Robert Stalnaker

Robert Culp Stalnaker (* 1940 ) is an American philosopher.

He holds the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professorship in Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His work deals primarily with the philosophical foundations of semantics and language pragmatics , decision theory and game theory , with philosophical logic , the theory of conditional clauses, epistemology and the philosophy of mind . These areas of work are focused on the problem of intentionality : “what it means to represent the world both in speech and in memory” (German: “what it is to represent the world in both speech and thought.”).

life and career

He received his BA from Wesleyan University , his Ph.D. he received from Princeton University in 1965 . Stuart Hampshire was the doctoral supervisor , although he is said to have been more influenced by Carl Hempel , then a faculty member. Stalnaker briefly taught at Yale University and the University of Illinois before spending many years at Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University until he finally joined MIT in the late 1980s. his students include u. a. Jason Stanley . He has published four monographs and numerous articles in key journals. In 1992 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 2007 he gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University under the title Our Knowledge of the Internal World .

plant

In his complete works so far, Stalnaker offers a naturalistic explanation of intentionality that explains representation using causal and modal terms .

Alongside Saul Kripke , David Lewis , and Alvin Plantinga , Stalnaker is one of the most influential exponents of a philosophical interpretation of the formal semantics of possible worlds . According to his position, the actual world could also have taken other courses, so that possible worlds determine the properties and states that the actual world could have assumed. In this he distinguishes himself from David Lewis' modal realism , according to which possible worlds are in their possibility independent of the actual world and can easily be presented alongside it as concrete objects.

In addition, Stalnaker uses possible worlds to examine the semantics of natural language, specifically counterfactual conditional , presuppositions, and indicative conditional clauses . His view that the necessary common conditions for communication (the common ground ) for statements excludes precisely those cases in which the content of the statement is incorrect, was an important impetus for recent debates on semantics and pragmatics, especially for the so-called dynamic turn .

Publications (selection)

• Inquiry , MIT Press, 1987. ISBN 0-262-69113-2 .
• Context and Content: Essays on Intentionality in Speech and Thought Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-19-823707-3 .
• Robert Stalnaker: Ways a world might be: metaphysical and anti-metaphysical essays . Clarendon, Oxford 2003, ISBN 0-19-925149-5 .
• Our Knowledge of the Internal World , Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 0-19-954599-5 .

Web links

• full list of publications on the MIT website
• Literature by and about Robert Stalnaker in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Self-statement as a caption for a portrait by the photographer Steven Pyke
2. ↑ Page of the Locke Lectures on philosophy.ox.ac.uk ( Memento of the original from July 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ^ Stalnaker Ways a world might be: metaphysical and anti-metaphysical essays. Oxford: Clarendon 2003, ISBN 0-19-925149-5 ; Pp. 27-28