For some reason I’ve ended up reading a bit of history of linguistics the last few months. I’ve felt at a bit of a disadvantage not knowing the context to various arguments that have sprung up during this Chomskyan era, and it’s nice to see how they fit together. It’s also instructive to get a different perspective on philosophy. Linguistics, at least at the syntax and semantics end, is just about the closest discipline in the modern university to philosophy (maybe cog sci as it is practiced in some places is closer, but not by much). But still there’s a very different take on things.

Here’s a passage from a fairly brief survey of recent developments in semantics by Barbara Abbott.

In August of 1969 the philosophers Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman organized a small colloquium of logicians and linguists in an effort to promote more fruitful interactions, but Quine (one of the participants) remarked in his condensed autobiography that ‘[t]he colloquium was a fiasco at bridge building’ (Quine 1986, 38), and suggested that the personalities involved were the cause. However the volume that resulted from this small conference, Davidson & Harman 1972, contained many classic articles (including contributions from both Partee and Montague) which were widely read by linguists as well as philosophers, and ultimately the work of Montague and Partee along with linguistically inclined philosophers like David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker had and continue to have a tremendous impact on the field.

I bet there’s not many philosophers who would talk about the important semantics papers in that volume and not mention a paper on names that first appeared there.

I’m not, I should stress, having a swipe at Abbott here. In the history she’s covering, “Naming and Necessity” simply doesn’t play that huge a role.

If you want a really unscientific but easy to use method for measuring the influence of various philosophers on modern semantics, you can use Google to search for how many times and how widely they are cited in papers in the wonderful Semantics Archive. This method won’t yield results for some philosophers, because Google can’t tell Bach from Bach, or Austin from Austin, or King from the King, although I think it can in practice tell Stanley from Stanley. Anyway, here are the results for a few randomly selected philosophers of language: Montague, Lewis, Higginbotham, Grice, Stalnaker, Davidson, Strawson, Kripke, Stanley, Williamson, Searle, Putnam, Burge, Dummett, Weatherson.

(Obligatory political postscript. You might notice the list I’ve got is a little lacking in gender diversity. I could have added some extra names to make the list a little more diverse, but the most obvious candidates would be relatively junior faculty – Graff and Jeshion for example. Senior women in philosophy of language, particularly in semantics in philosophy departments, are not exactly flooding the marketplace. The contrast with what we see in linguistics is striking. Just in New England a list of the most important semanticists would have Partee, Heim, Kratzer, Jacobson and Iatridou at or near the top. I’m just making observations here, not making prescriptions, and there are sample size effects to consider, but I really don’t think the contrast reflects at all well on philosophy.)

(UPDATE: Two observations about the political point at the end. I was worried that the asymmetry I alluded to was more due to my faulty memory or observations than to reality. So I checked an independent source. In Peter Ludlow’s philosophy of language reader, the only papers by women either included in the text or listed as additional reading were written by theorists who are primarily employed in linguistics departments. (Though it’s worth pointing out that two of those theorists, Barbara Partee and Sally McConnell-Ginet, are also affiliated to the philosophy departments at their respective institutions.) Second, as I sort of said already, the asymmetry is nowhere near as striking when one looks beyond the ranks of full professor. Or so it seems to me at least.)