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Best Anglophone philosophers of language since 1945

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–MORE DISCUSSION WELCOME

With over 300 votes on our latest poll, here's the top 20:

1. Saul Kripke  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
2. W.V.O. Quine  loses to Saul Kripke by 141–74
3. H. Paul Grice  loses to Saul Kripke by 161–51, loses to W.V.O. Quine by 114–88
4. J.L. Austin  loses to Saul Kripke by 159–62, loses to H. Paul Grice by 104–91
5. Donald Davidson  loses to Saul Kripke by 168–50, loses to J.L. Austin by 104–101
6. David K. Lewis  loses to Saul Kripke by 160–42, loses to Donald Davidson by 104–90
7. Noam Chomsky  loses to Saul Kripke by 154–60, loses to David K. Lewis by 96–92
8. Hilary Putnam  loses to Saul Kripke by 174–41, loses to Noam Chomsky by 100–92
9. Rudolf Carnap  loses to Saul Kripke by 162–47, loses to Hilary Putnam by 100–86
10. David Kaplan  loses to Saul Kripke by 176–23, loses to Rudolf Carnap by 88–83
11. Michael Dummett  loses to Saul Kripke by 175–41, loses to David Kaplan by 89–82
12. P.F. (Peter) Strawson  loses to Saul Kripke by 179–37, loses to Michael Dummett by 96–77
13. Alfred Tarski  loses to Saul Kripke by 180–21, loses to P.F. (Peter) Strawson by 90–71
14. Tied:
Gareth Evans  loses to Saul Kripke by 189–23, loses to Alfred Tarski by 80–75
Robert Stalnaker  loses to Saul Kripke by 183–16, loses to Alfred Tarski by 80–68
16. John Searle  loses to Saul Kripke by 193–17, loses to Gareth Evans by 87–76
17. Tyler Burge  loses to Saul Kripke by 192–12, loses to John Searle by 81–65
18. Keith Donnellan  loses to Saul Kripke by 192–10, loses to Tyler Burge by 68–57
19. Peter Geach  loses to Saul Kripke by 192–10, loses to Keith Donnellan by 62–57
20. Robert Brandom  loses to Saul Kripke by 178–32, loses to Peter Geach by 76–62

Just outside the top 20 were Ruth Marcus, John Perry, and Wilfrid Sellars.

The "top ten" living philosophers of language were Kripke, Chomsky, Putnam, Kaplan, Stalnaker, Searle, Burge, Brandom, John Perry, and Hans Kamp.

This poll had a somewhat larger number of errors of omission, including Dennis Stampe, Frank Veltman, Jeroen Groenendijk Martin Stokhof, Richard Montague, Max Cresswell, Irene Heim, Terence Parsons, Richard Heck, Jeff King, Robert Harnish, and Howard Wettstein.  I imagine one or two of these folks might have been competitive for the "top 20," but I welcome reader thoughts.  Wittgenstein was not an error of omission; he was left out on purpose given that he did not write in English; we know from earlier polls that he, in any case, tends to dominate all other philosophers of the past two hundred years.

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16 responses to “Best Anglophone philosophers of language since 1945”

  1. Anon UW-System Philosopher

    Mark Wilson! Predicate Meets Property!! Wandering Significance!!!

    Reply
  2. anon

    Angelika Kratzer was also missing.

    Reply
  3. Reinhold

    Lewis is overrated here, given his minimal contributions to philosophy of language. (What are people thinking of? "General Semantics"? Is that really significant?) And Tarski probably underrated, given his profound influence on semantics. Overall, though, not too bad.

    Reply
  4. Mark Silcox

    Dummett should be #3 at the very lowest. One suspects both he and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Brandom are being punished for their, let's say "uneconomical" writing styles.

    Reply
  5. lowly grad student

    'Scorekeeping in a language game' is pretty important, as is 'languages and language' and his work on counterfactuals. I have a hard time seeing how anyone could seriously claim that Lewis's contributions to the philosophy of language are minimal.

    Reply
  6. Graduate Student

    In response to Reinhold: Lewis certainly deserves his place on the list. General Semantics is one the the foundational documents in model theoretic semantics (along with Montague, Partee, Higginbotham, etc.), both providing a much clearer presentation than Montague of how formal semantics can be done and arguing against the prior, conceptualist approaches of e.g. Fodor and Katz. Along with this, Convention, and his fellow-up Languages and Language, presents what is still probably the best (and most widely adopted) view within meta-semantics. Scorekeeping in a Language game is, along with Stalnaker's work, central to contemporary pragmatics. His contributions to semantic analyses of various constructions (conditionals, quantificational adverbs, etc.) are widely accepted. These are just a few of Lewis' lasting contributions to philosophy of language.

    Reply
  7. Oliver

    Robert May was also omitted.

    Reply
  8. anon

    Paul Pietroski was also missing from the list of candidates (assuming he's over 50, which his CV would suggest).

