Chapter Beginning an account of linguistic meaning: speaker, hearer, context, and utterance Pity the poor analyst, who has to do the best he can with ...

It has often been suggested that the meaning of terms is theory dependent. Bas van Fraassen has proposed a particular way of inferring which sentences are true in virtue of meaning, given a theory in so-called state-space format. I examine his claims by means of simple examples.

In this paper we explore how compositional semantics, discourse structure, and the cognitive states of participants all contribute to pragmatic constraints on answers to questions in dialogue. We synthesise formal semantic theories on questions and answers with techniques for discourse interpretation familiar from computational linguistics, and show how this provides richer constraints on responses in dialogue than either component can achieve alone.

This paper aims to argue for two related statements: first, that formal semantics should not be conceived of as interpreting natural language expressions in a single model (a very large one representing the world as a whole, or something like that) but as interpreting them in many different models (formal counterparts, say, of little fragments of reality); second, that accepting such a conception of formal semantics yields a better comprehension of the relation between semantics and pragmatics and of the role (...) to be played by formal semantics in the general enterprise of understanding meaning. For this purpose, three kinds of arguments are given: firstly, empirical arguments showing that the many models approach is the most straightforward and natural way of giving a formal counterpart to natural language sentences. Secondly, logical arguments proving the logical impossibility of a single universal model. And thirdly, theoretical arguments to the effect that such a conception of formal semantics fits in a natural and fruitful way with pragmatic theories and facts. In passing, this conception will be shown to cast some new light on the old problems raised by liar and sorites paradoxes. (shrink)

Arguments are given against the thesis that properties and propositional functions are identical. The first shows that the familiar extensional treatment of propositional functions -- that, for all x, if f(x) = g(x), then f = g -- must be abandoned. Second, given the usual assumptions of propositional-function semantics, various propositional functions (e.g., constant functions) are shown not to be properties. Third, novel examples are given to show that, if properties were identified with propositional functions, crucial fine-grained intensional distinctions would (...) be lost. (shrink)

This collection, with contributions from leading philosophers, places analytic philosophy in a broader context comparing it with the methodology of its most ...

Many philosophers, however, have been tempted to be relativists about specific domains of discourse, especially about those domains that have a normative character. Gilbert Harman, for example, has defended a relativistic view of morality, Richard Rorty a relativistic view of epistemic justification, and Crispin Wright a relativistic view of judgments of taste.¹ But what exactly is it to be a relativist about a given domain of discourse?

This volume is a report on the state of philosophy in a number of significant areas.

It is sometimes said that no living philosopher is a genuine modal realist. This is no doubt an exaggeration. But at least this much is true: while we all partake of possible world talk when philosophizing, most of us regard this talk as incurring no commitment to a plurality of concrete worlds.

The word 'belief' is ambiguous, referring sometimes to what is believed, sometimes to the act or state of believing it. I believe that as I write this it is sunny outside. This belief is true. What is true is what I believe, namely that it is sunny, not my believing it. On the other hand, my belief that it is sunny is rational and unshakeable, and it played a causal role in my deciding not to wear a coat today. What (...) is rational, unshakeable, and played a causal role is my believing a certain thing, not the thing I believe. I will say that what I believe is an object of belief , and that my believing it is a belief state. (shrink)

What we believe depends on more than the purely intrinsic facts about us: facts about our environment or context also help determine the contents of our beliefs. 1 This observation has led several writers to hope that beliefs can be divided, as it were, into two components: a "core" that depends only on the individual?s intrinsic properties; and a periphery that depends on the individual?s context, including his or her history, environment, and linguistic community. Thus Jaegwon Kim suggests that "within (...) each noninternal psychological state that enters into the explanation of some action or behavior we can locate an ?internal core state? which can assume the causal-explanatory role of the noninternal state."2 In the same vein, Stephen Stich writes that "nonautonomous" states, like belief, are best viewed as "conceptually complex hybrids" made up of an autonomous component together with historical and contextual features.3 John Perry, whose term I have adopted, distinguishes between belief states, which are determined by an individual?s intrinsic properties, and objects of belief, which are not.4 And Daniel Dennett makes use of the same notion when he asks:5. (shrink)

A. Horowitz has recently argued against semantic externalism. In this paper, I will show that his arguments are unsuccessful, owing to misconceptions regarding the nature of that semantic view.

