Stephen Roy Albert Neale (born January 9, 1958) is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Neale is a specialist in the philosophy of language and has written extensively about meaning, information, and interpretation, and more generally about issues at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. He has also written about the history of analytic philosophy and is one of the world’s leading authorities on Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Descriptions, on the philosophies of Paul Grice and Donald Davidson, and on the intricacies of formal arguments in logic known as slingshots. His best known writings are the books Descriptions (1990) and Facing Facts (2001), and the articles "Meaning, Grammar, and Indeterminacy" (1987), "Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language" (1992), "Term Limits" (1993), "No Plagiarism Here!" (2001). He is the nephew of the horologist George Daniels.
From 1999 to 2007 Neale was Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Previously he was Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Logic and Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley (1990-1999), and Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London (1996—1997). His first position was as assistant professor of philosophy and linguistics at Princeton University (1988—1990). He received his PhD in philosophy from Stanford University (1988), where he worked under the supervision of John Perry and conducted research at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). He has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (2002), the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1998), the Rockefeller Foundation Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship at Bellagio (1995), as well as fellowships, scholarships and honorary professorships from numerous institutions including the University of California, Stanford University, the University of Miami, Oxford University, the University of London, the University of Oslo, the University of Stockholm, and the University of Iceland.
Neale's writings are primarily in the philosophy of language, construed broadly enough to intersect with generative linguistics, the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, philosophical logic, metaphysics, theory of legal interpretation, and literary theory. Philosophical problems about interpretation, context, information content, structure, and representation form the nexus of Neale's work. He has vigorously defended Russell's Theory of Descriptions, descriptive theories of anaphora, Paul Grice's intention-based theory of meaning, and a general approach to meaning and interpretation he calls "linguistic pragmatism". His most influential work to date has been on the underdetermination and indeterminacy associated with uses of so-called incomplete descriptions (a topic that runs through much of his work from his 1990 book Descriptions to his 2005 papers "This, That, and the Other" and "A Century Later"), and on a slingshot argument originally used by Kurt Gödel (examined in his 2001 book Facing Facts).
Neale is an intentionalist and a pragmatist about the interpretation of speech and writing, and to this extent his work is rooted firmly in the Gricean tradition. While probably a Quinean in his attitude towards indeterminacy in the realm of meaning, Neale is a Chomskyan and a Fodorian in his empirical attitude towards syntax and mental representation. Aspects of syntactic theory and formal logic figure heavily in some of his writings, and a realist (rather than a pragmatist) position on truth runs through them, although he appears to be agnostic about the explanatory value of appeals to individual facts in philosophical talk about truth. Traditional accounts of interpretation are marred, Neale claims, by (1) a failure to engage correctly with the epistemic asymmetry of the situations in which producers and consumers of language find themselves; (2) a consequent failure to distinguish adequately the metaphysical question of what determines what a speaker (or writer) means on a given occasion from the epistemological question of how that particular meaning is identified; (3) a failure to appreciate the severity of constraints on the formation of linguistic intentions; (4) failures to appreciate pervasive forms of underdeterminaton (such as those examined by pragmatists and relevance theorists); (5) failures to recognize that genuine indeterminacy of the sort associated with what speakers (and writers) imply may also affect what they say (for example, when they use incomplete definite descriptions); (6) inappropriate reliance on formal notions of context deriving from indexical logics, (7) unwarranted faith in transcendent notions of "what is said", "what is implied" and "what is referred to"; and (8) a quite general overestimation of the role traditional compositional semantics can play in explanations of how humans use language to represent the world and communicate.
Important influences on Neale are J. L. Austin, Noam Chomsky, Donald Davidson, Gareth Evans, Jerry Fodor, Paul Grice, Saul Kripke, John Perry, W. V. Quine, Bertrand Russell, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Philosophers of language who have written their PhD dissertations under Neale's supervision include Herman Cappelen (University of Oslo), Josh Dever (University of Texas, Austin), Eli Dresner (Tel Aviv University), and Angel Pinillos (Arizona State University).
