Overlooking Conventions
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Overlooking Conventions
This book criticizes the methodology of the recent semantics-pragmatics debate in the theory of language and proposes an alternative. It applies this methodology to argue for a traditional view against a group of “contextualists” and “pragmatists”, including Sperber and Wilson, Bach, Carston, Recanati, Neale, and many others. The author disagrees with these theorists who hold that the meaning of the sentence in an utterance never, or hardly ever, yields its literal truth-conditional content, even after disambiguation and reference fixing; it needs to be pragmatically supplemented in context. The standard methodology of this debate is to consult intuitions. The book argues that theories should be tested against linguistic usage. Theoretical distinctions, however intuitive, need to be scientifically motivated. Also we should not be guided by Grice’s “Modified Occam’s Razor”, Ruhl’s “Monosemantic Bias”, or other such strategies for “meaning denialism”. From this novel perspective, the striking examples of context relativity that motivate contextualists and pragmatists typically exemplify semantic rather than pragmatic properties. In particular, polysemous phenomena should typically be treated as semantic ambiguity. The author argues that conventions have been overlooked, that there’s no extensive “semantic underdetermination” and that the new theoretical framework of “truth-conditional pragmatics” is a mistake.
Reference and Beyond
Author: Michael Devitt
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2025-07-31
In Reference and Beyond, Michael Devitt explores philosophy of language from a naturalistic approach. A dominant theme of this book is the semantics of proper names, definite descriptions, and demonstratives. It shows that these terms have conventional "referential" uses to express "singular" thoughts. Those uses are explained by a unified "causal" theory: a term's reference is largely fixed in an object by a causal link between the person and the object when it is, or was, the focus of that person's perception. Furthermore, Devitt argues that a term's meaning is its largely causal mode of reference. So, a related theme is the rejection of the "direct reference" view that the meaning of a name is its bearer. Another theme in Reference and Beyond concerns thoughts and their ascriptions, including "de se" thoughts and Kripke's Paderewski puzzle. Devitt approaches the semantics of ascriptions from a perspective on thoughts, thus according with the slogan, "Put Metaphysics First," that governs the author's approach to all philosophical problems. A further framework is naturalism. Languages are parts of the spatio-temporal world playing causal roles in virtue of certain properties, "meanings." The task of a theory of language is then to explain the nature of those causally significant properties. The book takes a very dim view of the popular idea that "propositions" have a place in explanations of meanings. The naturalism leads to a rejection of the received view that theories of language must rest on an evidential base of speakers' intuitions and to a search for a respectable empirical base.
Linguistic Luck
Author: Abrol Fairweather
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2023
There has been much philosophical interest in the role of luck in ethics and epistemology; now this volume brings the topic to the fore in philosophy of language. Eleven new essays explore the diversity, scope, and mode of operation of luck-reducing mechanisms in language, without which linguistic communication would be impossible.