Philosophy of Language

This volume collects Davidson's seminal contributions to the philosophy of language. Its key insight is that the concept of truth can shed light on various issues connected to meaning: Davidson, who assumes a partial and primitive understanding of the truth predicate, reverses Tarski who had succeeded in elucidating the concept of truth by taking the notion of ‘translation’ (preservation of meaning) for granted. In the first of five subsections into which the papers are thematically organized, Davidson develops the systematic constraints a theory of meaning has to meet and shows how an approach to semantics based on the concept of truth meets these demands better than any rival approach. Sect. 2 explores whether one can give semantic analyses of quotation, intensional contexts, and force within the extensional limitations of the truth‐theoretic framework. Viewing the theories of meaning developed in the first section as empirical, Sect. 3 inquires into their testability: can we verify these theories without presupposing concepts too closely aligned to that of meaning, interpretation, and synonymy? Davidson develops constitutive constraints on applying truth theories to interpret the speech behaviour of others: we have to view utterances for the most part as assertions of the speaker's beliefs and those beliefs as largely true and consistent (he terms this the ‘Principle of Charity’). Sect. 4 combines these interpretative constraints with the semantic concept of truth developed in Sect. 1 to tackle metaphysical issues. Davidson claims that truth is not relative to conceptual schemes but only to languages that can be shown to be largely correct about the world; consequently, by studying those languages via the semantic concept of truth we can derive ontological conclusions. Sect. 5 explores aspects of linguistic usage that form a particular threat to theories of meaning (such as Davidson's) that focus on the literal meaning of sentences: for truth theory to be adequate as a general theory of language, it must give valid accounts of sentence mood, illocutionary force, and metaphorical meaning.

Killing a person is in general among the most seriously wrongful forms of action, yet most of us accept that it can be permissible to kill people on a large scale in war. Does morality become more permissive in a state of war? This book argues that conditions in war make no difference to what morality permits and that the justifications for killing people are the same in war as they are in other contexts, such as individual self-defence. This view is radically at odds with the traditional theory of the just war and has implications that challenge common sense views. It implies, for example, that it is wrong to fight in a war that is unjust because it lacks a just cause, that those who fight in a just war are not legitimate targets of attack, and that some civilians may, in principle if not in practice, be morally liable to suffer certain harms in war.

We might hear that marshmallows are sweet. Here, we are talking about the kind marshmallow and assert that individual instances of this kind have the property of being sweet. Strangely, we are prepared to believe these so‐called generic sentences even though we are aware that there are some bad‐tasting marshmallows. What can make these generic sentences be true even when there are exceptions? This question has led philosophers, linguists, and researchers in artificial intelligence to search for semantic theories that could accommodate this phenomenon. The word water is a mass term; the word dog is a count term. One can count how many dogs are in the room, but not how many waters are in the room, for water is just “present.” The philosophical and linguistic literature is rife with semantic theories concerned with an account of this ontological difference and how it can be learned. This volume of contributions by noted researchers in the psychology of language uses material from the investigation of human performance and child‐language learning to broaden the range of options open for formal semanticists in the construction of their theories.

The thesis of this book is that knowing how to do something amounts to knowing facts. The facts are those that answer a question about how one could do it. Elaborating the conception of knowledge how involves presenting more generally an account of what it is to know the answer to a question. The account of knowing an answer to a question, or knowledge-wh, leads to a novel defense of a Fregean view of propositions, according to which they contain ways of thinking (or modes of presentations) of objects. In explaining and defending the account of knowing how, the book lays out a conception of knowledge of facts where possession of such knowledge is not merely passive in guiding behavior. The ultimate moral of the book is that it is our ability to acquire knowledge of facts that explains our capacity for skilled engagement with the world.

Knowledge ascriptions, such as ‘Sam knows that Obama is president of the United States’, play a central role in our cognitive and social lives. For example, they are closely related to epistemic assessments of action. As a result, knowledge ascriptions are a central topic of research in both philosophy and science. The line-up for this collection of chapters on knowledge ascriptions consists of world-class philosophers who offer novel approaches to this long-standing topic. The contributions exemplify three recent approaches to knowledge ascriptions. First, a linguistic turn according to which linguistic phenomena and theory are an important resource for providing an adequate account of knowledge ascriptions. Second, a cognitive turn according to which empirical theories from, for example, cognitive psychology as well as experimental philosophy should be invoked in theorizing about knowledge ascriptions. Third, a social turn according to which the social functions of knowledge ascriptions to both individuals and groups are central to understanding knowledge ascriptions. In addition, since knowledge ascriptions have figured very prominently in discussions concerning philosophical methodology, many of the contributions address or exemplify various methodological approaches. The book includes an introduction that gives an overview of the various approaches to this complex debate, their interconnections, and the wide-ranging methodological issues that they raise.

