William Joseph Rapaport^[2] is a North American philosopher who is an Associate Professor Emeritus of the University at Buffalo.

Philosophical work

Rapaport has done research and written extensively on intentionality and artificial intelligence. He has research interests in computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), computational linguistics, cognitive science, logic and mathematics, and published many scientific articles on them.

While a philosophy graduate student at Indiana University in 1972, he concocted the sentence: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo". Throughout his career he developed this theme, and discussed it extensively.^[3]

His early work on nonexistent objects was influenced by Alexius Meinong.^[4][5]

Rapaport has written on the field of intentionality, influencing scientists and writers^{[citation needed]} including Daniel Dennett, Héctor-Neri Castañeda (who was his doctoral advisor^[2]) and John Searle (with whom he disagrees). Rapaport is interested in science educational theory, and received the New York Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.^[6]

Other activities

In June 1988, Rapaport compiled a list of restaurants in the Buffalo area for attendees of an ACL meeting at SUNY Buffalo. The list was continued, becoming interactive, with user reviews of restaurants.

Rapaport and his wife Mary, with whom he has a son Michael, are the principal donors to the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center^[7] in Jamestown, NY. The Desilu Playhouse, located in the Rapaport Center, contains memorabilia and other vintage I Love Lucy items. He and his wife have also purchased and renovated Lucille Ball's childhood home in Celoron, New York.^[8]

Books and articles

• Intentionality and the Structure of Existence, unpublished Ph.D. Indiana University, 1976.
• "Meinongian Theories and a Russellian Paradox", Noûs, 12(2) (1978), pp. 153–80.
• Thought, Language and Ontology. Edited by William J. Rapaport et al. Includes various essays by Rapaport and his colleagues.
• Cognition and Fiction, with Stuart C. Shapiro (PostScript format)^[9]
• "To Be and Not To Be"
• "Representing Fiction in SNePS"
• In Defense of Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition
• "What Did You Mean by That? Misunderstanding, Negotiation, and Syntactic Semantics"
• "Yes, She Was!", reply to Ford's "Helen Keller Was Never in a Chinese Room"
• "Predication, fiction, and artificial intelligence"
• "On cogito propositions"
• "Because mere calculation isn't thinking"
• Philosophy of Computer Science, online textbook on connections between philosophy, computer science and artificial intelligence, constantly being updated