Online research in philosophy

[Jennifer Hornsby] The central claim is that the semantic knowledge exercised by people when they speak is practical knowledge. The relevant idea of practical knowledge is explicated, applied to the case of speaking, and connected with an idea of agents' knowledge. Some defence of the claim is provided. /// [Jason Stanley] The central claim is that Hornsby's argument that semantic knowledge is practical knowledge is based upon a false premise. I argue, contra Hornsby, that speakers do not voice their thoughts directly. Rather, our actions of voicing our thoughts are justified by decisions we make (albeit rapidly) about what words to use. Along the way, I raise doubts about other aspects of the thesis that semantic knowledge is practical knowledge.

This paper defends the commonsense conception of linguistic competence according to which linguistic competence involves propositional knowledge of language. More specifically, the paper defends three propositions challenged by Devitt in his Ignorance af Language. First, Chomskian linguists were right to embrace this commonsense conception of linguistic cornpetence. Second, the grammars that these linguists propose make a substantive claim about the computational processes that are presumed to constitute a speaker’s linguistic competence. Third, Chomskian linguistics is indeed a subfield of psychology, in the business of characterizing the linguistic competence of speakers.

There is no consensus yet on the definition of semantic information. This paper contributes to the current debate by criticising and revising the Standard Definition of semantic Information (SDI) as meaningful data, in favour of the Dretske-Grice approach: meaningful and well-formed data constitute semantic information only if they also qualify as contingently truthful. After a brief introduction, SDI is criticised for providing necessary but insufficient conditions for the definition of semantic information. SDI is incorrect because truth-values do not supervene on semantic information, and misinformation (that is, false semantic information) is not a type of semantic information, but pseudo-information, that is not semantic information at all. This is shown by arguing that none of the reasons for interpreting misinformation as a type of semantic information is convincing, whilst there are compelling reasons to treat it as pseudo-information. As a consequence, SDI is revised to include a necessary truth-condition. The last section summarises the main results of the paper and indicates some interesting areas of application of the revised definition.

A certain orthodoxy has it that understanding is essentially computational: that information about what a sentence means is something that may be generated by means of a derivational process from information about the significance of the sentences constituent parts and of the ways in which they are put together. And that it is therefore fruitful to study formal theories acceptable as compositional theories of meaning for natural languages: theories that deliver for each sentence of their object-language a theorem acceptable as statement of its meaning and derivable from axioms characterizing subsentential expressions and operations forming that sentence. This paper is to show that there is something deeply wrong with these ideas, namely that they are based on a certain confusion about ascriptions of semantic knowledge. The paper is to make this point by considering a semantic theorist who has explicit knowledge of a theory of truth for L. And by showing that all the theorist needs to have knowledge of to understand the sentences of L are these axioms -- that the derivation of T-theorems is epistemically redundant. And that this doesnt change when we turn from explicit to what has been called tacit knowledge.

This paper addresses one of the fundamental problems of the philosophy of information: How does semantic information emerge within the underlying dynamics of the world?—the dynamical semantic information problem. It suggests that the canonical approach to semantic information that defines data before meaning and meaning before use is inadequate for pre-cognitive information media. Instead, we should follow a pragmatic approach to information where one defines the notion of information system as a special kind of purposeful system emerging within the underlying dynamics of the world and define semantic information as the currency of the system. In this way, systems operating with semantic information can be viewed as patterns in the dynamics—semantic information is a dynamical system phenomenon of highly organized systems. In the simplest information systems, the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the information medium are co-defined. It proposes a new more general theory of information semantics that focuses on the interface role of the information states in the information system—the interface theory of meaning. Finally, with the new framework, it addresses the debate between weakly semantic and strongly semantic accounts of information, siding with the strongly semantic view because the pragmatic account developed here is a better generalization of it.

What is the best way to understand 'applies to' when it is said of a linguistic theory that it applies to a particular language-user? We can answer by saying that a linguistic theory is applicable to an individual language-user just in case that individual tacitly-knows the theory. But this is an uninformative answer until we are told how to understand 'tacit-knowledge'. The end goal of this thesis is to defend the claim that we should take tacit-knowledge to be, simply, knowledge. Towards this end I argue against the satisfactoriness of competing ways of understanding 'tacit-knowledge'. For example, the instrumentalist position is neutral on whether linguistic theories are actually known by the ordinary language-users who tacitly-know them; instead, linguistic theories are to be such that knowing them would enable someone to do whatever it is that the tacit-knower can do. Other competing positions hold that, though tacit-knowledge is a psychological relation of some sort, it is not genuine knowledge. I also attempt to meet specific objections to the claim that a typical language-user (as opposed to a linguistic theorist) could plausibly be said to know a linguistic theory. An objection on which I focus is based on the claim that typical language-users do not possess the requisite concepts for having genuine knowledge of a linguistic theory. The aim in attempting to meet these objections is to open up the way for the linguistic theorist to exploit a paradigm of explanation: explanation of behaviour by knowledge attribution. Attributing knowledge of linguistic theories would be potentially explanatory of linguistic behaviour in exactly the same way that attributions of knowledge in non-linguistic spheres are potentially explanatory of behaviour. Finally, because my emphasis is specifically on semantic theories, I attempt to explicate and defend the claim that a semantic theory could and should have the form of a theory of truth.

In this paper I examine a contemporary debate about the general notion of linguistic rules and the place of context in determining meaning, which has arisen in the wake of a challenge that the conceptual framework of moral particularism has brought to the table. My aim is to show that particularism in the theory of meaning yields an attractive model of linguistic competence that stands as a genuine alternative to other use-oriented but still generalist accounts that allow room for context-sensitivity in deciding how the linguistic rules would apply in concrete cases. I argue that the ideas developed in relation to particularism in meta-ethics illuminate a difficulty with the modest generalist view, one that can be resolved by adopting semantic particularism instead.

There is a long tradition of drawing metaphysical conclusions from investigations into language. This paper concerns one contemporary variation on this theme: the alleged ontological significance of cognitivist truth-theoretic accounts of semantic competence. According to such accounts, human speakers’ linguistic behavior is in part empirically explained by their cognizing a truth-theory. Such a theory consists of a finite number of axioms assigning semantic values to lexical items, a finite number of axioms assigning semantic values to complex expressions on the basis of their structure and the semantic values of their constituents, and a finite number of production schemata. The theory enables the derivation of truth-conditions for each sentence of the language: something of roughly the form ‘S is true iff P’.1 The claim that speakers stand in a cognitive relation to such theories is advanced, not as a conceptual analysis of semantic competence or understanding, but rather as an empirical hypothesis about human speakers in particular, one part of a broader empirical account of our linguistic competence and cognition generally. It therefore must mesh with the rest of our theorizing in these areas and whatever relevant data from neighboring inquiries there may be. (For example, since it’s hypothesized that ‘S’ in the schema above should be replaced by a certain sort of syntactic representation of the sentence, syntactic evidence can bear on the semantic theory and vice versa.) The precise nature of the cognitive relation a speaker is supposed to bear to a truththeory is a matter of some dispute. I speak of ‘‘cognizing’’ (following..

According to cognitivist truththeoretic accounts of semantic competence, aspects of our linguistic behavior can be explained by ascribing to speakers cognition of truththeories. It's generally assumed on this approach that, however much contextsensitivity speakers' languages contain, the cognized truththeories themselves can be adequately characterized contextinsensitively—that is, without using in the metalanguage expressions whose semantic value can vary across occasions of utterance. In this paper, I explore some of the motivations for and problems and consequences of dropping this assumption.

This paper motivates two bases for ascribing propositional semantic knowledge (or something knowledgelike): first, because it’s necessary to rationalize linguistic action; and, second, because it’s part of an empirical theory that would explain various aspects of linguistic behavior. The semantic knowledge ascribed on these two bases seems to differ in content, epistemic status, and cognitive role. This raises the question: how are they related, if at all? The bulk of the paper addresses this question. It distinguishes a variety of answers and their varying philosophical and empirical commitments.