This is a collection of eleven original essays in analytical philosophy by British and American philosophers, centering on the connection between mind and language. Two themes predominate: how it is that thoughts and sentences can represent the world; and what having a thought - a belief, for instance - involves. Developing from these themes are the questions: what does having a belief require of the believer, and of the way he or she relates to the environment? In particular, does having (...) a belief require speaking a language? The volume concludes the informal series stemming from the meetings sponsored by the Thyssen Foundation. (shrink)

The expression ‘Like’ has a wide variety of uses among English and American speakers. It may describe preference, as in (1) She likes mint chip ice cream. It may be used as a vehicle of comparison, as in (2) Trieste is like Minsk on steroids.

David Charles presents a major new study of Aristotle's views on meaning, essence, necessity, and related topics. These interconnected views are central to Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, and are also highly relevant to current philosophical debates. Charles aims to reach a clear understanding of Aristotle's claims and arguments, to assess their truth, and to evaluate their importance to ancient and modern philosophy.

This major publication is a history of the semantic tradition in philosophy from the early nineteenth century through its incarnation in the work of the Vienna Circle, the group of logical positivists that emerged in the years 1925-1935 in Vienna who were characterised by a strong commitment to empiricism, a high regard for science, and a conviction that modern logic is the primary tool of analytic philosophy. In the first part of the book, Alberto Coffa traces the roots of logical (...) positivism in a semantic tradition that arose in opposition to Kant's theory that a priori knowledge is based on pure intuition and the constitutive powers of the mind. In Part II, Coffa chronicles the development of this tradition by members and associates of the Vienna Circle. Much of Coffa's analysis draws on the unpublished notes and correspondence of many philosophers. The book, however, is not merely a history of the semantic tradition from Kant 'to the Vienna Station'. Coffa also critically reassesses the role of semantic notions in understanding the ground of a priori knowledge and its relation to empirical knowledge and questions the turn the tradition has taken since Vienna. (shrink)

The Pauṣkara briefly discusses the meaning-expressing nature of śabda (constituted of phonemes, varṇa) and the means to the cognition of word and sentence meaning. According to this dualistic Śaiva Tantra, meaning is denoted by nāda, a capacity of varṇas. Varṇas also are the means to the cognition of meaning through a capacity (saṃskāra) manifested in them. Although the meaning-denoting capacity is natural to varṇas, the relation of words (which are nothing but groups of varṇas) with objects is fixed by convention. (...) This article translates and analyzes the relevant passages from the sixth and eighth chapters. Certain arguments of plagiarism levelled against the eighth chapter of the Pauṣkara are examined in the concluding part of the article. (shrink)

This powerfully iconoclastic book reconsiders the influential nativist position toward the mind.

This philosophical treatise on the foundations of semantics is a systematic effort to clarify, deepen, and defend the classical doctrine that words are conventional signs of mental states, principally thoughts and ideas, and that meaning consists in their expression. This expression theory of meaning is developed by carrying out the Gricean program, explaining what it is for words to have meaning in terms of speaker meaning, and what it is for a speaker to mean something in terms of intention. But (...) Grice's own formulations are rejected and alternatives developed. The foundations of the expression theory are explored at length, and the author develops the theory of thought as a fundamental cognitive phenomenon distinct from belief and desire, argues for the thesis that thoughts have parts, and identifies ideas or concepts with parts of thoughts. This book will appeal to students and professionals interested in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In the first section of this paper I present a well known objection to meaning holism, according to which holism is inconsistent with natural language being learnable. Then I show that the objection fails if language acquisition includes stages of partial grasp of the meaning of at least some expressions, and I argue that standard model theoretic semantics cannot fully capture such stages. In the second section the above claims are supported through a review of current research into language acquisition. (...) Finally, in the third section it is argued that contemporary algebraic logical systems consist in a superior formal vehicle through which to capture stages of partial grasp of meaning; this claim is supported by concrete examples. (shrink)

In the first two sections I present and motivate a formal semantics program that is modeled after the application of numbers in measurement (e.g., of length). Then, in the main part of the paper, I use the suggested framework to give an account of the semantics of necessity and possibility: (i) I show thatthe measurement theoretic framework is consistent with a robust (non-Quinean) view of modal logic, (ii) I give an account of the semantics of the modal notions within this (...) framework, and (iii) I defend the suggested account against various objections. (shrink)

..". an excellent collection... " -- Journal of Language Social Psychology An important collection of original essays by well-known scholars debating the questions of logical versus psychologically-based interpretations of language.

