On local bars and imported beer

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-87
Author(s):  
Richard Vallée
Keyword(s):  
Large Family ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Semantic Role ◽  
Cognitive Significance ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Truth Values ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Complex Condition

“Imported” is a member of a large family of adjectives, including “enemy”, “domestic”, “local”, “exported”, “foreign”. Call these terms contextuals. Contextuals are prima facie context-sensitive expressions in that the same contextual sentence can have different truth-values, and hence different truth-conditions, from utterance to utterance. I use Perry’s multipropositionalist framework to get a new angle on contextuals. I explore the idea that the lexical linguistic meaning of contextual adjectives introduces two conditions to the cognitive significance of an utterance. These conditions contain a variable, y, that does not correspond to any lexical component in the sentence. This is the available tool for letting the speakers’ intentions, or what the speakers have in mind, play a semantic role. My view focuses on the complex condition that linguistic meaning (as type) sometimes semantically determines.

Discourse, Context, and Coherence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Una Stojnić
Keyword(s):  
Prima Facie ◽  
Context Sensitivity ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Linguistic Feature ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Pure Indexicals

On the received view, the resolution of context-sensitivity is at least partly determined by non-linguistic features of utterance situation. If I say ‘He’s happy’, what ‘he’ picks out is underspecified by its linguistic meaning, and is only fixed through extra-linguistic supplementation: the speaker’s intention, and/or some objective, non-linguistic feature of the utterance situation. This underspecification is exhibited by most context-sensitive expressions, with the exception of pure indexicals, like ‘I.’ While this received view is prima facie appealing, I argue it is deeply mistaken. I defend an account according to which context-sensitivity resolution is governed by linguistic mechanisms determining prominence of candidate resolutions of context-sensitive items. Thus, on this account, the linguistic meaning of a context-sensitive expression fully specifies its resolution in a context, automatically selecting the resolution antecedently set by the prominence-governing linguistic mechanisms.

Two‐Dimensional Semantics

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Chalmers
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Cognitive Significance ◽  
Dimensional Approach ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
Sense And Reference ◽  
Semantic Values ◽  
Distinctive Role

Two-dimensional approaches to semantics, broadly understood, recognize two ‘dimensions’ of the meaning or content of linguistic items. On these approaches, expressions and their utterances are associated with two different sorts of semantic values, which play different explanatory roles. Typically, one semantic value is associated with reference and ordinary truth-conditions, while the other is associated with the way that reference and truth-conditions depend on the external world. The second sort of semantic value is often held to play a distinctive role in analyzing matters of cognitive significance and/or context-dependence. In this broad sense, even Frege's theory of sense and reference might qualify as a sort of two-dimensional approach.

Linguistic Pragmatism

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
John Collins
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Linguistic Structure ◽  
What Is Said

This chapter articulates and defends linguistic pragmatism as a linguistic hypothesis that language alone underdetermines truth conditions (or what is said), and doesn’t even provide a variable licence for the truth conditions of an utterance in a context. Linguistic meaning is characterized, therefore, in terms of constraints upon what can be literally said with a linguistic structure, without the presumption that the linguistic properties of an utterance in a context will determine a content. The hypothesis is explained in terms of the resources language makes available to content, differentiated from related positions, and defended against numerous objections, especially those that argue for an essential role for minimal propositions in accounting for aspects of what is said.

Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-50
Author(s):  
Jonathan Dancy
Keyword(s):  
Prima Facie ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
Moral Particularism ◽  
The Real ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Prima Facie Duty ◽  
Principle Theory

This paper follows a path that takes us from utilitarianism to particularism. Utilitarianism is the leading one-principle theory; its falsehood is here simply asserted. W. D. Ross’s theory of prima facie duty is offered as the strongest many-principle theory. Ross’s two accounts of his notion of a prima facie duty are considered and criticized. But the real criticism of his view is that being a prima facie duty is a context-sensitive notion, since a feature that is a prima facie duty-making feature in one case may be prevented from playing that role in another. Since the strongest many-principle theory is therefore false, the only conclusion is a no-principle theory: a theory that allows moral reasons but does not suppose that they behave in the regular way required for there to be moral principles—namely, moral particularism.

Is Wittgenstein a Contextualist?

