Most theories of concepts take concepts to be structured bodies of information used in categorization and inference. This paper argues for a version of atomism, on which concepts are unstructured symbols. However, traditional Fodorian atomism is falsified by polysemy and fails to provide an account of how concepts figure in cognition. This paper argues that concepts are generative pointers, that is, unstructured symbols that point to memory locations where cognitively useful bodies of information are stored and can be deployed to (...) resolve polysemy. The notion of generative pointers allows for unresolved ambiguity in thought and provides a basis for conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Polysemy has recently emerged as a popular topic in philosophy of language. While much existing research focuses on the relatedness among senses, this article introduces a novel perspective that emphasizes the continuity of sense individuation, sense regularity, and sense productivity. This new perspective has only recently gained traction, largely due to advancements in computational linguistics. It also poses a serious challenge to semantic minimalism, so I present three arguments against minimalism from the continuous perspective that touch on the minimal concept, (...) the distinction from homonymy, and the quasi‐rule‐like nature of polysemy. Last, I provide an account of polysemy that incorporates this continuous perspective. (shrink)

This article introduces a new pragmatic framework for dual character concepts and their expressions, offering an alternative to the received lexical‐semantic view. On the prevalent lexical‐semantic view, expressions such as “philosopher” or “scientist” are construed as lexical polysemes, comprising both a descriptive and a normative dimension. Thereby, this view prioritizes established norms, neglecting normative expressions emerging in specific contexts. In contrast, the pragmatic view integrates pragmatic modulation as a central element in explaining context‐dependent dual character concepts and expressions. This not (...) only accounts for a wider range of phenomena but also addresses several theoretical shortcomings of the lexical view. (shrink)

Our interest in understanding belief stems partly from our being creatures who think. However, the term ‘belief’ is used to refer to many states: from the fully conscious rational state that partly constitutes knowledge to the fanciful states of alarm clocks. Which of the many ‘belief’ states must a theory of belief be answerable to? This is the scope question. I begin my answer with a reply to a recent argument that belief is invariably weak, i.e., that the evidential standards (...) that are required for belief are low. Although one state we refer to using the term ‘belief’ fits this profile, other ‘belief’ states do not. Crucially, when ‘belief’ is heard in a weak sense, it attributes a state that only a rational creature can be in. I will use this observation as a starting point for an argument that the study of (our) belief should not be constrained by the requirement that the illuminated state be held in common with any non-rational being. This lends support to the Transformative Theory of Rationality, according to which rationality does not merely add powers or complexity to the animal mind, but transforms it into a different kind of mind altogether. (shrink)

Zeugmatic oddness is a linguistic intuition of oddness with respect to an instance of zeugma, i.e. a sentence containing an instance of a homonymous or polysemous word being used in different meanings or senses simultaneously. Zeugmatic oddness is important for philosophical debates as philosophers often use it to argue that a particular philosophically interesting expression is ambiguous and that the phenomenon referred to by the expression is disunified. This paper takes a closer look at zeugmatic oddness. Focusing on relevant psycholinguistic (...) literature on homonymy and polysemy processing and representation, I argue that there are two different ways in which zeugmatic oddness can arise. Philosophical upshots concerning zeugmatic oddness are then drawn. (shrink)

Building on Wittgenstein’s ideas, I defend a brand of pluralism that associates words with conceptual families and appeals to this notion in the course of philosophical problem solving. I argue that certain problems that the received view of conceptual engineering (‘improvement by replacement’) faces can be more easily overcome if we adopt a pluralist perspective. I show that the proposed approach can circumvent the problem of topic discontinuity, whilst also avoiding the threat of trivialisation, since it can easily accommodate both (...) coarse-grained and fine-grained topics. Finally, I argue that my variant of pluralism is compatible with de novo conceptual engineering insofar as it allows that the paradigm associated with a word may shift overtime thus creating an opportunity for new candidate members to join a conceptual family. (shrink)

