevac and David Sosa) (2006, The Philosophical Review 115:273-316)
Semantic Value (2005, in Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics)
Binding into Character (2004, in New Essays in the Philosophy of Language and Mind)
Review of Zoltan Gendler Szabo, Problems of Compositionality (2003, The Philosophical Review 112:254-258)
Modal Fictionalism and Compositionality (2003, Philosophical Studies 114:223-251)
Complex Demonstratives (2001, Linguistics and Philosophy 24:271-330)
Believing in Words (with Herman Cappelen) (2001, Synthese 127:279-301)
A Clash of Orthodoxies: An Exchange (2000, First Things 104:45-49)
Compositionality as Methodology (1999, Linguistics and Philosophy 22:311-326)
Worlds Apart: On the Possibility of an Actual Infinity (1998, Taiwanese Journal for the Philosophy and History of Science 10:95-116)
Slingshots and Boomerangs (with Stephen Neale) (1997, Mind 106:143-168)
JOSH DEVER is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and a Professorial Fellow at the Arche Philosophical Research Center at the University of St Andrews. He received his undergraduate training at Princeton University (AB Philosophy, 1991) and his graduate training at the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D. Philosophy, 1998), where he wrote his dissertation Variables under the direction of Stephen Neale and Charles Chihara.
Professor Dever works primarily in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic, with interests in the application of these fields to problems throughout core areas of philosophy. His publications include work on the principle of compositionality in formal semantics and its philosophical consequences ("Compositionality", a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Language", "Compositionality as Methodology", Linguistics and Philosophy; "Modal Fictionalism and Compositionality", Philosophical Studies) and work on the consequences of direct reference theories ("Complex Demonstratives", Linguistics and Philosophy; "Believing in Words", Synthese). His recent interests include the semantics, logic, and philosophical applications of conditionals, and foundational issues in the nature of semantic values.
Undercooked Items
(Slides from talks; old drafts I'm not sure what to do with. Buyer beware: ranges from out-of-context-incomprehensible to confused to wrong.)
Some Tentative Diagnostic Remarks on Deep Negation
Time and Paradox: Don't Fear the Reaper
Living the Life Aquatic: Does Presupposition Accommodation Mandate Dynamic Semantics?
Pedagogical Stuff
Daily Logic, Daily Semantics: Want to learn either logic or formal semantics gradually and relatively painlessly? I run email lists that send out a short (200 word) bit of instruction in the two topics every day. Sign up for daily logic or daily semantics.
Logibeasts: A short book providing a Pokemon-style creature-building implementation of propositional logic. Future plans include switching this to a branching Gentzen-style proof system and extending the system to quantified logic.
Formal Methods in Philosophy of Language: In-progress draft of a textbook on formal tools in semantics.
Get Rational With These Four Weird Tricks!: When I get stuck on other projects, I tinker with this continually-in-progress logic textbook, which has the eventual aim of covering pretty much everything of interest to philosophers in logic, broadly conceived.