Philosophy of Language

This book presents ten new essays about singular (de re) thought by a distinguished international group of philosophers of mind and language, as well as a comprehensive introduction by the editor. The contributors are: Kent Bach, John Campbell, Imogen Dickie, Manuel García‐Carpintero, Robin Jeshion, François Recanati, R.M. Sainsbury, Nathan Salmon, Arthur Sullivan, and Kenneth Taylor. The essays in this collection explore three main and overlapping sets of topics. One concerns the relationship between singular thought and perception. How does perception enable us to think non‐discursive thought about objects? Are there intermediaries, like sense data, that serve as the constituents of thought contents or is our thought on the basis of perceptual experience directly about the objects we perceive? The second concerns the relationship between singular thought and the semantics of demonstratives, indexicals, descriptions, proper names, and pronouns. What is the semantic content of these singular terms, and how do their semantic properties structure the nature of thoughts employing them? Topics addressed include puzzles about informative identities and the representation of them at the mentalistic level; belief attributions; the transfer of singular thought in communication; the semantics of empty referring expressions and fictional names. The third topic explores questions about the epistemic conditions for having singular thought. Is some variety of acquaintance necessary for singular thought, as Russell held? Can we convert descriptive, de dicto, thoughts into singular thoughts by manipulating the semantics, and what does this show about the mind's dependence upon language in structuring the nature of thought?

This book examines some recent answers to the questions of how and where to draw the divide between semantics (roughly, features of the literal meaning of linguistic items) and pragmatics (roughly, features emerging from the context within which such items are being used). In particular, the book defends what is commonly known as ‘minimal semantics’ (aka ‘semantic invariantism’ or ‘insensitive semantics’). Minimal semantics, as the name suggests, offers a pretty minimal account of the inter-relation between semantics and pragmatics. Specifically, it holds that while context can affect literal semantic content in the case of genuine (i.e. lexically or syntactically marked) context-sensitive items (e.g. indexicals, demonstratives, tense markers), this is the extent of pragmatic influence within the semantic realm. Minimalism, then, prohibits what are here called ‘free pragmatic effects’: putative effects on semantic content which are not required by any lexico‐syntactic item in a sentence. The book opens with an exploration of the current positions in this debate, introducing the main approaches of minimalism, indexicalism, contextualism, relativism, and occasionalism and offers some initial reasons for being concerned about many of the positions opposing minimalism. The main arguments against minimalism are then explored, looking at the argument that minimal contents are explanatorily irrelevant, the argument that at least some sentences fail to express minimal contents, and the argument that the kinds of word meanings which minimalism requires are either impossible or explanatorily inadequate. The ultimate conclusion of the book is that none of these arguments are compelling and that minimalism in fact provides an attractive and plausible account of the literal meanings of natural language sentences.

This book critically examines some widespread views about the semantic phenomenon of reference and the cognitive phenomenon of singular thought. It begins by denying that either is tied to a special relation of causal or epistemic acquaintance. It goes on to challenge the alleged semantic rift between definite and indefinite descriptions on the one hand, and names and demonstratives on the other—a division that has been motivated in part by appeals to considerations of acquaintance. Drawing on recent work in semantics, a more unified account of all four types of expression is explored, according to which none of them paradigmatically fits the profile of a referential term. The authors argue that all four involve existential quantification but admit of uses that exhibit many of the traits associated with reference—a phenomenon that is due to the presence of what we call a ‘singular restriction’ on the existentially quantified domain. The Afterword draws out some implications of the proposed semantic picture for the traditional categories of reference and singular thought.

This book offers a general theory of expressive behavior, including but not limited to such behavior as it occurs in our own species. At the core of the project is the thesis that self-expression is a matter of showing a cognitive, affective, or qualitative state in such a way that the showing is a product of design. Design may be the result of conscious intention, natural selection, artificial selection, or convention. Showing comes in three forms: showing that something is so, showing something in such a way as to make it perceptible, and showing how an object appears or how an experience or affect feels. This elucidation of self-expression as designed showing of something inner sheds light on such issues as the distinction between saying and showing, the nature of speaker meaning, speech acts, the problem of other minds, implicature, the psychology and evolutionary biology of facial expression, idiosyncratic and conventional aspects of expressive behavior, empathy, qualia, and artistic expression, particularly expression in music. The work blends insights from evolutionary game theory, ethology, experimental psychology, neuroscience, pragmatics, and the philosophies of mind and language.

How can one think about the same thing twice without knowing that it's the same thing? How can one think about nothing at all (for example Pegasus, the mythical flying horse)? Is thinking about oneself special? One could mistake one's car for someone else's, but it seems one could not mistake one's own headache for someone else's. Why not? This book provides an entirely new theory which answers these puzzles and more. The framework is an account of the mind that sees it as part of nature, as opposed to something with supernatural powers. This means that human beings have more opportunities to make mistakes than many have liked to think.

The general aim of The Unity of Linguistic Meaning is to deliver a solution to the so-called ‘unity of the proposition’ problem as it pertains to linguistic meaning. The problem is to explain what needs to be added to a collection of elements to make a structured unity comprising those elements. In linguistic terms, the problem is to explain what distinguishes a contentful sentence from a list of words. The volume can be roughly divided into three parts. Firstly, the focus on language is explained and the unity problem is stated accompanied by three desiderata on an adequate solution. The problem is divided into two by way of a distinction between an interpretive and a combinatorial problem; the latter problem will be the focus of the volume. The general import of the desiderata is that an account of unity must explain—or at least be consistent with—the fact that the difference between contenful and non-contentful structures solely turns on the content of the constituent words. Secondly, it is argued that all extant solutions to the problem fail to meet the desiderata or otherwise fail by themselves. Especial attention is paid to Frege and Russell. Thirdly, an account that satisfies the three desiderata is presented and defended against a range of likely objections. The account is essentially two-part: words are internally structured and are combined by a general principle specifiable independently of the content of words (what is called Merge in contemporary syntactic theory). The account is clarified and defended in light of research from both philosophy and linguistics.

At least since Locke, philosophers and psychologists have usually held that concepts arise out of sensory perceptions, thoughts are built from concepts, and language enables speakers to convey their thoughts to hearers. This book holds that this tradition is mistaken about both concepts and language. The mind cannot abstract the building blocks of thoughts from perceptual representations. More generally, we have no account of the origin of concepts that grants them the requisite independence from language. The book's alternative is to show that much of cognition consists in thinking by means of mental imagery, without the help of concepts, and that language is a tool by which interlocutors coordinate their actions in pursuit of shared goals. Imagistic cognition supports the acquisition and use of this tool, and when the use of this tool is internalized, it becomes the very medium of conceptual thought.