A family of familiar linguistic tests purport to help identify when a term is ambiguous. These tests are philosophically important: a familiar philosophical strategy is to claim that some phenomenon is disunified and its accompanying term is ambiguous. The tests have been used to evaluate disunification proposals about causation, pain, and knowledge, among others. -/- These ambiguity tests, however, have come under fire. It has been alleged that the tests fail for polysemy, a common type of ambiguity, and one that (...) is at issue in philosophically interesting cases. Furthermore, the objection that the tests fail for polysemy is often taken to be an undeniable bit of linguistic data. -/- We argue that this is mistaken. The objection implicitly relies on controversial assumptions about how to account for copredicational sentences, in which a single argument is ascribed prima facie incompatible properties. Furthermore, on several viable theories of copredication, the objection fails. However, our discussion also reveals that even if ambiguity tests are preserved, they may be significantly harder to execute than previously thought. (shrink)

Ad hoc concepts feature prominently in lexical pragmatics. A speaker can use a word or phrase to communicate an ad hoc concept that is different from the lexically encoded concept and the hearer can construct the intended ad hoc concept pragmatically during utterance comprehension. I argue that some philosophical concepts have origins as ad hoc concepts, and such concepts pose a challenge for experimental philosophy regarding these concepts. To illustrate this, I consider philosophers’ ‘what-it’s-like’-concepts and experimental philosophy of consciousness.

In this paper, I criticize Ethan Jerzak’s view that ‘want’ has only one sense, the mixed expected utility sense. First, I show that his appeals to ‘really’-locutions fail to explain away the counterintuitive predictions of his view. Second, I present a class of cases, which I call “principled indifference” cases, that pose difficulties for any expected utility lexical entry for ‘want’. I argue that in order to account for these cases, one needs to concede that ‘want’ has a sense, according (...) to which wanting is a matter of subjectively preferring p-alternatives to not-p-alternatives. Finally, I introduce some considerations for and against the view that ‘want’ also has another sense, which is roughly synonymous with ‘need’. (shrink)

The standard approach to model how human beings understand natural languages is the symbolic, compositional approach according to which the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its constituents. In other words, meaning plays a fundamental role in the model. In this work, because of the polysemous, flexible, dynamic, and contextual structure of natural languages, this approach is rejected. Instead, a connectionist model which eliminates the concept of meaning is proposed.

Why is there a long-standing debate about paraphrase in poetry? Everyone agrees that paraphrase can be useful; everyone agrees that paraphrase is no substitute for the poem itself. What is there to disagree about? Perhaps this: whether paraphrase can specify everything that counts as a contribution to the meaning of a poem. There are, we say, two ways to take the question; on one way of taking it, the answer is that paraphrase cannot. Does this entail that there is meaning (...) mysteriously locked in a poem, meaning that cannot be represented in any way other than via the poem itself? If that were so it would have profound implications for poetry’s capacity to convey insight. We suggest reasons for thinking that the entailment does not hold. Throughout, we connect the traditional debate over paraphrase, which has largely been conducted within the fields of philosophy and literary theory, with recent empirically oriented thinking about the communicability of meaning, represented by work in pragmatics. We end with a suggestion about what is to count as belonging to meaning, and what as merely among the things that determine meaning. (shrink)

Causal pluralists hold that that there is not just one determinate kind of causation. Some causal pluralists hold that ‘cause’ is ambiguous among these different kinds. For example, Hall (2004) argues that ‘cause’ is ambiguous between two causal relations, which he labels dependence and production. The view that ‘cause’ is ambiguous, however, wrongly predicts zeugmatic conjunction reduction, and wrongly predicts the behaviour of ellipsis in causal discourse. So ‘cause’ is not ambiguous. If we are to disentangle causal pluralism from the (...) ambiguity claim, we need to consider what other linguistic approaches are available to the causal pluralist. I consider and reject proposals that ‘cause’ is a general term, that the term is an indexical, and that the term conveys different kinds of causation through implicature or presupposition. Finally, I argue that causal pluralism is better handled by treating ‘cause’ as a univocal term within a dynamic interpretation framework. (shrink)

We often use language creatively, introducing new expressions on the fly. That we can successfully communicate with novel expressions without antecedent semantic knowledge has led many to a dynamic meaning hypothesis: namely, we can actively renegotiate extant semantic conventions to better suit our communicative, practical, and even normative concerns. We argue that this hypothesis is a mistake: meanings are non-negotiable, and so, lexical innovation cannot proceed by way of meaning-negotiation.

