Background
Schiffer, Stephen was born on February 20, 1940 in Atlantic City.
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Stephen Schiffer
Edit ProfilePhilosopher of language: philosopher of mind
Education
BA, University of Pennsylvania. 1962; DPhil. Oxford, 1970. /nffs: H. PGrice.
Career
He was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962 and a Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy from Oxford University in 1970. He has specialized in the philosophy of language, and is the author of three significant works concerning semantic meaning: Meaning (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1972), Remnants of Meaning (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1987), and The Things We Mean (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2003). He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.
Views
Stephen Schiffer is a central figure in the current debates on issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He is a student of H. P. Grice, and his early work, starting with his 1972 monograph on meaning, was an elaboration of Gricean or ‘intention-based’ semantics. The goal of this semantics was to reduce speaker-meaning to intention, and then reduce expression-meaning to the reduced speakermeaning. Having gradually lost confidence in the viability of this programme, Schiffer argued in Remnants of Meaning (1987) that intention-based semantics, as well as any systematic theory of meaning, is impossible. He argued that there are no suitable objects of thought for beliefs and other intentional attitudes, and thus that there can be no relational theory of thought. On his view, without such a relational theory, a compositional semantics for natural languages is impossible. His critique extends to representational theories of mind.
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Born
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Nationality
American