We live forwards but understand backwards: Linguistic practices and future behavior
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 80 (2):157-177 (1999)
Abstract
Ascriptions of content are sensitive not only to our physical and social environment, but also to unforeseeable developments in the subsequent usage of our terms. This paper argues that the problems that may seem to come from endorsing such 'temporally sensitive' ascriptions either already follow from accepting the socially and historically sensitive ascriptions Burge and Kripke appeal to, or disappear when the view is developed in detail. If one accepts that one's society's past and current usage contributes to what one's terms mean, there is little reason not to let its future usage to do so as well.Author's Profile
DOI
10.1111/1468-0114.00078
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Citations of this work
Linguistic Interventions and Transformative Communicative Disruption.Rachel Katharine Sterken - 2020 - In Herman Cappelen, David Plunkett & Alexis Burgess (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 417-434.
Semantic Plasticity and Speech Reports.Cian Dorr & John Hawthorne - 2014 - Philosophical Review 123 (3):281-338.
Relativism, metasemantics, and the future.Derek Ball - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10):1036-1086.
Semantic intuitions, conceptual analysis, and cross-cultural variation.Henry Jackman - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 146 (2):159 - 177.
References found in this work
New work for a theory of universals.David K. Lewis - 1983 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (4):343-377.