Philosophy of Language

Abstract objects such as properties, propositions, numbers, degrees, and expression types are at the centre of many philosophical debates. Philosophers and linguists alike generally hold the view that natural language allows rather generously for reference to abstracts objects of the various sorts. The project of this book is to investigate in a fully systematic way whether and how natural language permits reference to abstract objects. For that purpose, the book will introduce a great range of new linguistic generalizations and make systematic use of recent semantic and syntactic theories. It will arrive at an ontology that differs rather radically from the one that philosophers, but also linguists, generally take natural language to involve. Reference to abstract objects is much more marginal than is generally thought. Instead of making reference to abstract objects, natural language, with its more central terms and constructions, makes reference to (concrete) particulars, especially tropes, as well as pluralities of particulars. Reference to abstract objects is generally reserved for syntactically complex and less central terms of the sort the property of being wise or the number eight.

What is intentionality? Intentionality is a distinguishing characteristic of states of mind such as beliefs, thoughts, wishes, dreams, and desires, which are about things outside themselves. This book explores various ways in which philosophers have tried to explain intentionality, and then suggests a new way. Part I of the book gives a critical account of the five most comprehensive and prominent current approaches to intentionality. These approaches can be summarized as the instrumentalist approach, derived from Carnap and Quine, and culminating in the work of Daniel Dennett; the linguistic approach, derived from the work of Chomsky and exhibited most fully in the work of Jerry Fodor; the biological approach, developed by Ruth Garrett Millikan, Colin McGinn, and others; the information-processing approach, which has been given a definitive form in the work of Fred Dretske; and the functional role approach of Brian Loar. Part II sets out a multi-level, developmental approach to intentionality. Drawing upon work in neurophysiology and psychology, the book argues that intentionality is to be found, in different forms, at the levels of brain functioning, prelinguistic consciousness, language, and at the holistic level of ‘whole person performance’ which is demarcated by our ordinary everyday talk about beliefs, desires, hopes, intentions, and the other ‘propositional attitudes’.

This book examines a central phenomenon of language — the use of sentences to ask questions. Although there is a sizable literature on the syntax and semantics of interrogatives, the logic of ‘questions’, and the speech act of questioning, no one has tried to put the syntax and semantics together with the speech acts over the full range of phenomena we pretheoretically think of as asking questions. This book attempts to do this, and it also takes up some more foundational issues in the theory of language. By positioning the findings of contemporary grammatical theorizing within the larger domain of language use, this book makes some important challenges. It acknowledges the importance of grammatical form and the grammarian. In addition to developing an Austinian distinction between four questioning speech-acts, and a proposal concerning the philosophy of language, this book contains a discussion of the type-token distinction and how use of language compares with use of other things. The book also considers the nature of multiple questions, revealing what one must know to ask them, and what speech acts one may perform when asking them.

This volume brings together new chapters on assertion by leading epistemologists and philosophers of language. The chapters are arranged into two sections. The chapters in the first section address the question of what an assertion is. MacFarlane surveys and evaluates the various possible theories, leaning towards a commitment view. Kölbel defends a view that combines a commitment approach with Stalnaker's ‘essential effect’ as a necessary condition. At the centre of Pagin's proposal is the notion of an utterance being made ‘prima facie because it is true’. Cappelen promotes a debunking view according to which the category of assertion is superfluous. Robert Stalnaker shows how de se content can be incorporated into his theory of assertion. The chapters in the second section focus on the idea that there is an epistemic norm of assertion. The contributions by Brown and Lackey question sufficiency: knowing that p puts one in a good enough epistemic position to assert that p. Kvanvig questions necessity: one is in a good enough epistemic position to assert that p only if one knows that p. Goldberg argues that if there is a necessary epistemic condition on appropriate assertion then this can explain certain prominent features of testimony. Greenough considers how a relativist should best specify the epistemic norms for assertion. Maitra questions Williamson's suggestion that the intimate connection between the notion of assertion and the epistemic norms governing it can be understood on analogy with the rules of a game.

Claiming to know is more than making a report about one's epistemic position; one also offers one's assurance to others. What is an assurance? This book unites J. L. Austin's insights about the pragmatics of assurance giving and the semantics of knowledge claims into a systematic whole. The central theme in the Austinian view is that of reasonableness: appeal to a reasonable person standard makes the practice of assurance giving possible, and lets our knowledge claims be true despite differences in practical interests and disagreement among speakers and hearers. The Austinian view addresses a number of difficulties for contextualist semantic theories, resolves closure-based skeptical paradoxes, and helps us to tread the line between acknowledging our fallibility and skepticism.

Ascriptions of mental states to oneself and others give rise to many interesting logical and semantic problems. This problem presents an original account of mental state ascriptions that are made using intensional transitive verbs such as ‘want’, ‘seek’, ‘imaginer’, and ‘worship’. This book offers a theory of how such verbs work that draws on ideas from natural language semantics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics.