This paper explores the suggestion (Steen, 2023a, 2023b) that most metaphor may be structurally ambiguous between deliberate and non-deliberate meanings, which in turn affords multivalent metaphor use. The paper begins by examining a sample of 56 Metaphor-Related Words in 25 examples of language use from corpus research about metaphor in discourse about cancer and the end of life (Semino et al., 2018). These data are analyzed by means of a new method proposed by Deliberate Metaphor Theory (Steen, 2023a; cf.; Reijnierse (...) et al. 2019). Results show that all metaphors in the sample that are both polysemous and conventional can be given two interpretations, one non-deliberate and one deliberate. This ambiguity is largely corroborated by additional analysis of these same data by Wmatrix. Subsequent inclusion of all other cases from the same chapter in Semino et al. (2018) offers additional support. This finding offers a critical perspective on the idea that metaphor is a strong psychological device for figurative framing in discourse, for the structural ambiguity of most metaphor allows for multivalent metaphor use, where, in fact, most metaphor may typically be comprehended non-metaphorically (Steen, 2008, 2023a, 2023b). The ambiguity of metaphor hence also explains the paradox of metaphor. (shrink)

Based on the existence of polysemy (e.g., lunch can refer to both food and events), it is argued that central tenets of externalist semantics and Fodorian concept atomism, an externalist theory on which words lack semantic structure, are unsound. We evaluate the premise that these arguments rely on—that polysemous words have separate, finer‐grained senses. We survey the evidence across psychology and linguistics and argue that it shows that polysemy does not exist, at least not in this “sense”. The upshot is (...) that if polysemy does not exist, it cannot pose a problem for atomism or externalism. (shrink)

Pragmatic difficulties are considered a hallmark of autism spectrum conditions (ASC), but remain poorly understood. We discuss and evaluate existing hypotheses regarding the literalism of ASC individuals, that is, their tendency for literal interpretations of non‐literal communicative intentions. We present evidence that reveals a developmental stage at which neurotypical children also have a tendency for literalism and suggest an explanation for such behaviour that links it to other behavioural, rule‐following, patterns typical of that age. We discuss evidence showing that strict (...) adherence to rules is also widespread in ASC, and suggest that literalism might be linked to such rule‐following behaviour. (shrink)

In this article, I propose an inquisitive approach to semantic underdetermination using the model of issue resolution to describe how occasion meanings are determined in the process of pragmatic enrichment. I appeal to “Travis cases” to motivate the account of semantic underdetermination based on alternative ways for some objectato be F. When interpreting a sentence, we look how to narrow down the space of metalinguistic alternatives and achieve the state where a metalinguistic issue is resolved. I suggest that, in doing (...) this, we primarily rely on contextual domain goals, preferring those alternatives which are conducive to the goal. (shrink)

This article proposes that predicate order and coherence relations are the two major determining factors in copredication licensing, resolving a long-standing puzzle over the criteria for constructing acceptable copredications. The effects of predicate ordering are claimed to be anchored around semantic complexity, such that copredications with semantically Simple–Complex predicate orderings are more acceptable than the reverse. This motivates a parsing bias, termed Incremental Semantic Complexity. Particular ways of implementing this parsing bias are discussed. The effect of predicate coherence is claimed (...) to be anchored around a sense of causality and featural commonality. Lastly, a hierarchy of possible copredications is outlined (the Copredication Hierarchy), helping to delimit the modelling of copredications to a greater extent than has previously been possible. (shrink)

