Account Of Linguistic Meaning Research Articles

Behavioral Foundations for Expression Meaning

According to a well-established tradition in the philosophy of language, we can understand what makes an arbitrary sound, gesture, or marking into a meaningful linguistic expression only by appealing to mental states, such as beliefs and intentions. In this paper, I explore the contrasting possibility of understanding the meaningfulness of linguistic expressions just in terms of observable linguistic behavior. Specifically, I explore the view that a type of sound (or other item) becomes a meaningful linguistic expression within a group in virtue of the production of that type of item becoming that group’s widespread, copied way of getting others to involve an object or relation in their activity. After discussing a preliminary version of the view, I develop it in response to some key concerns about whether it really does, as a matter of fact, eschew mental states, and about its adequacy as an account of linguistic meaning.

Truth, Meaning, and the Study of Religion

Abstract This paper focuses on two contrasting approaches to the theory of linguistic meaning and asks how they color a range of issues of interest to scholars of religion. The so-called truth-conditional approach makes truth basic. It trades on the thought that we sometimes or perhaps often know what someone has said when we know what it would be for what she has said to be true. The other approach pegs meaning to how expressions and sentences are used in communicative situations. Dummett and Davidson are front and center. Davidson is of course in one sense a champion of truth-conditional semantics, but, over the issues I have in view, his case is instructively mixed. This discussion leads us toward an account of linguistic meaning which elevates over truth a family of concepts associated with use, including verification, justification, and pragmatic success.

VI—The Importance of Concepts

Words change meaning over time. Some meaning shift is accompanied by a corresponding change in subject matter; some meaning shift is not. In this paper I argue that an account of linguistic meaning can accommodate the first kind of case, but that a theory of concepts is required to accommodate the second. Where there is stability of subject matter through linguistic change, it is concepts that provide the stability. The stability provided by concepts allows for genuine disagreement and ameliorative change in the context of conceptual engineering.

Decision Theory, Propositional Measurement, and Unified Interpretation

The content of our propositional attitudes is often characterized by assigning them abstract entities, namely propositions. In decision theory the attitudes are also assigned numerical measures. It may thus be asked how assignments of these two types are related to each other � both metaphysically and structurally. In the first section of this paper I argue for the importance of this question and I review Davidson�s unified account of decision theory and radical interpretation as a failed attempt to answer it. Then, in the main part of the paper, I present a unified measurement-theoretic account of linguistic meaning, propositional mental content, and action, an account that avoids the difficulties of Davidson�s picture. Thus in the second section I outline two theoretical preliminaries (the representational theory of measurement and Savage�s decision theory), in the third section I present the proposed novel account, and in the fourth section I defend it against various objections.

Quine’s Behaviorism and Linguistic Meaning: Why Quine’s Behaviorism is not Illicit

Some of Quine’s critics charge that he arrives at a behavioristic account of linguistic meaning by starting from inappropriately behavioristic assumptions (Kripke 1982, 14; Searle 1987, 123). Quine has even written that this account of linguistic meaning is a consequence of his behaviorism (Quine 1992, 37). I take it that the above charges amount to the assertion that Quine assumes the denial of one or more of the following claims: (1) Language-users associate mental ideas with their linguistic expressions. (2) A language-user can have a private theory of linguistic meaning which guides his or her use of language. (3) Language learning relies on innate mechanisms. Call an antecedent denial of one or more of these claims illicit behaviorism. In this paper I show that Quine is prepared to grant, if only for the sake of argument, all three of the above claims. I argue that his claim that “there is nothing in linguistic meaning beyond what is to be gleaned from overt behavior in observable circumstances” is unscathed by these allowances (Quine 1992, 38). And I show that the behaviorism which Quine does assume should be viewed as a largely uncontroversial aspect of his evidential empiricism. I conclude that if one sets out to dismiss Quine’s arguments for internal-meaning skepticism, this dismissal should not be motivated by the charge that his conclusions rely on the illicitly behavioristic assumptions that some have suggested that they do.

A relevance reassessment of reformulation markers

This discussion note deals with the reformulation markers (RMs) that is, that is to say, in other words, namely, i.e. and viz. and the role they play in linguistic communication as described by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995). According to Blakemore (1996), items such as that is (to say) and in other words are conceptual and non-truth conditional. This fact makes her conclude that classifying them with discourse connectives like so and after all (procedural and non-truth conditional) under the category of discourse markers (as in, for example, Fraser, 1990, 1996) has no theoretical value. Blakemore (1996) bases her analysis on Wilson and Sperber’s (1993) account of linguistic meaning and on Ifantidou-Trouki’s (1993) explanation of parenthetical constituents. Blakemore (2002: 179–183) retakes part of her analysis of RMs to prove the same point: That there is no single category of discourse markers and that research on discourse markers as a class has no value. Blakemore (1996) distinguishes two types of use: Discourse sequence uses (1) and nominal apposition uses (2):

Religious discourse and first person authority

AbstractCompetent speakers are normally authoritative as to the meaning of their words. Increasingly students of religion seem to be discounting this "first person authority", claiming that religious persons are not - as they seem to be - talking about what Hume called "invisible intelligent powers", gods, goddesses, ancestors, angels, and the like. This interpretative stance has understandably drawn criticism. I argue that the force of first person authority is diminished in religious discourse, and that this explains why it is so widely discounted. My argument turns on a broadly externalist account of linguistic meaning. When we view linguistic meaning as somehow "in the head" of the speaker, the interpreter will be set the incoherent task of trying to extract it with a minimum of distortion. But by viewing the meaning of words as emerging from the circumstances, mental and physical, and of their use, we may uncover the basis of first person authority and come to understand why its place in religious discourse has proved elusive.

Curbing the Realist's Flights of Fancy

In his paper “Fanciful Arguments For Realism,” Alan H. Goldman offers what he terms a “local case” argument as part of a more general defence of “semantic realism” against the anti-realist manoeuvres of Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam. Semantic realism, here, is the thesis that sentences in a natural language L may have content that transcends any verification or assertability conditions associated with these sentences by competent speakers of L: an adequate semantics, the realist maintains, must equate the content of an assertoric sentence with its realist truth-conditions. Goldman contends that his local case argument demonstrates both the need to accord a central role to a realist conception of truth in an account of linguistic meaning, and the manner in which we acquire such a conception. He further maintains that the argument cannot be countered by any of the strategies that anti-realists are wont to deploy against “global case” arguments for realism (“evil demon” and “brain in a vat” scenarios, for example), and that, given the local case argument, we can recognise the fallacy in such anti-realist strategies and thereby rehabilitate the global case arguments that a full-blown semantic realism requires. I argue that Goldman's local case cannot fulfil its intended function in the overall economy of his argument, and that his strategy for defending semantic realism is fundamentally flawed. In so doing, I attempt to curb the realist's flight of fancy before it leaves the ground.

The Behaviourist Foundation of Sellars' Semantics

It is well known that Sellars' account of linguistic meaning is closely linked to a framework of Rylean-behaviouristic concepts. It is far from clear, however, what the nature of this relation exactly is. Some (e.g., Chisholm, [2], 523) have construed this relation as conceptually so tight as to commit Sellars to logical behaviourism about meaning: semantical statements would be shorthand ways of talking about overt verbal and nonverbal behaviour and behavioural dispositions. On the other hand, some (e.g., J. Young, [18]), have construed the relation so loosely as to deny that the behaviouristic framework can possibly provide a conceptually adequate basis for understanding semantical discourse.