Semantics etc.

For my introductory remark at the Workshop on the 30th Anniversary of Stalnaker’s “Assertion”, I wanted to trace the impact of the paper by following citations to it. This turned out to be surprisingly difficult:

Other indexing services gave the same result:

One might ask why the indexing services missed such a seminal paper. Granted it appeared not in one of the foremost journals of the field, but as a chapter in a book series. On the other hand, the series (Syntax & Semantics from the Academic Press) is/was widely read and was the venue for quite a few important papers (including David Kaplan’s “Dthat” in the very same 1978 volume).

But whatever the answer, this observation shows clearly that when one wants to measure impact of a work (or the standing of a scholar in the field), one should not rely exclusively on these indexing services. We all know that “Assertion” was one of the most important papers in the history of the field (for example, it is on Frank Veltman’s list of classics in semantics & pragmatics), but ISI’s Web of Science is clueless.

One service that actually delivered something useful was Google Scholar:

At least for our small field, I think the overall lesson is that to find out about the status of a paper or and author, one shouldn’t ask the indexing services, but just ask the experts.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the publication of Bob Stalnaker’s “Assertion”, MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy will be hosting a conference on December 12-13, 2008. The aim is to showcase some recent work that builds on the picture of context and communication originally developed in “Assertion”, and to have linguists and philosophers discuss recent developments and implementations of that framework.

All are welcome.