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Robert C. May

American philosopher and linguist

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 29, 2025
Entity authorityQ112829455 ↗
Source-derived summary

Robert C. May is an American philosopher and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis. He is known for his works on philosophy of language.

Books

Logical Form: Its Structure and Derivation. MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1985.

The Grammar of Quantification, Garland Publishing, New York, 1991.

Indices and Identity, with Robert Fiengo. MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1994.

De Lingua Belief, with Robert Fiengo. MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma, 2006.

References

External links

"Robert C. May".

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Robert C. May” is american philosopher and linguist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Robert, American and philosopher, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1985, 1991, 1994, 2006—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Robert, American and philosopher is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american philosopher and linguist” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 29, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q112829455. VIAF identifies the subject as 9038149198350974940004. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1985, 1991, 1994 and 2006.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Robert C. May”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Robert C. May primary sources, Robert C. May archive and Robert research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Robert C. May”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Robert C. May” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.