    Reply
  9. Reinhold

    Re: Lewis, don't get me wrong, I like "General Semantics" and "Counterfactuals," at least, but I didn't get the impression he was very influential in philosophy of language. Maybe more so in linguistics. But the list doesn't seem to make a sharp distinction. However: Lewis over Tarski, Chomsky, and even Kaplan? I don't know….

    Reply
  10. Benj Hellie

    1. Peter Ludlow was also missing from the list of candidates.

    2. Expanding on Graduate Student's 3:51 on behalf of Lewis: (a) 'Probabilities of conditionals and conditional probabilities' presents an overarching demand on theories of the conditional at which several generations of literature have now taken a crack; (b) 'Index, context, and content' is the single best paper on 'foundations of semantics', much surpassing 'Demonstratives' in scope and clarity — its lessons are only now coming into focus, with Stalnaker's 2014 book centered around its framework; (c) A footnote in 'Adverbs of quantification' is the source of Kratzer's theory of the conditional, while the body of the paper both subserves a widely used tool among linguists in probing for argument structure and is the source of Heim's dynamism about singular terms; (d) 'A problem about permission' is the source of the Portner pragmatics of commands, around which the practical language literature now centers, and (to my knowledge) the first presentation of a formal pragmatics for a fragment; (e) works like 'Radical interpretation' provide a rationale that now seems obvious (perhaps one earlier articulated by Stalnaker) for unifying formal theories of linguistic meaning with formal theories of psychology; (f) 'Attitudes de dicto and de se' introduces the tools for 'relativist' approaches; I could go on.

    BL COMMENT: Ludlow was included in the poll, I forget where he finished.

    Reply
  11. Peter Kail

    Quine not number one? I demand my money back.

    Reply
  12. Daniel Harris

    I estimate that in papers and talks in the philosophy of language that I've seen in the last few years, Lewis's specific ideas are either presupposed or substantively engaged with more than anyone else on the list. There's just so much work being done on conditionals, convention and metasemantics, dynamic semantics/pragmatics, the content–semantic value distinction, modals and imperatives, the de se, and so on, that Lewis is inescapable.

    I think that Montague should be high on the list—maybe in the top ten.

    Reply
  13. A.c.S

    I feel that Montague would've made the top 20 and Heim would've had an outside shot. It appears, however, that there is a sort of bias here owing to the fact that many of the ppl on the list that have contributed to formal semantics (which I take to have had considerable impact on their ultimate placement on the list) are also philosophers in a squarely disciplinary sense and have done important work within other sub-disciplines of philosophy. Those whose work falls more roundly within semantics seem to have received short(er) shrift.

    In any case, some of the specific rankings are surprising. For instance, how the heck is Dummett lower than, say, Austin (or Kaplan, or Putnam or Carnap)? At least one person has mentioned, with particular enthusiasm (no less than top three!), that MD's placement is a head-scratcher.

    Also, how is Kripke such a clear winner?– I think that it must owe to the popularity of NN as an approachable classic within the area. To be sure, other works like "Puzzle…" "Speaker Reference…" as well as "Rules and Private Language" (along with, of course, early technical work on modal logic and Truth) are well regarded, but (to me) they don't suffice to explain his relative ranking.

    Anyways, debating these issues is a bit fun, but ultimately pointless as there has been so much first rate work by ppl who have cracked the top 20 and by ppl who haven't. I would've liked and expected to see one woman crack this esteemed list, but this is probably partly due to the alleged bias (above) against linguists working in semantics. Glad, at least, to know that Marcus wasn't too far off.

    Reply
  14. Reinhold

    I'm genuinely surprised Lewis is so crucial in phil. of language. I had thought of it this way: I think several of his papers and ideas in philosophy of science have been influential and interesting––as in "How to Define Theoretical Terms," "Immodest Inductive Methods," and scattered remarks on laws of nature as best systems axioms––but if I saw him at number 6 on a list of best philosophers of science, I'd be similarly surprised. I'll take everyone's word for it, but I'm still surprised that the logician who pioneered truth-conditional semantics and the linguist who pioneered transformational-generative grammars (neither independently or single-handedly, granted) rank lower than someone who hist best-known contributions in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic.
    Remember I never said he shouldn't be on the list, just that number 6 struck me as overrated.

    Reply
  15. curious

    Reinhold,
    I share your view on Lewis. Incidentally, are you in Europe? I ask this because I often find that Europeans and Americans have slightly different influences and thus tend to rank philosophers differently. This is certainly the case in philosophy of science, for example.

    Reply
  16. Anon

    Reinhold's philosophy of science analogy is simply bizarre: we're talking about someone who made very many pioneering and agenda setting contributions to the philosophy of language — Lewis wrote two BOOKS on the philosophy of language for heaven's sake (Convention, Counterfactuals) — and that's before we even get to his works on indicatives, context sensitivity and indexicality, pragmatics, the semantics of adverbial quantification, metasemantics, etc.

    The only surprise here is your surprise that Lewis's contribution to the philosophy of language is overrated….

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