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Voltolini ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Family Resemblance ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Truth Conditions

There is definitely a family resemblance between what contemporary contextualism maintains in philosophy of language and some of the claims about meaning put forward by the later Wittgenstein. Yet the main contextualist thesis, namely that linguistic meaning undermines truth-conditions, was not defended by Wittgenstein. If a claim in this regard can be retrieved in Wittgenstein despite his manifest antitheoretical attitude, it is instead that truth-conditions trivially supervene on linguistic meaning. There is, however, another Wittgensteinian claim that truly has a contextualist flavour, namely that linguistic meaning is itself wide-contextual. To be sure, this claim does not lead to the eliminativist/intentionalist conception of linguistic meaning that radical contextualists have recently developed. Rather, it goes together with a robust conception of linguistic meaning as intrinsically normative. Yet it may explain why Wittgenstein is taken to be a forerunner of contemporary contextualism.

scholarly journals Meaning and Reference: Some Chomskian Themes

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Stainton
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Truth Values ◽  
Theory Of Meaning ◽  
External Objects ◽  
The World ◽  
Semantic Reference ◽  
Theoretical Insight ◽  
Insight Into

This article introduces three arguments that share a single conclusion: that a comprehensive science of language cannot (and should not try to) describe relations of semantic reference, i.e. word–world relations. Spelling this out, if there is to be a genuine science of linguistic meaning (yielding theoretical insight into underlying realities, aiming for integration with other natural sciences), then a theory of meaning cannot involve assigning external, real-world, objects to names, nor sets of external objects to predicates, nor truth values (or world-bound thoughts) to sentences. Most of the article tries to explain and defend this broad conclusion. The article also presents, in a very limited way, a positive alternative to external-referent semantics for expressions. This alternative has two parts: first, that the meanings of words and sentences are mental instructions, not external things; second, that it is people who refer (and who express thoughts) by using words and sentences, and word/sentence meanings play but a partial role in allowing speakers to talk about the world.

Locating meanings

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul M. Pietroski
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Natural Phenomenon ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Lexical Items

This chapter characterizes meanings in terms of certain generative procedures. We can begin to locate the natural phenomenon of linguistic meaning by focusing on (Chomsky-style) examples of constrained homophony. Two or more lexical items can connect distinct meanings with the same pronunciation; and phrases like ‘ready to please’ are similarly homophonous. But as ‘eager to please’ and ‘easy to please’ illustrate, phrasal homophony is constrained. Such facts provide important clues about what meanings are, and how they can(not) be combined. The details provide reasons for identifying the languages that children naturally acquire with biologically implemented procedures, and not sets of expressions. There are English procedures; but English is not a thing that speakers share and use to communicate. In this context, some initial reasons are given for doubting that the relevant procedures generate sentences that have truth conditions.

Linguistic Pragmatism and Weather Reporting

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Collins
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Interpretation ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Domain Restriction ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Full Analysis ◽  
The Common ◽  
Quantifier Domain Restriction

Linguistic pragmatism claims that what we literally say goes characteristically beyond what the linguistic properties themselves mandate. In this book, John Collins provides a novel defence of this doctrine, arguing that linguistic meaning alone fails to fix truth conditions. While this position is supported by a range of theorists, Collins shows that it naturally follows from a syntactic thesis concerning the relative sparseness of what language alone can provide to semantic interpretation. Language–and by extension meaning–provides constraints upon what a speaker can literally say, but does not characteristically encode any definite thing to say. Collins then defends this doctrine against a range of alternatives and objections, focusing in particular on an analysis of weather reports: ‘it is raining/snowing/sunny’. Such reporting is mostly location-sensitive in the sense that the utterance is true or not depending upon whether it is raining/snowing/sunny at the location of the utterance, rather than some other location. Collins offers a full analysis of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of weather reports, including many novel data. He shows that the constructions lack the linguistic resources to support the common literal locative readings. Other related phenomena are discussed such as the Saxon genitive, colour predication, quantifier domain restriction, and object deletion.

I-Languages and T-Sentences

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul M. Pietroski ◽  
Bradley Armour-Garb
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
The Liar

This chapter argues that liar sentences reveal a fundamental problem for the project of characterizing linguistic meaning in terms of truth. It further argues that weak-logic solutions to the Foster problem for Davidsonian theories are exacerbated by the Liar. According to the chapter, liar sentences have no truth conditions, and any theory that has its instances of the T-schema as a theorem is just false. The author urges that liar sentences illustrate a deep difficulty for truth-theoretic conceptions of meaning for Human Languages and that we should find a different conception of meaning according to which expressions of Human Languages—I-Languages—are not among the truth-evaluable things.

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