Expressivism — the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare — is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy. Yet the semantic commitments of expressivism are still poorly understood and have not been very far developed. Expressivists have not yet even managed to solve the ‘negation problem’ — to explain why atomic normative sentences are inconsistent with their negations. As a result, it is far from clear that expressivism even could be true. This book evaluates the semantic commitments of expressivism by showing how an expressivist semantics would work, what it can do, and what kind of assumptions would be required, in order for it to do it. Building on a highly general understanding of the basic ideas of expressivism, it argues that expressivists can solve the negation problem — but only in one kind of way. It shows how this insight paves the way for an explanatorily powerful, constructive expressivist semantics, which solves many of what have been taken to be the deepest problems for expressivism, including making unprecedented progress in attacking the well-known Frege-Geach problem for noncognitivist theories. But it also argues that any account which can attain these advantages will face further, even more formidable, obstacles. Expressivism, it is argued, is coherent and interesting, but false.

This book aims to reconcile pragmatism (in both its classical American and its Wittgensteinian forms) with analytic philosophy. It investigates relations between the meaning of linguistic expressions and their use. Giving due weight both to what one has to do in order to count as saying various things and to what one needs to say in order to specify those doings makes it possible to shed new light on the relations between semantics (the theory of the meanings of utterances and the contents of thoughts) and pragmatics (the theory of the functional relations among meaningful or contentful items). Among the vocabularies whose interrelated use and meaning are considered are: logical, indexical, modal, normative, and intentional vocabulary. As the argument proceeds, new ways of thinking about the classical analytic core programs of empiricism, naturalism, and functionalism are offered, as well as novel insights about the ideas of artificial intelligence, the nature of logic, and intentional relations between subjects and objects.

In Naming and Necessity Saul Kripke undermined descriptive analyses of names by showing that names are rigid designators; thereby telling us what their meanings are not, but not what they are. In Beyond Rigidity, Scott Soames strengthens Kripke's attack, while also providing a positive theory of the semantics and pragmatics of names. Using a new conception of how the meaning of a sentence relates to the information asserted and conveyed by utterances, Soames argues that the meaning of a linguistically simple name is its referent, and that the meaning of a linguistically complex, partially descriptive, name is a compound that includes both its referent and a partial description. After illustrating these analyses with simple sentences containing names, Soames extends them to sentences that report the assertions and beliefs of agents. Appealing again to his new understanding of the relationship between meaning and information asserted and conveyed, Soames attempts to reconcile the central semantic doctrines of Millianism and Russellianism with Fregean intuitions about the information carried by belief and other propositional attitude ascriptions. Finally, Soames investigates the relationship between proper names and natural kind terms, including mass nouns, count nouns, and adjectives functioning as predicates. After showing that natural kind predicates do not fit reasonable definitions of rigidity, he argues that there is no notion of rigid designation for predicates that (1) is a natural extension of the notion of rigidity for singular terms, (2) is such that simple natural kind predicates are standardly rigid whereas many other predicates are not, and (3) plays the role imagined by Kripke in explaining the necessary a posteriori status of theoretical identities like Water is H O and An object x is hotter than an object y iff x has a higher mean molecular kinetic energy than y. Finally, Soames uses key elements of Kripke's discussion to construct an alternative explanation of the necessary a posteriori character of these sentences that is based on the nondescriptionality of simple natural kind predicates, and the manner in which their meaning and reference is determined.

Contextualism is the view that the epistemic standards that a subject must meet in order for a sentence attributing knowledge to her to be true vary according to the contexts in which those sentences are uttered. This book argues that contextualism is true and is superior to its rival, invariantism, in both of the latter's main forms: classical invariantism and subject-sensitive invariantism. Chapter 2 presents the main argument for contextualism: the argument from the ordinary usage of ‘know(s)’. Chapter 3 utilizes the knowledge account of assertion both to answer the most important objection to Chapter 2's argument and to underwrite a second positive argument for contextualism: the argument from variable conditions of warranted assertability for simple assertions. Chapter 4 explores options for how to handle the semantics of context-sensitive terms in situations of disagreement among speakers, and answers objections to contextualism based on its alleged inability to handle such disagreements. Chapter 5 answers several objections to contextualism that allege that in various ways ‘know(s)’ does not behave like a context-sensitive term. Chapter 6 argues that contextualism has an important advantage over subject-sensitive invariantism in virtue of its ability to respect ‘intellectualism’, the thesis that questions over whether a subject knows turn exclusively on truth-related features of the subject's situation. Chapter 7 explores important connections between knowledge and various evaluations of actions. Against recent claims that important advantages for subject-sensitive invariantism are to be found here, it is argued that contextualism actually handles these connections better than does subject-sensitive invariantism.