Stephen Neale

Stephen Neale

Full name	Stephen Neale
Born	January 9, 1958 (1958-01-09) England
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Philosophy of language
Influenced by Noam Chomsky, H. P. Grice

Stephen Roy Albert Neale (born January 9, 1958) is an 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). He is the nephew of the horologist George Daniels.

Academic biography

Neale received his PhD in philosophy from Stanford University (1988), where he worked under the supervision of John Perry and conducted research at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). His dissertation, Descriptions, (see below) was published by MIT Press. His first position was as assistant professor of philosophy and linguistics at Princeton University (1988–1990). Subsequently, he was Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Logic and Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley (1990–1999), and Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London (1996–1997). From 1999 to 2007 Neale was Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has been the recipient of numerous prestigious academic awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2002), the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1998), the Rockefeller Foundation Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship at Bellagio (1995), as well as fellowships, scholarships and honorary professorships from various institutions including the University of California, Stanford University, the University of Miami, Oxford University, the University of London, the University of Oslo, the University of Stockholm, and the University of Iceland.

Work

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, metaphysics, theory of legal interpretation, and literary theory. Philosophical problems about interpretation, context, information content, structure, and representation form the nexus of Neale's work. He has vigorously defended Russell's Theory of Descriptions, descriptive theories of anaphora, Paul Grice's intention-based theory of meaning, and a general approach to meaning and interpretation he calls "linguistic pragmatism". His most influential work to date has been on the underdetermination and indeterminacy associated with uses of so-called incomplete descriptions (a topic that runs through much of his work from his 1990 book Descriptions to his 2005 papers "This, That, and the Other" and "A Century Later"), and on a slingshot argument originally used by Kurt Gödel (examined in his 2001 book Facing Facts).

Neale is an intentionalist and a pragmatist about the interpretation of speech and writing, and to this extent his work is rooted firmly in the Gricean tradition. While probably a Quinean in his attitude towards indeterminacy in the realm of meaning, Neale is a Chomskyan and a Fodorian in his empirical attitude towards syntax and mental representation. Aspects of syntactic theory and formal logic figure heavily in some of his writings, and a realist (rather than a pragmatist) position on truth runs through them, 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 recognize that genuine indeterminacy of the sort associated with what speakers (and writers) imply may also affect what they say (for example, when they use incomplete definite descriptions); (6) inappropriate reliance on formal notions of context deriving from indexical logics, (7) unwarranted faith in transcendent notions of "what is said", "what is implied" and "what is referred to"; and (8) a quite general overestimation of the role traditional compositional semantics can play in explanations of how humans use language to represent the world and communicate.

Influences

Important influences on Neale are J. L. Austin, Noam Chomsky, Donald Davidson, Gareth Evans, Jerry Fodor, Paul Grice, Saul Kripke, John Perry, W. V. Quine, Bertrand Russell, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Philosophers of language who have written their PhD dissertations under Neale's supervision include Herman Cappelen (University of Oslo), Josh Dever (University of Texas, Austin), Eli Dresner (Tel Aviv University), and Angel Pinillos (Arizona State University).

Publications

Books

• Descriptions MIT Press, 1993. (Originally published 1990.) ISBN 0-262-64031-7
• Facing Facts Oxford University Press, 2002. (Originally published 2001.) ISBN 0-19-924715-3

Edited volume

• Mind. Special issue commemorating 100th anniversary of Russell's "On Denoting" Oxford University Press, 2005.

Selected articles

• Term Limits Revisited Philosophical Perspectives 22, 1 (2008), pp. 89–124.
• On Location. In Situating Semantics: Essays in Honour of John Perry. MIT Press 2007, pp. 251–393.
• Pragmatism and Binding. In Semantics versus Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 165–286.
• A Century Later. In Mind 114, 2005, pp. 809–871.
• This, That, and the Other. In Descriptions and Beyond. Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 68–182.
• No Plagiarism Here! Times Literary Supplement. February 9, 2001, pp. 12–13.
• Meaning, Truth, Ontology. In Interpreting Davidson. Stanford: CSLI, (2001) pp. 155–197.
• On Representing". In The Library of Living Philosophers: Donald Davidson. L. E. Hahn (ed.), Illinois: Open Court, (1999) pp. 656–669.
• Coloring and Composition. In Philosophy and Linguistics Boulder: Westview Press, 1999, pp. 35–82.
• Context and Communication. In Readings in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: MIT Press (1997), pp. 415–474.
• Logical Form and LF. In Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments Routledge, 1993, pp. 788–838.
• Term Limits. Philosophical Perspectives 7, 1993, pp. 89–124.
• Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language. Linguistics and Philosophy 15, 5, 1992, pp. 509–59.
• Descriptive Pronouns and Donkey Anaphora. Journal of Philosophy 87, 3, 1990, pp. 113–150.
• Meaning, Grammar, and Indeterminacy. Dialectica 41, 4, 1987, pp. 301–19.

On Neale's work

• Facts, Slingshots and Anti-Representationalism: On Stephen Neale’s Facing Facts. Edited by Gerhard Preyer and Georg Peter, Protosociology, Vol. 23.

External links

• Neale's home page
• Neale's faculty web page at the CUNY Graduate Center
• Protosociology volume on Neale's Work
• Review of 'Facing Facts, by John MacFarlane