According to the received view in the literature on homonymy and polysemy representation, there is a difference between how polysemes and homonyms are represented in our mental lexicons. More concretely, the received view holds that whereas the meanings associated with a homonymous expression are (mentally) represented in separate lexical entries, the meanings associated with a polysemous expression are represented together in a single lexical entry. It is usually argued that this is the picture that is supported by the growing body (...) of empirical evidence coming from psycholinguistics. Empirical studies of ambiguity processing and resolution consistently show that polysemous expressions enjoy various processing advantages compared to homonyms, and the received view is generally taken to be required in order to explain these results. The aim of this paper is not only to show that this is not the case but also, and more fundamentally, that the received view falls far short of explaining the available data to a sufficient degree. As a result, the received view is caught up in an explanatory dilemma that I dubthe Continuum Puzzle.I then claim that the best way to escape this puzzle is to give up the received view’s core thesis in favor of an alternative view consistent with the empirical evidence. Reaching such an alternative will require rejecting the following pervasive but ill-motivated assumption: Differences in ambiguity processing and resolution can only be explained by there being some corresponding differences in the architecture of our mental lexicons. (shrink)

The paper argues that natural language quantification, as expressed by determiner phrases, is not polysemous. The foil for this claim is Hofweber, who contends that natural language quantification is polysemous between a domain reading and an inferential reading. The thesis is intended to support a more general division between externalist and internalist positions in semantics. The paper, to the contrary, argues that there is no linguistic evidence for polysemous quantification, and Hofweber’s proposal proves to be non-compositional. Further, an approach at (...) least consistent with internalism is available independent of an inferential reading, for natural language quantification can be read as ontologically neutral, which removes the rationale for the polysemy hypothesis. The paper remains neutral on so-called heavyweight vs. lightweight construals of quantification, which are not claims about natural language semantics. (shrink)

Individual differences and polysemy have rich literatures in cognitive linguistics, but little is said about the prospect of individual differences in polysemy. This article reports an investigation that sought to establish whether people vary in the senses of a polysemous word that they find meaningful, and to develop a novel methodology to study polysemy. The methodology combined established tools: sentence-sorting tasks, a rarely used statistical model of inter-participant agreement, and network visualisation. Two hundred and five English-speaking participants completed one of (...) twelve sentence-sorting tasks on two occasions, separated by a delay of two months. Participants varied in how similarly they sorted the sentences as compared to other participants, and mean agreement across all 24 tasks did not meet an established threshold of acceptable agreement. Between the two test phases, inter-participant agreement varied to a significant but trivial degree. Networks generated for each dataset varied in the degree to which they captured all participants’ responses. This variation correlated with inter-participant agreement. The data collectively suggest that word senses may be subject to individual differences, as is the case in other linguistic phenomena. The methodology proved replicable and has a promise as a useful tool for studying polysemy. (shrink)

Most substantive (content-bearing) words are polysemous, but polysemy is cross-categorial; for instance, the lexical forms ‘stone’ and ‘front’ are associated with families of interrelated senses and these senses are spread across their manifestations as three words, noun, verb and adjective. So, the ultimate unit underpinning polysemy is not a word but the categoryless root of the related words, which must, in some sense, track the interrelated families of senses. The main topic of this paper is the vexed question of the (...) meaning of roots and the backdrop is a view of words as delineated syntactic domains which allow assignment of atomic content (non-compositional meaning), and whose actual meanings are, in the first instance, pragmatically inferred in the throes of communication, some of them subsequently becoming established, so stored in a lexicon and directly retrieved in comprehension. Three different positions on the meanings of roots are outlined, and their merits and shortcomings are discussed: (a) inherent underspecified meanings; (b) meanings conditioned by grammatical context (allosemy); (c) meaninglessness. I argue that, overall, the current state of the evidence favours the third position: roots are categoryless, meaningless (perhaps phonological) indices. (shrink)