論文

I dug up the piles of papers to look for "on denoting" and found a few pieces looking somewhat interesting.

Higginbotham, 2002, "On linguistics in philosophy, and philosophy in linguistics" in Linguistics and Philosophy 25.

This is kinda fizzling out. He does not really give a good reason to believe that the development of linguistics helps us solve metaphysical problems. I share his view, but there is no argumentation for it. Nor this paper gives a collection of real examples of such interactions. Well, maybe he presupposes the readers of the journal know the subject pretty well.

Ruth Manor, 2001 "On the overlap of pragmatics and semantics" in Synthese 128.

I have no idea why I printed this out. Did I randomly look up 2001 Synthese? Why 2001? Anyway, this is also a quite methodological piece. The funny thing is the way in which Bar-Hillel depicted the relationship between semantics and pragmatics; "Semanticists can continue to use pragmatics as its garbage can". Well put. At any rate what the author says is very important, if not interesting. As I looked it over, I was thinking of the possibility of a subject, evolutionary semantics, which studies how semantics (that is about somewhat abstract rules and principles) have developed from pragmatics. Cuz probably people somehow started using language before talking about its meanings. Mere speculation, though.