The main focus of this paper is on two issues: which, if any, NPs can be used to refer, and which, if any, NPs can be (truthfully) said to refer all by themselves. It is evident just from this statement that we will be dealing with two distinct reference relations – a pragmatic relation holding among speakers, expressions, and entities out in the world (so to speak); and a semantic relation hol...

Quantitative comparison of human language and natural animal communication requires improved conceptualizations. We argue that an infrastructural approach to development and evolution incorporating an extended interpretation of the distinctions among illocution, perlocution, and meaning (Austin 1962; Oller and Griebel 2008) can help place the issues relevant to quantitative comparison in perspe...

The language of justification logic makes it possible to define what it means for knowledge/belief described by an epistemic modality to be self-referential. Building on an earlier result that S4 and its justification counterpart LP describe knowledge that is self-referential, we show that the same is true for K4, D4, and T with their justification counterparts, whereas for K and D self-referen...