This book is an exploration of the relation between knowledge, reasons, and justification. According to the primary argument of the book, you can rely on what you know in action and belief, because what you know can be a reason you have and you can rely on the reasons you have. If knowledge doesn't allow for a chance of error — if it requires certainty — then this result is unsurprising. But if knowledge does allow for a chance of error — as seems required if we know much of anything at all — this result entails the denial of a received position in epistemology. Because any chance of error, if the stakes are high enough, can make a difference to what can be relied on, two subjects with the same evidence and generally the same strength of epistemic position for a proposition can differ with respect to whether they are in a position to know. This phenomenon has come to be known as ‘pragmatic encroachment’. All of the points above, it is argued, apply equally well to justification for believing. The results, then, have ramifications for and are borne on by debates about epistemological externalism and contextualism, the value and importance of knowledge, Wittgensteinian hinge propositions, Bayesianism, and the nature of belief.

This book examines what happens when language becomes self-reflexive; when language is used to talk about language. Those who think, talk, and write about language are habitual users of various meta-linguistic devices, but reliance on these devices begins early — kids are told, “That's called a rabbit”. It's not implausible that a primitive capacity for the meta-linguistic kicks in at the beginning stages of language acquisition. But no matter when or how frequently these devices are invoked, one thing is clear: they present theorists of language with a complex data pattern. This book shows that the study of these devices and patterns not only represents an interesting and neglected project in the philosophy of language, but also carries important consequences for other parts of philosophy. Part I is devoted to presenting data about various aspects of our meta-linguistic practices. In Part II, the book examines and rejects the four leading meta-linguistic theories, and offers a new account of our use of quotation in a variety of different contexts. But the primary goal of this book is not to promote one theory over another. Rather, it is to present a deeply puzzling set of problems and explain their significance.

Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by rules. This volume presents a different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, the way they express norms and conventions. It argues that the central norms applying to language are non-evaluative; they are more like those norms of function and behavior that account for the survival and proliferation of biological species. Specific linguistic forms survive and are reproduced together with cooperative hearer responses because some portion of the time these patterns of production and response benefit both speakers and hearers. What needs to be reproduced, however, for a given language to survive is not specific conceptual rules or inference patterns, but only satisfaction conditions concerning distal objects and properties, and essential elements of hearer response. Thus, the psychological processes that support the use of proper names, of words for kinds, properties and so forth, need to be examined anew, resulting in a fairly uncompromising rejection of conceptual analysis as a tool in philosophy. Further results concern the distinction between the propositional content and the force of a linguistic utterance and a new description of illocutionary acts. It turns out that neither the intentionality of thought nor the intentionality of language is derived from the other. Also, the processes involved in understanding language are best modeled as a form of direct perception of the world parallel, for example, to perception mediated by the natural signs contained in structured light, and results in a radically new description of how children learn language.

The aim of this book is to present a comprehensive debate about the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), from discussions as to how the law is to be understood, to reasons for accepting or re-thinking the law, and to issues that raise challenges to the law, such as the Liar Paradox, and a ‘dialetheic’ resolution of that paradox. The essays in this collection address the ‘Law of Non-Contradiction’ (LNC), and the challenges posed to it by contemporary dialetheism (the view that some contradictions are true). After an introduction that puts the individual essays in the collection into perspective, and an essay setting up the debate, the discussion is structured around four topics: (i) what exactly is the LNC? (ii) methodological issues surrounding challenges to the LNC and similar apparently fundamental logical laws; (iii) arguments against the LNC; and (iv) arguments for the LNC.

This book presents a new development of the famous Language of Thought hypothesis, which has since the 1970s been at the centre of interdisciplinary debate about how the mind works. The book defends and extends the groundbreaking idea that thinking is couched in a symbolic system realized in the brain. This idea is central to the representational theory of mind which has been established as a key reference point in modern philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. The foundation stone of our present cognitive science is Turing's suggestion that cognitive processes are not associations but computations; and computation requires a language of thought. This book offers a more cogent presentation and a fuller explication of a distinctive account of the mind, with various intriguing new features. The central role of compositionality in the representational theory of mind is revealed: most of what we know about concepts follows from the compositionality of thoughts. The book shows the necessity of a referentialist account of the content of intentional states, and of an atomistic account of the individuation of concepts. Not least among the new developments is the book's identification and persecution of pragmatism as the leading source of error in the study of the mind today.