Scott Soames

The Freedom Center is excited to welcome Scott Soames as a visiting fellow during fall 2024. Visit date: September 22 – October 31, 2024 .

Scott Soames is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He specializes in the philosophy of language, the history of analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of law. He has published extensively on truth, reference, meaning, the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, and the nature of syntactic and semantic theories of natural languages. Specific topics of his scholarly interest include names, natural kind terms, descriptions, pronominal anaphora, propositions and propositional attitudes, vagueness, presupposition, partially defined predicates, the so-called rule following paradox, the indeterminacy of translation, and the use of the science and philosophy of language to illuminate the content of legal texts.