Philosophy of Language

Moral responsibility can be explained by analogy with a conversation. The relation between a morally responsible agent and those who hold her morally responsible is like the relation between a speaker and her audience. A responsible agent’s actions are bearers of meaning, agent meaning, just as a speaker’s utterances are bearers of speaker meaning. Agent meaning is a function of the morally quality of the will with which an agent acts. Those who hold an agent morally responsible for what she does do so by responding to her as if in a conversation. By responding with certain morally reactive attitudes, such as resentment or indignation, they thereby communicate their regard for the meaning taken to be revealed in that agent’s actions. It is then open for the agent held responsible to respond to those holding her responsible by offering an apology, a justification, an excuse, or some other response, thereby extending the evolving conversational exchange. The conversational theory of moral responsibility accepts two features of P.F. Strawson’s theory. One is that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal so that being responsible must be understood by reference to the nature of holding responsible. Another is that the moral emotions are central to holding responsible.

This work explores some of the many interesting philosophical issues that arise in the conduct of generative linguistics. There are three basic themes that are woven throughout the work. The first theme is that generative linguistics at its best is concerned with understanding and explanation, and not just with observation and data gathering. Generative linguistics is interested in underlying mechanisms that give rise to language related phenomena, and this interest will often trump the goal of accumulating more data. The second theme is the Ψ-language hypothesis. It is the hypothesis that the underlying mechanisms posited by generative linguists are fundamentally psychological mechanisms and that generative linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology, but that it doesn't follow that cognitive psychology must therefore be interested in psychological states individuated narrowly. It is consistent with the Ψ-language hypothesis that psychological states are individuated in part by the embedding environment. The third theme is the principle of methodological minimalism. It is the thesis that best theory criteria like simplicity and formal rigor all really come down to one thing: seek methods that help linguists to do their jobs effectively and with the minimal of cognitive labor.

This book argues against the traditional understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide and puts forward a radical alternative. Through half a dozen case studies, it shows that what an utterance says cannot be neatly separated from what the speaker means. In particular, the speaker's meaning endows words with senses that are tailored to the situation of utterance and depart from the conventional meanings carried by the words in isolation. This phenomenon of ‘pragmatic modulation’ must be taken into account in theorizing about semantic content, for it interacts with the grammar-driven process of semantic composition. Because of that interaction, the book argues, the content of a sentence always depends upon the context in which it is used. This claim defines Contextualism, a view which has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and of which the author of this book is one of the main proponents.