Truth and Meaning is a classic collection of original essays on fundamental questions in the philosophy of language.

ACT, CONTENT, AND OBJECT THE TITLE I have chosen for this work is a mere label for a set of problems; the controversial views that have historically been ...

In Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, Eugene Gendlin examines the edge of awareness, where language emerges from nonlanguage.

This paper consists of two main parts and a coda. In the first part I present the ''binding theory'' of presupposition projection, which is the framework that I adopt in this paper (Section 1.1). I outline the main problems that arise in the interplay between presuppositions and anaphors on the one hand and attitude reports on the other (Section 1.2), and discuss Heim''s theory of presuppositions in attitude contexts (Section 1.3).In the second part of the paper I present my own (...) proposal. To begin with, I define an extension of DRT in which attitude reports can be represented (Sections 2.1–2.2). I then argue that the verb believe triggers a certain presupposition and that, given the binding theory, this presupposition determines the projection behaviour of the verb (Section 2.3). This analysis yields predictions which are incomplete in the sense that they do not fully account for speakers'' intuitions about presuppositions and anaphors in belief contexts. In Section 2.4 I suggest that this is as it should be because we may assume on independent grounds that there is a class of plausibility inferences which complement the predictions of the presupposition theory. Finally, the analysis is extended to the verb want (Section 2.5). (shrink)

This paper argues that relativity of truth to a world plays no significant role in empirical semantic theory, even as it is done in the model-theoretic tradition relying on intensional type theory. Some philosophical views of content provide an important notion of truth at a world, but they do not constrain the empirical domain of semantic theory in a way that makes this notion empirically significant. As an application of this conclusion, this paper shows that a potential motivation for relativism (...) based on the relativity of truth to a world fails. (shrink)

Quine and Davidson are among the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Their influence on contemporary philosophy is second to none, and their impact is also strongly felt in disciplines such as linguistics and psychology. This is the first book devoted to both of them, but also the first to question some of their basic assumptions. Hans-Johann Glock critically scrutinizes their ideas on ontology, truth, necessity, meaning and interpretation, thought, and language, and shows that their attempts to accommodate meaning and (...) thought within a naturalistic framework, either by impugning them as unclear or by extracting them from physical facts, are ultimately unsuccessful. His discussion includes interesting comparisons of Quine and Davidson with other philosophers, particularly Wittgenstein, and also offers detailed accounts of central issues in contemporary analytic philosophy, such as the nature of truth and of meaning and interpretation, and the relation between thought and language. (shrink)

Frege and many following him, such as Dummett, Geach, Stenius and Hare, have envisaged a role for illocutionary force indicators in a logically perpspicuous notation. Davidson has denied that such expressions are even possible on the ground that any putative force indicator would be used by actors and jokers to heighten the drama of their performances. Davidson infers from this objection a Thesis of the Autonomy of Linguistic Meaning: symbolic representation necessarily breaks any close tie with extra-linguistic purpose. A modified (...) version of Frege's ideal is here propounded according to which all expression is a force indicator just in case it indicates force in any speech act in which it occurs. It is shown that attainment of such an ideal would not have deprived Frege of what he desired of a perspicuous notation. In elaborating this ideal we also espouse an illocutionary conception of validity and argue that the ideal is one to which English conforms: parenthetical speech act verbs in the first person present indicative active are force indicators in the modified sense. But the mere possibility of force indicators in the modified sense is enough to show Davidson's Autonomy Thesis to be at best at half-truth. (shrink)

A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation Hans Kamp. INTRODUCTION Two conceptions of meaning have dominated formal semantics of natural language. ...

