Una Stojnić
Biographic Data
| ID | 1017352 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Una Stojnić |
| GIVEN NAMES | Una |
| FAMILY NAME | Stojnić |
| SIGNATURE | STOJNIĆ U |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2151-2462 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Language
This book is intended as a definitive guide to contemporary philosophy of language but with a twist: although some of the articles focus on technical issues more narrowly construed in the recent tradition of linguistically oriented philosophy of language, the majority focus on foundational questions in traditional philosophy of language. The aim is to reconsider these foundational issues in a new light, while still bearing in mind the formal deve…
Inflammatory Language
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 (e.g., on the basis of race, ethnicity, origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or ideology). This book is in large part about pejoratives, but mainly about this subclass of particularly inflammat…
Change Don’t Come Easy
We often use language creatively, introducing new expressions on the fly. That we can successfully communicate with novel expressions without antecedent semantic knowledge has led many to a dynamic meaning hypothesis: namely, we can actively renegotiate extant semantic conventions to better suit our communicative, practical, and even normative concerns. We argue that this hypothesis is a mistake: meanings are non-negotiable, and so, lexical innov…
Inquiry and Logical Form
Joint inquiry requires agents to exchange public content about some target domain, which in turn requires them to track which content a linguistic form contributes to a conversation. But, often, the inquiry delivers a necessary truth. For example, if we are inquiring whether a particular bird, Tweety, is a woodpecker, and discover that it is, then our inquiry concluding in this fact would conclude in a necessity, and the form “Tweety is a woodpec…
Metasemantics, context, and felicitous underspecification
Being called
Inescapable articulations
Context and Coherence
Natural languages are riddled with context-sensitivity. One and the same string of words can express indefinitely many different meanings on an occasion of use. And yet we understand one another effortlessly, on the fly. What fixes the meaning of context-sensitive expressions, and how are we able to recover this meaning so quickly and without effort? This book offers a novel response: we can do so because we draw on a broad array of subtle lingui…
Formal properties of now revisited
The traditional view is that now is a pure indexical, denoting the utterance time. Yet, despite its initial appeal, the view has faced criticism. A range of data reveal now allows for discourse-bound (i.e., anaphoric) uses, and can occur felicitously with the past tense. The reaction to this has typically been to treat now as akin to a true demonstrative, selecting the prominent time supplied by the non-linguistic context or prior discourse. We a…
Names and Naming
Our focus is in this paper is in answering the question what is required of interlocutors in order for them to pick up a word, and use/apply it successfully. Putting our cards on the table, our answer will be not much
Just Words
We all make mistakes in pronunciation and spelling, but a common view is that there are limits beyond which a mistaken pronunciation or spelling becomes too dramatic to be recognized as of a particular word at all. These considerations have bolstered a family of accounts that invoke speaker intentions and standards for tolerance as determinants of which word, if any, an utterance tokens. I argue this is a mistake. Neither intentions nor standards…
Fodor and demonstratives in LOT
In this paper, we consider a range of puzzles for demonstratives in the language of thought we had raised in our last philosophical conversation we had with Jerry Fodor. We argue against the Kaplan-inspired indexing solution Fodor proposed to us, but offer a Fodor-friendly account of the demonstratives in the language of thought in its stead, building on our account of demonstrative pronouns in English
Context
This book is a development of Stalnaker's dominant research program (going back to Stalnaker 1970), defending the “autonomy of pragmatics” thesis that “it is possible and fruitful to theorize about the structure and function of discourse independently of a specific theory about the mechanisms that languages use to serve those functions” (1). The program is broadly Gricean, explaining the contents of utterances and attitudes independently of how t…
One's Modus Ponens
Recently, there has been a shift away from traditional truth‐conditional accounts of meaning towards non‐truth‐conditional ones, e.g., expressivism, relativism and certain forms of dynamic semantics. Fueling this trend is some puzzling behavior of modal discourse. One particularly surprising manifestation of such behavior is the alleged failure of some of the most entrenched classical rules of inference; viz., modus ponens and modus tollens . The…
Deixis (Even Without Pointing)
Kant's consideration of space and the puzzle of incongruence
In this paper we are dealing with Kant's view on the phenomenon of incongruous counterparts, in particular with the argument from his article 'On the First Ground of the Distinction of Regions in Space', where the phenomenon of incongruous counterparts is used as an argument for the existence of the absolute and objective space, and with the argument from Kant's Inaugural Dissertation in which he uses the phenomenon of incongruous counterparts ag…
Just Words
We all make mistakes in pronunciation and spelling, but a common view is that there are limits beyond which a mistaken pronunciation or spelling becomes too dramatic to be recognized as of a particular word at all. These considerations have bolstered a family of accounts that invoke speaker intentions and standards for tolerance as determinants of which word, if any, an utterance tokens. I argue this is a mistake. Neither intentions nor standards…
One's Modus Ponens
