Higginbotham earned a Ph.D. in
philosophy at
Columbia University in 1973 under the supervision of
Sidney Morgenbesser and
Charles Parsons. He taught at Columbia until 1980, when he moved to
MIT as associate professor of philosophy and linguistics. In 1993, he became Professor of General Linguistics at
Oxford University, a position he held until moving to
University of Southern California in 2000. In 1993, he became the first male Fellow of
Somerville College, Oxford. He was also the Vera Brittain Visiting Fellow at Somerville College in 2009. He was elected a Fellow of the
British Academy in 1995 and the
American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2011. Higginbotham edited the
Journal of Philosophy (along with others) when he was on the faculty at
Columbia University. He was also the editor of the OUP series in
cognitive science and the associate editor of
Pragmatics and Cognition. ==Philosophical and linguistic works==