INTRODUCTION Consistency is only contextual. One of the fundamental constraints imposed upon accurate thought is the avoidance of mixing distinct semantic ...

Objects of Metaphor puts forward a philosophical account of metaphor radically different from those currently on offer. Powerful and flexible enough to cope with the syntactic complexity typical of genuine metaphor, it offers novel conceptions of the relationship between simile and metaphor, the notion of dead metaphor, and the idea of metaphor as a robust theoretic kind. Without denying that metaphor can sometimes be merely ornamental, Guttenplan justifies the view of metaphor as fundamental to language and the study of language. (...) His book will be of great interest not only to philosophers in this field, but also to those working across psychology and linguistics. (shrink)

In this important new collection, Gilbert Harman presents a selection of fifteen interconnected essays on fundamental issues at the center of analytic philosophy. The book opens with a group of four essays discussing basic principles of reasoning and rationality. The next three essays argue against the once popular idea that certain claims are true and knowable by virtue of meaning. In the third group of essays Harman presents his own view of meaning and the possibility of thinking in language The (...) final three essays investigate the nature of mind, developing further the themes already set out. Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind offers an integrated presentation of this rich and influential body of work. which Harman has developed over thirty years. (shrink)

In Oughts and Thoughts, Anandi Hattiangadi provides an innovative response to the argument for meaning skepticism set out by Saul Kripke in Wittgenstein on ...

Nelson Goodman's proposal for a reconception of meaning consists in replacing the absolute notion ofsameness of meaning by that oflikeness of meaning (with respect to pertinent contexts). According to this view, synonymy is a matter of degree (of interreplaceability) with identity of expression as a limiting case. Goodman's demonstration that no two expressions are exactly alike in meaning is shown to be unsuccessful. Although it does not make use of quotational contexts for the test of interreplaceability, it is tantamount to (...) their acceptance. Goodman rejects quotational contexts; I argue that they should be accepted. This move offers two advantages.Firstly, and mainly, it allows interlinguistic comparison of meaning, something that has not been deemed possible in the received version of Goodman's account.Secondly, it restores the full scale of likeness of meaning damaged by the renunciation of those contexts that guarantee difference in meaning for diverse expressions. (shrink)

Reissue from the classic Muirhead Library of Philosophy series (originally published between 1890s - 1970s).

The purpose of the paper is to show that semanticexternalism – the thesis that contents are notdetermined by ``individualistic'' features of mentalstates – is mistaken. Externalist thinking, it isargued, rests on two mistaken assumptions: theassumption that if there is an externalist wayof describing a situation the situation exemplifiesexternalism, and the assumption that cases in which adifference in the environment of an intentional stateentails a difference in the state's intentional objectare cases in which environmental factors determine thestate's content. Exposing these mistakes (...) leads to seethat the conditions that are required for thetruth of externalism are inconsistent. (shrink)

Geach’s rich paper ‘A Program for Syntax’ introduced many ideas into the arena of categorial grammar, not all of which have been given the attention they warrant in the thirty years since its first publication. Rather surprisingly, one of our findings (Section 3 below) is that the paper not only does not contain a statement of what has widely come to be known as “Geach’s Rule”, but in fact presents considerations which are inimical to the adoption of the rule in (...) question. With regard to at least some amongst the numerous other points extracted here from Geach’s discussion, we shall not be able to reach so definitive a conclusion, and content ourselves with giving the issues an airing. (shrink)

This article is a critical review of Stephen Schiffer’s monograph The Things We Mean . The text discusses some novel contributions made by Schiffer to the philosophy of meaning, in particular, Schiffer’s proposal for the reification of certain abstract entities and the application of his argument to the philosophical problem of vagueness in natural language. Special attention is paid both to Schiffer’s ingenious use of the notion of conservative extension , here employed as a criterion for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate (...) reifications and to Schiffer’s notion of vague partial belief and its relation to standard partial belief. Schiffer’s particular understanding of vagueness and its relation to the sorites paradox is also considered, with some remarks made concerning the relationship between these related philosophical problems and human perception. Key Words: meaning • vagueness • sorites • perception • conservative extension • fictional entities. (shrink)

This paper explores speakers'' epistemic access to the semanticand syntactic features of sentences of their language. I argue that there is evidence that ceteris paribus, the actual semantic features of sentences of a language are accessible as such by typical speakers of that language.I then explore various linguistic, cognitive, and epistemic consequences of this position.

