Salmon was born January 2, 1951, in Los Angeles to a working-class family of Sephardi Jews of Spanish-Turkish heritage.
Salmon attended Lincoln Elementary School in Torrance, California through eighth grade, where he was a classmate and friend of the child prodigy, James Newton Howard.
At UCLA he studied with Tyler Burge, Alonzo Church, Keith Donnellan, Donald Kalish, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke, and Yiannis Moschovakis.
[2] Salmon is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1984.
Salmon has provided accounts both of propositional attitudes and of Frege's puzzle about true identifications, i.e., truths of the form "a = b".
[3] Salmon maintains that co-designative proper names are inter-substitutable with preservation of semantic content.
Salmon has also applied his account of mythical objects to Peter Geach's famous problem of uncovering the logical form of the particular sentence, "Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob wonders whether she (the same witch) killed Cob's sow".
Salmon thinks, again contrary to Kant, that it is perfectly legitimate to invoke existence in a term's definition.
This same conclusion is also a trivial logical consequence of the atheist's contention that no conceivable individual actually is uniquely both divine and existent.
Salmon argues that natural-language sentences that are representable as λ-converts of one another (in the sense of Church's lambda-calculus) are, although logically equivalent by λ-conversion, typically not strictly synonymous, i.e., they typically differ in semantic content—as for example "a is large and also a is seaworthy" and "a is a thing that is both large and seaworthy".
Salmon maintains that such an identification is an instance of a mistaken form of argument in the philosophy of language, "the pragmatic fallacy.
Critics of Salmon's alleged proof acknowledge that the highlighted difference between