Stephen Neale
| Stephen Neale | |
|---|---|
Stephen Neale, 11 March 2007
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| Born |
9 January 1958 England |
| Alma mater |
University College London Stanford University |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
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Main interests
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Philosophy of language |
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Influences
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Stephen Roy Albert Neale (born 9 January 1958) is a British Analytic philosopher and specialist in the philosophy of language who has written extensively about meaning, information, interpretation, and communication, and more generally about issues at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. Neale is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY) and has previously held positions at Princeton University, University of California, Berkeley, and Rutgers University. He is one of the world's leading authorities on Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions, on the philosophies of Paul Grice and Donald Davidson, and on the intricacies of formal arguments in logic known as slingshots. His best known writings are the books Descriptions (1990) and Facing Facts (2001), and the articles "Meaning, Grammar, and Indeterminacy" (1987), "Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language" (1992), "Term limits" (1993), "No Plagiarism Here!" (2001).
Neale completed his B. Phil in Linguistics at University College London working with linguist Deirdre Wilson. He completed his PhD in Philosophy at Stanford University with philosopher John Perry as his dissertation advisor.
Neale's writings are primarily in the philosophy of language, construed broadly enough to intersect with generative linguistics, the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, philosophical logic, and formal logic. A realist (rather than a pragmatist) position on truth runs through his work, although he appears to be agnostic about the explanatory value of appeals to individual facts in philosophical talk about truth. Traditional accounts of interpretation are marred, Neale claims, by (1) a failure to engage correctly with the epistemic asymmetry of the situations in which producers and consumers of language find themselves; (2) a consequent failure to distinguish adequately the metaphysical question of what determines what a speaker (or writer) means on a given occasion from the epistemological question of how that particular meaning is identified; (3) a failure to appreciate the severity of constraints on the formation of linguistic intentions; (4) failures to appreciate pervasive forms of underdeterminaton (such as those examined by pragmatists and relevance theorists); (5) failures to recognise that genuine indeterminacy of the sort associated with what speakers (and writers) imply incomplete descriptions, and on a slingshot argument originally used by Kurt Gödel.
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