The belief that the mind and the body are separate and that the mind is the source of all meaning has been a part of Western culture for centuries. Both philosophers and scientists have questioned this dualism, but their efforts have rarely converged. Many philosophers continue to rely on disembodied models of human thought, while scientists tend to reduce the complex process of thinking to a merely physical phenomenon. In The Meaning of the Body , Mark Johnson continues his pioneering (...) work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic Metaphors We Live By . Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. Thus the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking the bodily sources of meaning. Brilliantly synthesizing a broad range of scientific research and philosophical inquiry in clear and original writing, Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world. (shrink)

Predicate logic has proved a very useful tool for the expression of theories of natural language semantics. Hurford's suggestion that predicate–argument structures mirror certain properties of the human sensorimotor architecture can be seen as an explanation of why this is so. Although I support this view, I think that the correspondences that Hurford draws between linguistic and sensorimotor structures not only involve natural language semantics, but include some elements of natural language syntax as well.

This paper argues for a largely unnoted distinction between relational and modal components in the lexical semantics of verbs. Wehypothesize that many verbs encode two kinds of semantic information:a relationship among participants in a situation and a subset ofcircumstances or time indices at which this relationship isevaluated. The latter we term sublexical modality.We show that linking regularities between semantic arguments andsyntactic functions provide corroborating evidence in favor of thissemantic distinction, noting cases in which the semantic groundingof linking through participant-role properties (...) apparently fails. Thissemantic grounding can be preserved, however, once we abstractaway from sublexical modality in lexical semantic representations.Semantically-based linking constraints are insensitive to the sublexicalmodality component of lexical entries and depend only on informationin a predicator's situational core. (shrink)

What are facts, situations, or events? When Situation Semantics was born in the eighties, I objected because I could not swallow the idea that situations might be chunks of information. For me, they had to be particulars like sticks or bricks. I could not imagine otherwise. The first manuscript of “An Investigation of the Lumps of Thought” that I submitted to Linguistics and Philosophy had a footnote where I distanced myself from all those who took possible situations to be units (...) of information. In that context and at that time, this meant Jon Barwise and John Perry. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an account of the meaning of must and can within the framework of possible worlds semantics. The paper consists of two parts: the first argues for a relative concept of modality underlying modal words like must and can in natural language. I give preliminary definitions of the meaning of these words which are formulated in terms of logical consequence and compatibility, respectively. The second part discusses one kind of insufficiency in the meaning definitions given in (...) the first part, which arise from the ex falso quodlibet paradox of logical consequence. In stepwise fashion, I make an attempt to avoid most of the consequences of this paradox for the meaning definitions of must and can. (shrink)

are synthetic a priori judgements possible?" In both cases, i~thas usually been t'aken for granted in fife one case by Kant that synthetic a priori judgements were possible, and in the other case in contemporary,'d-". philosophical literature that contingent statements of identity are ppss. ible. I do not intend to deal with the Kantian question except to mention:ssj~",.