Recently, there has been a shift away from traditional truth‐conditional accounts of meaning towards non‐truth‐conditional ones, e.g., expressivism, relativism and certain forms of dynamic semantics. Fueling this trend is some puzzling behavior of modal discourse. One particularly surprising manifestation of such behavior is the alleged failure of some of the most entrenched classical rules of inference; viz., modus ponens and modus tollens . The…
Deixis (Even Without Pointing)
Kant's consideration of space and the puzzle of incongruence
In this paper we are dealing with Kant's view on the phenomenon of incongruous counterparts, in particular with the argument from his article 'On the First Ground of the Distinction of Regions in Space', where the phenomenon of incongruous counterparts is used as an argument for the existence of the absolute and objective space, and with the argument from Kant's Inaugural Dissertation in which he uses the phenomenon of incongruous counterparts ag…
Deixis (Even Without Pointing)
One's Modus Ponens
Recently, there has been a shift away from traditional truth‐conditional accounts of meaning towards non‐truth‐conditional ones, e.g., expressivism, relativism and certain forms of dynamic semantics. Fueling this trend is some puzzling behavior of modal discourse. One particularly surprising manifestation of such behavior is the alleged failure of some of the most entrenched classical rules of inference; viz., modus ponens and modus tollens . The…
Context
This book is a development of Stalnaker's dominant research program (going back to Stalnaker 1970), defending the “autonomy of pragmatics” thesis that “it is possible and fruitful to theorize about the structure and function of discourse independently of a specific theory about the mechanisms that languages use to serve those functions” (1). The program is broadly Gricean, explaining the contents of utterances and attitudes independently of how t…
Fodor and demonstratives in LOT
In this paper, we consider a range of puzzles for demonstratives in the language of thought we had raised in our last philosophical conversation we had with Jerry Fodor. We argue against the Kaplan-inspired indexing solution Fodor proposed to us, but offer a Fodor-friendly account of the demonstratives in the language of thought in its stead, building on our account of demonstrative pronouns in English
Context and Coherence
Natural languages are riddled with context-sensitivity. One and the same string of words can express indefinitely many different meanings on an occasion of use. And yet we understand one another effortlessly, on the fly. What fixes the meaning of context-sensitive expressions, and how are we able to recover this meaning so quickly and without effort? This book offers a novel response: we can do so because we draw on a broad array of subtle lingui…
Formal properties of now revisited
The traditional view is that now is a pure indexical, denoting the utterance time. Yet, despite its initial appeal, the view has faced criticism. A range of data reveal now allows for discourse-bound (i.e., anaphoric) uses, and can occur felicitously with the past tense. The reaction to this has typically been to treat now as akin to a true demonstrative, selecting the prominent time supplied by the non-linguistic context or prior discourse. We a…
Names and Naming
Our focus is in this paper is in answering the question what is required of interlocutors in order for them to pick up a word, and use/apply it successfully. Putting our cards on the table, our answer will be not much
Just Words
We all make mistakes in pronunciation and spelling, but a common view is that there are limits beyond which a mistaken pronunciation or spelling becomes too dramatic to be recognized as of a particular word at all. These considerations have bolstered a family of accounts that invoke speaker intentions and standards for tolerance as determinants of which word, if any, an utterance tokens. I argue this is a mistake. Neither intentions nor standards…
Inescapable articulations
Being called
Metasemantics, context, and felicitous underspecification
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Language
This book is intended as a definitive guide to contemporary philosophy of language but with a twist: although some of the articles focus on technical issues more narrowly construed in the recent tradition of linguistically oriented philosophy of language, the majority focus on foundational questions in traditional philosophy of language. The aim is to reconsider these foundational issues in a new light, while still bearing in mind the formal deve…
Inflammatory Language
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 (e.g., on the basis of race, ethnicity, origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or ideology). This book is in large part about pejoratives, but mainly about this subclass of particularly inflammat…
Change Don’t Come Easy
We often use language creatively, introducing new expressions on the fly. That we can successfully communicate with novel expressions without antecedent semantic knowledge has led many to a dynamic meaning hypothesis: namely, we can actively renegotiate extant semantic conventions to better suit our communicative, practical, and even normative concerns. We argue that this hypothesis is a mistake: meanings are non-negotiable, and so, lexical innov…
Inquiry and Logical Form
Joint inquiry requires agents to exchange public content about some target domain, which in turn requires them to track which content a linguistic form contributes to a conversation. But, often, the inquiry delivers a necessary truth. For example, if we are inquiring whether a particular bird, Tweety, is a woodpecker, and discover that it is, then our inquiry concluding in this fact would conclude in a necessity, and the form “Tweety is a woodpec…
Philosophy (13 works) · Linguistics (12 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (6 works) · Metaphysics (5 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (5 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (4 works) · Philosophy of language (4 works) · Classical Philosophy and Thought (3 works)