The central claim of this thesis is that concepts, the components from which cognitively significant truth evaluable content (thought) is composed, are unstructured entities an account of whose individuation makes no essential reference to other concepts in the possession of the thinking subject or to any particular means by which the reference of the concept is identified by the thinking subject. This position is called Conceptual Atomism and contrasts with Inferential Role Semantics, according to which concepts are individuated by their (...) inferential roles or their conditions of warranted application. The structure of the argument is as follows. Firstly, a principle called the Transparency Principle is developed. This places constraints on the individuation of concepts across differing contexts. The Transparency Principle is then used to show that Inferential Role Semantics is false because it cannot provide a satisfactory account of cognitive dynamics; that is, of the conditions under which a concept is retained through changes in the epistemic state of the subject over a period of time. A version of Conceptual Atomism is then defended and it is shown that this theory yields the correct individuation of concepts. According to this theory the concepts of an individual subject are individuated in terms of referential episodes, episodes of ongoing reference to an object or property during which it is diachronically transparent to the subject that the same thing is being referred to. The more general notion of a referential practice is then used to account for the sharing of concepts by more than one person. Finally, a novel account of the thoughts expressed using indexical terms is defended in order to show that indexicals present no counterexample to Conceptual Atomism. This account of indexical thoughts is of some consequence in its own right. (shrink)

Words have meaning. Sentences also have meaning, but their meaning is different in kind from any collection of the meanings of the words they contain. I discuss two puzzles related to this difference. The first is how the meanings of the parts of a sentence combine to give rise to a unified sentential meaning, as opposed to a mere collection of disparate meanings (UP1). The second is why the formal ontology of linguistic meaning changes when grammatical structure is built up (...) (UP2). For example, the meaning of a sentence is a proposition evaluable for truth and falsity. In contrast, a collection of the meanings of its parts does not constitute a proposition and is not evaluable for truth. These two puzzles are closely related, since change in formal ontology is the clearest sign of the unity of meaning. The most popular strategy for answering them is taking the meanings of the parts as abstractions from primitive sentence meanings. However, I argue that, given plausible psychological constraints, sentence meanings cannot be taken as explanatory primitives. Drawing on recent work in Generative Grammar and its philosophy, I suggest that the key to both unity questions is to distinguish strictly between lexical and grammatical meaning. The latter is irreducible and determines how lexical content is used in referential acts. I argue that these referential properties determine a formal ontology, which explains why and how formal ontology changes when grammatical structure is built up (UP2). As for UP1, I suggest that, strictly speaking, lexical meanings never combine. Instead, whenever grammar specifies a formal ontology for the lexical meanings entering a grammatical derivation, further lexical (or phrasal) meanings can only specify aspects of this recursive grammatical process. In this way, contemporary grammatical theory can be used to address old philosophical problems. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the idea of a semantic code in the contemporary debate between contextualism and minimalism. First, I identify historical sources of these positions in Grice’s pragmatics and in Davidson’s theory of meaning in order to sketch the role of a semantic code there. Then I argue that contextualism is committed to the idea of an ad hoc code, while minimalism involves a persistent code. However, the latter approach to a code requires disambiguation which must be carried (...) out in the early stages of speech act processing. I raise a concern that primary pragmatic processes may be active here, especially in the case of disambiguating polysemous expressions, which could be problematic or even devastating for the minimalist program. At the end I evaluate a possible minimalist way out by examining the minimalist account of metaphor, which lies at the root of polysemy. If a code robust enough to deal with polysemy could be created, minimalist conceptions would present a new impetus to understand language as a code. Without such a code, very little would be left of the notion of a persistent code and hence of minimalism itself. (shrink)

A discussion of Frege's views concerning the meaning of 'I' and his distinction between the 'I' of soliloquy and the 'I' of conversation.