Naming and Indexicality

How do words stand for things? Taking ideas from philosophical semantics and pragmatics, this book offers a unique, detailed, and critical survey of central debates concerning linguistic reference in the twentieth century. It then uses the survey to identify and argue for a novel version of current 'two-dimensional' theories of meaning, which generalise the context-dependency of indexical expressions. The survey highlights the history of tensions between semantic and epistemic constraints on plausible theories of word meaning, from analytic philosophy and modern truth-conditional semantics, to the Referentialist and Externalist revolutions in theories of meaning, to the more recent reconciliatory ambition of two-dimensionalists. It clearly introduces technical semantical notions, theses, and arguments, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step guides. Wide-ranging in its scope, yet offering an accessible route into literature that can seem complex and technical, this will be essential reading for advanced students, and academic researchers in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language.

Empty Reference

We seem able to talk about things that do not exist, such as centaurs, Oliver Twist, and the highest prime. But the axiom of existence tells us that we can refer to something only if it exists, since reference is a relation. What, then, is it to which we refer in the case of non-existents? Various proxy referents are dismissed since they will either trivialize statements about non-existents or give implausible theories of meaning. Instead, we should think of our statements as being about non-existents instead of referring to them where this involves only a pretended referring. We can distinguish pretended reference from unintentional reference failure by the factive component required for genuine reference. Aboutness can be a substitute for reference and, if based on a public theory of meaning, it allows us to talk about what does not exist.

Tourism in a Semantic Mirror: Retheorizing Tourism from the Linguistic Turn

Although scholars have sought to theorize tourism from important philosophical turns (e.g., epistemological/antirational/postmodern/practice), one influential turn (viz. linguistic) has not received much attention. This study attempts to fill this gap by retheorizing tourism from the linguistic turn. We introduced major theories of meaning (a core part of the linguistic turn) from the philosophy literature, on the basis of which we constructed a new semantic space of “tourism” where multiple semantic dimensions (defined by particular types of meaning theories) coexist and possess different semantic veins (determined by a subtheory of meaning) consisting of numerous semantic dots (i.e., actual understandings of tourism). This prescriptive space captures the image of tourism in a semantic mirror, encompassing tourism ontologies in a semantic/linguistic realm. This space also offers solutions to four problems in prior tourism theorization. By innovatively linking tourism and philosophy of language, this study has expanded the options in addressing the question “What is tourism?”

Against Jazz Combo Theories of Meaning and Reference

The “jazz combo theory” captures the common spirit of various theories that reject reference and the “bottom up” approach to the problem of objective representational content. We can imagine the members of a jazz combo initially playing together without any shared musical norms. But they continually adjust to one another until norms emerge and are mutually endorsed. Players start holding one another to these norms, and it’s this that gives the sounds they produce—what would otherwise be mere noise—determinate musical content. Similarly, on the jazz combo theory, what would otherwise be productions of meaningless strings by language users, come to constitute determinate linguistic acts with determinate propositional contents, by virtue of the users adopting, and holding one another to, a shared set of linguistic and discursive norms. This chapter argues that jazz combo theorists overstate the case against reference, although they’re right in stressing the importance of norms and their dependence on social interaction. Jazz combo theorists tend to reject bottom-up approaches, including causal theories, because they take those approaches to be incompatible with the explanatory priority of the sentence and to fail to bridge the supposed gap between cause and norm. A number of conceptual tools are introduced to counter their arguments and to defend the consistency of the dynamic priority of the sentence, the syntactic correlativity of sentences and their constituents, and the semantic priority of constituents.

Written Constitutionalism, Past and Present

Debates over constitutional originalism almost always center on meaning. Questions are typically focused, concentrated on the meaning of particular constitutional clauses at the moment of their inception: the Commerce Clause in 1787, the Second Amendment in 1791, or the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Given the prevalence of these investigations, theoretical and methodological debates over how to recover original constitutional meaning are concentrated on either the kind of meaning that should be targeted—original public meaning, original intended meaning, or original legal meaning—or how that meaning can be recovered—through conventional legal reasoning, corpus linguistics, or thick reconstruction of historical context. Regardless, virtually all originalist theories of meaning uncritically presuppose the nature of the object possessing that meaning: they take as given what the Constitution itself is and, by implication, what it has always been. Although it might not be clear what the Constitution originally meant, it is straightforward what the original Constitution originally was. It just is the Constitution.

Making AI Intelligible

Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? One aim of Making AI Intelligible is to show that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Cappelen and Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy of to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they also show ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved: our linguistic encounters with AIs revel that our theories of meaning have been excessively anthropocentric. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but the answers have pressing practical implications. Many important decisions about human life are now influenced by AI. In giving that power to AI, we presuppose that AIs can track features of the world that we care about (e.g. creditworthiness, recidivism, cancer, and combatants.) If AIs can share our concepts, that will go some way towards justifying this reliance on AI. The book can be read as a proposal for how to take some first steps towards achieving interpretable AI. Making AI Intelligible is of interest to both philosophers of language and anyone who follows current events or interacts with AI systems. It illustrates how philosophy can help us understand and improve our interactions with AI.