Philosophical Essays, Volume 2: The Philosophical Significance of Language - Softcover

Soames, Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691136831 ISBN 13: 9780691136837

Verlag: University Press Group, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

The two volumes of Philosophical Essays bring together the most important essays written by one of the world's foremost philosophers of language. Scott Soames has selected thirty-one essays spanning nearly three decades of thinking about linguistic meaning and the philosophical significance of language. A judicious collection of old and new, these volumes include sixteen essays published in the 1980s and 1990s, nine published since 2000, and six new essays. The essays in Volume 1 investigate what linguistic meaning is; how the meaning of a sentence is related to the use we make of it; what we should expect from empirical theories of the meaning of the languages we speak; and how a sound theoretical grasp of the intricate relationship between meaning and use can improve the interpretation of legal texts. The essays in Volume 2 illustrate the significance of linguistic concerns for a broad range of philosophical topics--including the relationship between language and thought; the objects of belief, assertion, and other propositional attitudes; the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic possibility; the nature of necessity, actuality, and possible worlds; the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori; truth, vagueness, and partial definition; and skepticism about meaning and mind. The two volumes of Philosophical Essays are essential for anyone working on the philosophy of language.

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"Soames's work is of an exceptionally high quality, the selections made here are truly excellent, and the organization is well thought out. Having these papers available in this form is a great boon to scholars."--Stephen Neale, CUNY Graduate Center

"Since many of these important papers are relatively inaccessible, it is particularly useful to have them collected together, and Soames has done an excellent job of selecting and arranging them. These two volumes are really terrific."--Alex Byrne, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS

THE PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF LANGUAGEBy Scott Soames

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13683-7

Contents

The Origins of These Essays.............................................................................................ixIntroduction............................................................................................................1Part One Reference, Propositions, and Propositional Attitudes..........................................................31Essay One Direct Reference, Propositional Attitudes, and Semantic Content..............................................33Essay Two Why Propositions Can't Be Sets of Truth-Supporting Circumstances.............................................72Essay Three Belief and Mental Representation...........................................................................81Essay Four Attitudes and Anaphora......................................................................................111Part Two Modality......................................................................................................137Essay Five The Modal Argument: Wide Scope and Rigidified Descriptions..................................................139Essay Six The Philosophical Significance of the Kripkean Necessary A Posteriori........................................165Essay Seven Knowledge of Manifest Natural Kinds........................................................................189Essay Eight Understanding Assertion....................................................................................211Essay Nine Ambitious Two-Dimensionalism................................................................................243Essay Ten Actually.....................................................................................................277Part Three Truth and Vagueness.........................................................................................301Essay Eleven What Is a Theory of Truth?................................................................................303Essay Twelve Understanding Deflationism................................................................................323Essay Thirteen Higher-Order Vagueness for Partially Defined Predicates.................................................340Essay Fourteen The Possibility of Partial Definition...................................................................362Part Four Kripke, Wittgenstein, and Following a Rule...................................................................383Essay Fifteen Skepticism about Meaning: Indeterminacy, Normativity, and the Rule-Following Paradox.....................385Essay Sixteen Facts, Truth Conditions, and the Skeptical Solution to the Rule-Following Paradox........................416Index...................................................................................................................457

Chapter One

Direct Reference, Propositional Attitudes, and Semantic Content

What do we want from a semantic theory? A plausible answer is that we want it to tell us what sentences say. More precisely, we want it to tell us what sentences say relative to various contexts of utterance. This leads to the view that the meaning of a sentence is a function from contexts of utterance to what is said by the sentence in those contexts. Call this the propositional attitude conception of semantics.

Another semantic picture that has enjoyed considerable popularity is the truth-conditional conception. According to it, the job of a semantic theory is to tell us what the truth conditions of sentences are. On this view, the meaning of a sentence can be thought of as a function from contexts of utterance to truth conditions of the sentence as used in those contexts.

Suppose now that we put the propositional attitude and the truth-conditional conceptions together. If we do this, it is virtually irresistible to conclude that what is said by a sentence in a context consists in its truth conditions relative to the context. But what are truth conditions?

One natural idea, embraced by the ruling semantic paradigm, is that the truth conditions of a sentence, relative to a context, are the metaphysically possible worlds in which the sentence, as used in the context, is true. Such truth conditions can be specified by a recursive characterization of truth relative to a context and a world. This characterization implicitly associates with each sentence a function representing its meaning. The value of the function at any context as argument is the set of metaphysically possible worlds in which the sentence, as used in the context, is true. It is this that is identified with what is said by the sentence in the context, when the propositional attitude conception of semantics is combined with this version of the truth-conditional conception.

This identification is, of course, highly problematic. The first difficulty one notices is that if S and S are necessarily equivalent relative to a context, then they are characterized as saying the same thing, relative to the context. However, it is highly counterintuitive to hold that all necessary truths say the same thing, that the conjunction of a sentence with any necessary consequence of it says the same thing as the sentence itself, and so on.

A plausible pragmatic principle extends this difficulty to the propositional attitudes of speakers.

(1) A sincere, reflective, competent speaker who assertively utters S in a context C says (or asserts), perhaps among other things, what S says in C.

This principle reflects an incipient relational analysis of the attitude of saying, or asserting—an analysis that sees it as a relation between speakers and things which serve as the semantic contents of sentences. Once this analysis is accepted, it is a short step to view propositional attitude reports in accord with (2) and (3).

(2) An individual i satisfies x says (asserts) that S relative to a context C iff i stands in a certain relation R to the semantic content of S in C.

(3) An individual i satisfies x v's that S (where v = 'believes', 'knows', 'proves', 'expects', etc.) relative to a context C iff i stands in a certain relation R to the semantic content of S in C.

But now our difficulties are surely unmanageable. Let us characteriz distribution over conjunction and closure under necessary consequence a follows:

Distribution over Conjunction

If an individual i satisfies x v's that P&Q relative to C, then i satisfies x v's that P and x v's that Q relative to C. (For example, anyone who asserts that P&Q asserts that P and asserts that Q.)

Closure under Necessary Consequence

If an individual i satisfies x v's that P relative to C, and if every possible world in which P is true relative to C is a possible world in which Q is true relative to C, then i satisfies x v's that Q relative to C. (For example, anyone who asserts that P asserts everything that necessarily follows from P.)

The second main difficulty with our combined truth-conditional and propositional attitude conception of semantics is that it equates distribution of a propositional attitude verb over conjunction with closure of the attitude under necessary consequence. For if Q is a necessary consequence of P, then the set of metaphysically possible worlds in which P&Q is true is the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University Press Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691136831
• ISBN 13: 9780691136837
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 474
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland