Under what conditions are two utterances peformances of the same word?

Morasch, Nathalie

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Description

Title

Under what conditions are two utterances peformances of the same word?

Author(s)

Morasch, Nathalie

Issue Date

2011-05-25T14:38:52Z

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Ebbs, Gary

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Ebbs, Gary

Committee Member(s)

• Wagner, Steven J.
• McCarthy, Timothy G.
• Lasersohn, Peter N.

Department of Study

Philosophy

Discipline

Philosophy

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Kaplan
• words
• anti-individualism
• Kripke puzzle
• self-knowledge

Abstract

Starting from the fact that people sometimes use the “same” words to talk about a given topic, I want to clarify what word-sameness comes to in those uses. I will adopt an epistemic framework, in which words are primarily instruments that render the inter-subjective transfer of knowledge possible. In the course of my dissertation I refine Kaplan’s notion of words to propose an account that occupies the middle ground between (social) anti-individualism and the kind of individualism that individuates a speaker’s words without input from the speaker’s linguistic community. I make the case that speakers keep track of the various performances of a given word w via a mental register. According to my proposal, the conceptions the speaker comes to associate with her mental register over time may play a role in whether we ought to identify her idiolectal word w with the public word w’. I will argue that in the end we must leave it up to the speaker’s own (informed) judgment whether she interprets her word w as repeating a particular public word w’. According to Kaplan the individual speaker’s word w is referentially bound to the public word w’ through her intentions to repeat w’. I stress that the intention to repeat her own words w trumps the intention to repeat the word w’ produced by some other speaker. I attempt to solve Kripke’s Paderewski puzzle and problems of self-knowledge by arguing that the speaker cannot be wrong about how she keeps track of her own words.

Graduation Semester

2011-05

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/24398

Copyright and License Information

© Copyright 2011 Nathalie Morasch

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