In combining a pluri‐propositionalist framework (Bach‐style) concerning alleged conventional implicatures, and a pluri‐propositionalist framework (Perry‐style) distinguishing various levels of content associated with a single utterance, I defend a Grice‐inspired model of communication. In so doing, I rely on the distinction between what is said, i.e. what is semantically encoded, and what is pragmatically implicated. I show how the notion of same‐saying plays a central role in dealing with problems pertaining to communication insofar as it permits us to posit a stability (...) of content among interlocutors. I also show how people can be classified as same‐sayers in different ways, viz. if they express the same (minimal) proposition/content or if they utter the same sentence. If A utters ‘I'm happy’ and B replies: ‘C said that too’, what B said can mean either that C said that A is happy—thus C and A expressed the same proposition—or that C utters the same words—they both utter ‘I'm happy’ and in so doing express different propositions, i.e. that A is happy and that C is happy respectively. (shrink)

My aim in this note is to address the question of how a context of utterance can figure within a formal, specifically truth-conditional, semantic theory. In particular, I want to explore whether a formal semantic theory could, or should, take the intentional states of a speaker to be relevant in determining the literal meaning of an uttered sentence. The answer I’m going to suggest, contrary to the position of many contemporary formal theorists, is negative. The structure of this note is (...) then as follows: first, I’ll very briefly sketch three distinct forms of semantic theory. One, ‘strong formal semantics’, will be seen to be immediately problematic, leaving us with two other options: use-based theories and what I’ll term ‘moderate formal semantics’. If we opt for the latter position, the question arises of what kinds of appeals to a context of utterance are legitimate given a formal outlook. I’ll suggest that this question arises in two distinct ways and explore the moderate formal semanticist’s position in regard to both. However, the conclusion I will reach is that what is characteristic of formal semantics is that it makes only the most minimal semantic concessions to context. (shrink)

In Reference and Reflexivity, John Perry tries to reconcile referentialism with a Fregean concern for cognitive significance. His trick is to supplement referential content with what he calls ‘‘reflexive’’ content. Actually, there are several levels of reflexive content, all to be distinguished from the ‘‘official,’’ referential content of an utterance. Perry is convinced by two arguments for referentialism, the ‘‘counterfactual truth-conditions’’ and the ‘‘same-saying’’ arguments, but he also acknowledges the force of two Fregean arguments against it, arguments that pose the (...) ‘‘coreference’’ and the ‘‘no-reference’’ problems. He sees these as genuine problems for referentialism and does not share Howard Wettstein’s (1986) view that semantics has ‘‘rested on a mistake,’’ the mistake of thinking that semantics is obliged to come to grips with ‘‘cognitive significance’’ and, in particular, to explain the fact that coreferring terms can differ in cognitive significance and that terms lacking in reference can still have cognitive significance. Perry points out that ‘‘there is nothing in [the arguments for referentialism] to show that the official content, rather than the reflexive content, is the key to understanding the cognitive motivation and impact of utterances’’ (Perry 2001, 193).1 In other words, ‘‘a theory of direct reference provides no argument for ignoring reflexive content, and, properly understood, has no motivation for searching for such an argument.’’ Thus Perry uses the notion of reflexive content to complement referentialism with a theory of cognitive significance. Frege drew a fundamental distinction between the reference of a term and the means by which its reference is determined. In his view, however, it is not the references themselves but the means by which they are determined that enter into propositions (‘‘Thoughts’’) expressed by sentences in which the terms occur. So we might call Frege an ‘indirect reference’ theorist. Echoing the introduction to Kaplan’s ‘‘Afterthoughts’’ (1989a), Perry stresses that ‘direct’, as it occurs in ‘direct reference’, does not imply that ‘‘the mechanism of reference is unmediated by the relation of fitting identifying conditions’’ (188). (shrink)

§§3-4 of the Begriffsschrift present Frege’s objections to a dominant if murky nineteenth-century semantic picture. I sketch a minimalist variant of the pre-Fregean picture which escapes Frege’s criticisms by positing a thin notion of semantic content which then interacts with a multiplicity of kinds of truth to account for phenomena such as modality. After exploring several ways in which we can understand the existence of multiple truth properties, I discuss the roles of pointwise and setwise truth properties in modal logic. (...) I argue that thinking of supertruth and determinate truth as setwise truth properties allows an understanding of supervaluationist approaches to vagueness which escapes both Williamson’s objections to and a needless metalinguistic orientation of traditional supervaluationism. (shrink)

In the debate between literalism and contextualism in semantics, Kent Bach’s project is often taken to stand on the latter side of the divide. In this paper I argue that this is a misleading assumption and justify this by contrasting Bach’s assessment of the theoretical eliminability of minimal propositions arguably expressed by well-formed sentences with standard minimalist views, and by further contrasting his account of the division of interpretative processes ascribable to the semantics and pragmatics of a language with a (...) parallel analysis carried out by the most radical opponent to semantic minimalism, i.e., by occasionalism. If my analysis proves right, the sum of its conclusions leaves Bach’s proposal in an invisible region of the literalism/contextualism debate. (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is to offer a practice-based account of intentionality. My aim is to examine what sort of practices agents have to engage in so as to count as talking and thinking about the way the world is – that is, what sort of practices count as representational. Representational practices answer to the way the world is: what is correct within such practices depends on the way things are, rather than on the attitudes of agents. An account (...) of representation must explain how such objective standards of correctness are introduced in human practices: one must explain how the world gets to have a say in what is correct in human discursive practices. Roughly, my proposal is that human discursive practices become responsive to the way things are by virtue of involving practical interactions with the world. The outcomes of these interactions depend on the way the world is and the evaluation of such outcomes contributes to determining which moves within the practice count as correct. Due to our practical engagement with the environment, thus, the world gets to constrain discursive practices. In order to flesh out my proposal, I develop a practice-based characterization of intentional or representational content. On this sort of approach, expressing intentional contents is seen as a matter of playing a certain role in relevant practices, rather than as a matter of engaging in some word-world relation. The expression of content, thus, is explained in terms of use. In particular, I adopt an inferentialist perspective, according to which discursive moves express contents because of their role in practices of giving and asking for reasons. I investigate how practical engagement with the environment introduces friction with the world in these practices of giving and asking for reasons. One of the main conclusions reached in the dissertation is that defeasibility is an essential feature of objective representational practices – so that attributions of representational correctness are revisable in an open-ended way. The discussion of defeasible reasoning – and of the way in which defeasibility shapes human representational practices – is a central point of this dissertation. (shrink)

I argue that there are analytic claims that, if true, can be known a priori, but which also can turn out to be false: they are expressive of merely default instructions from the language faculty to the conceptual system, which may be overridden by pragmatic or scientific considerations, in which case, of course, they would not be known at all, a priori or otherwise. More surprisingly, I also argue that they might not be, strictly speaking, conceptual: concepts may be importantly (...) different from the meaning instructions for the words we use to express them. I will press all this in the context of a general Quinean “naturalism,” where the epistemology that interests me is “a chapter of natural science,” but where the science won't be Quine's behaviorism, but a Chomskyan theory of the “I-semantics” of “I-language.” But, relying on a distinction I draw between an explanatory and a working epistemology, I will be pressing it largely as an explanatory claim, not one that will have serious consequences for on-going philosophical practice, neither with regard to the world, nor, more surprisingly, even with regard to armchair “conceptual analysis.” As Putnam observed, there may be analytic truths, but they don't cut much philosophical ice. (shrink)