The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Language

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Language introduces readers to the main issues and theories in the philosophy of language as currently practised. Written by leading researchers and covering the central topics in the contemporary philosophical study of language, the twenty-seven chapters provide an overview of the state of the art, and a presentation of cutting-edge developments. Topics covered include: the nature of language; the nature and role of semantic and attitudinal content; the dynamics of communication and speech acts; meta-semantics and reference grounding; tense and modality; discourse dynamics and information structure; and the expressive, evaluative, subjective, and social aspects of language. Although some of the articles focus directly on technical issues following the recent approach of linguistically oriented philosophy of language, the majority of the contributions are primarily focused on foundational questions drawn from traditional philosophy of language. The volume offers a reconsideration of these foundational issues in a new light, while still bearing in mind the formal developments in recent literature, as well as a presentation of new foundational issues that have emerged as a result of these developments.

1 - Do Languages Really Exist?
2 - Possible Human Languages
3 - The Logicality of Language, Meaning-Driven Unacceptability, and Modulated Logic forms
4 - Report and Content
5 - A Plea for Innocence
6 - Contemporary Foundational Accounts of Propositions
7 - Multiple Intensions Semantics
8 - States of Conversation
9 - The Distinction Between Content and Force
10 - Do Not Diagonalize
11 - Reference without Deference
12 - One Word, Many Concepts: Endorsing Polysemous Meanings
13 - The Problem of Polysemy
14 - Truth, Normativity, and Interpretational Theories of Meaning
15 - Semantic Non-Reductionism
16 - Foundations of Semantics
17 - Quantifier Domain Restriction and the Problem of Incomplete Quantifiers
18 - Future Displacement and Modality
19 - The Semantics and Logic of Counterfactuals
20 - Deontic Modal Expressions
21 - Indefinites: Scope and Context
22 - Information Structure for Philosophers
23 - Evaluativity
24 - How Vocatives Illuminate Slurs
25 - The Metatheoretic Foundation for Racial Epithets
26 - Subjectivity
27 - Linguistic Variation, Agency, and Style

Ernie Lepore is Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has authored numerous books and papers in the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind, including recently Imagination and Convention (with Matthew Stone, OUP, 2015), and Liberating Content (OUP, 2016) with Herman Cappelen. He is the co-editor (with David Sosa) of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language. Una Stojnic is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Princeton University. Prior to joining Princeton, she was Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, a Bersoff assistant professor and faculty fellow in Philosophy at NYU, and a research fellow in Philosophy at ANU. She earned her PhD in Philosophy and a Certificate in Cognitive Science from Rutgers University in 2016.