Thomas S. Kuhn claimed that the meanings of scientific terms change in theory changes or in scientific revolutions. In philosophy, meaning change has been taken as the source of a group of problems, such as untranslatability, incommensurability, and referential variance. For this reason, the majority of analytic philosophers have sought to deny that there can be meaning change by focusing on developing a theory of reference that would guarantee referential stability. A number of philosophers have also claimed that Kuhn’s view (...) can be explained by the fact that he accepted and further developed many central tenets of logical empiricism. I maintain that the genesis of Kuhn’s meaning theorising lies in his historical approach and that his view of meaning change is justified. Later in his career he attempted to advance a theory of meaning and can be said to have had limited success in it. What is more, recent cognitive science has unexpectedly managed to shed light on Kuhn’s insights on the organisation of information in the mind, concept learning, and concept definition. Furthermore, although Kuhn’s critique of Putnam’s causal theory of reference has often been dismissed as irrelevant, he has a serious point to address. Kuhn thought that the causal theory that works so well with proper names cannot work with scientific terms. He held that conceptual categories are formed by similarity and dissimilarity relations; therefore, several features and not only one single property are needed for determination of extension. In addition, the causal theory requires universal substances as points of reference of scientific terms. Kuhn was a conceptualist, who held that universals do not exist as mind-independent entities and that mind-dependent family resemblance concepts serve the role of universals. Further, at the beginning of his career, Kuhn was interested in the question of what concepts or ideas are and how they change in their historical context. Although he did not develop his theorising on this issue, I demonstrate that this is a genuine problem in the philosophy of history. Finally, Kuhn argued that scientists cannot have access to truth in history because we cannot transcend our historical niche, and as a consequence, the truth of a belief cannot be a reason for theory choice. Instead of truth, we can rely on justification. I also discuss Kuhn’s idea that problem-solving is the main aim of science and show that this view can be incorporated into coherentist epistemology. (shrink)

This paper is about the most important technical problem faced by Structured Meanings Semantics: the reiteration of hyperintensional functors (i.e., functors of -categorial languages of the sort defined by Max Cresswell in [6]). A way to solve this problem in a general and natural way by using Scott's Domains is both suggested and shown. The result is a semantics which unrestrictedly allows reiterations of hyperintensional functors. The semantics is also extended to accommodate -categorial languages with variables.

This paper advances a general argument, inspired by some remarks of Davidson, to show that appeal to meanings as entities in the theory of meaning is neither necessary nor sufficient for carrying out the tasks of the theory of meaning. The crucial point is that appeal to meaning as entities fails to provide us with an understanding of any expression of a language except insofar as we pick it out with an expression we understand which we tacitly recognize to be (...) a translation of the term whose meaning we want to illuminate by the appeal to assigning to it a meaning. The meaning drops out as irrelevant: the work is done, and can only be done, by matching terms already understood with terms they translate. (shrink)

The commonplace view about metaphorical interpretation is that it can be characterized in traditional semantic and pragmatic terms, thereby assimilating metaphor to other familiar uses of language. We will reject this view, and propose in its place the view that, though metaphors can issue in distinctive cognitive and discourse effects, they do so without issuing in metaphorical meaning and truth, and so, without metaphorical communication. Our inspiration derives from Donald Davidson’s critical arguments against metaphorical meaning and Richard Rorty’s exploration of (...) the diverse uses of language. But unlike these authors we ground our discussion squarely in distinctions about causal mechanisms in cooperative activity developed by H.P. Grice and others. (shrink)

A study of various central and connected topics in philosophical logic and the theory of meaning. There are important sections on the relation between linguistic and abstract entities, on necessity and convention, on meaning, sense and reference, and on entailment. Dr Lewy proposes a number of original solutions to problems which have been widely discussed in literature, and there is in particular a sharp and sustained criticism of conventionalism and reductionism. These are among the most difficult and intricate issues in (...) contemporary philosophy, but Dr Lewy writes with great clarity and a minimum of technicality. Where his views are controversial they are explained and supported in a detail which makes it both possible and necessary for potential critics to state their disagreement precisely. The book should therefore be of value as an advanced textbook as well as an original contribution to philosophical logic. (shrink)

This book opens up a new route to the study of knowledge dynamics and the sociology of knowledge. The focus is on the role of metaphors as powerful catalysts and the book dissects their role in the construction of theories of knowledge and will therefore be of vital interest to social and cognitive scientists alike.

This is the second volume of John McDowell's selected papers.

Plural predication is a pervasive part of ordinary language. We can say that some people are fifty in number, are surrounding a building, come from many countries, and are classmates. These predicates can be true of some people without being true of any one of them; they are non-distributive predications. However, the apparatus of modern logic does not allow a place for them. Thomas McKay here explores the enrichment of logic with non-distributive plural predication and quantification. His book will be (...) of great interest to philosophers of language, linguists, metaphysicians, and logicians. (shrink)