Work In Philosophy Of Language Research Articles

High-Stakes Interpretation

Courts look at text differently in high-stakes cases. Statutory language that would otherwise be “unambiguous” suddenly becomes “less than clear.” This, in turn, frees up courts to sidestep constitutional conflicts, avoid dramatic policy changes, and, more generally, get around undesirable outcomes. The standard account of this behavior is that courts’ failure to recognize “clear” or “unambiguous” meanings in such cases is motivated or disingenuous, and, at best, justified on instrumentalist grounds. This Article challenges that account. It argues instead that, as a purely epistemic matter, it is more difficult to “know” what a text means—and, hence, more difficult to regard that text as “clear” or “unambiguous”—when the practical stakes are raised. For that reason, this Article insists, it is entirely rational for courts to be more cautious when interpreting text in high-stakes cases than they would be if the stakes were low. Drawing on contemporary work in philosophy of language and epistemology, this Article grounds its argument in the observation that ordinary speakers’ willingness to attribute “knowledge” or “clarity” decreases as the practical stakes increase. And while the technical explanations of this phenomenon vary, they all reflect a basic insight: that one needs greater epistemic justification to act on some premise the higher the practical stakes. To illustrate, this Article applies the above insight to various interpretive settings. Considering judicial review, for example, this Article explains that it makes good epistemic sense for a court to wait until it is really sure that a statute means what it thinks it means before taking the extraordinary step of invalidating that statute as unconstitutional. Similarly, this Article urges that it is just sound epistemic practice for a court is to construe a statute in a way that would unsettle an existing implementation regime only if it is especially well justified in its reading of the statutory text—that is, only if it really knows that its reading is correct. This Article thus offers at least a partial justification of courts’ seemingly loose treatment of statutory text when the practical stakes are raised. And it does so, in contrast to prior scholarly efforts, by appeal to reasons that both formalists and instrumentalists can accept.

Conditionals and Propositions in Semantics

The project of giving an account of meaning in natural languages goes largely by assigning truth-conditional content to sentences. I will call the view that sentences have truth-conditional content propositionalism as it is common to identify the truth-conditional content of a sentence with the proposition it expresses. This content plays an important role in our explanations of the speech-acts, attitude ascriptions, and the meaning of sentences when they appear as parts of longer sentences. Much work in philosophy of language and linguistics semantics over the last halfcentury has aimed to characterize the truth-conditional content of different aspects of language.

Meaning and Truth

This paper concerns a key point of decision in Donald Davidson's early work in philosophy of language — a fateful decision that set him and the discourse in the area on the path of truth-theoretic semantics. The decision of moment is the one Davidson makes when, in the face of a certain barrier, he gives up on the idea of constructing an explicit meaning theory that would parallel Tarski's recursive way with truth theory. For Davidson there was little choice: he tells us he does not see how to deal with the difficulty except in the radical way he proposes. But there is a way to give such a meaning theory — a meaning theory proper which, using classical logic only, meets a meaning-theoretic analogue of Convention T, satisfies Davidson’s three key desiderata for a theory of meaning, reflects linguistic competence, and avoids quantifying over meanings. The meaning theory sketched here uses Tarskian strategies, as Davidson proposed, but differs from Davidson's approach in not going by way of a truth theory for the target language.

Introduction: Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics

Anthony Appiah is a major figure on the philosophical scene, whose work in philosophy of language and (especially) political philosophy has been very influential. Given his status, his new book on experimental and empirical approaches to ethics was bound to attract a great deal of attention. Experiments in Ethics deserves and repays the sustained scrutiny to which it has been subjected. In this brief introduction, I will sketch the themes of Appiah’s important book, by way of opening the way for the detailed discussion which follows. Philosophy in the analytic tradition has been revitalized by what we might call the naturalistic turn. This turn toward the sciences has taken two different, though overlapping, forms. Some naturalists are essentially empiricists—attempting to apply the findings of existing science to philosophical problems—whereas, and more recently, some are experimental philosophers, using the methods of science as well as its body of findings to test philosophical claims. Both kinds of naturalists have challenged common sense certainties, including the certainties of some philosophers. Unsurprisingly, these twin movements have attracted a great deal of controversy within philosophy. Yet as Appiah shows, these movements can be seen as a return to philosophy’s roots. Philosophy has traditionally been closely informed by scientific work, and the best philosophers have often engaged in science themselves. It is the era of conceptual analysis divorced from mere empirical engagement that is the aberration, not the turn to the empirical. If philosophy is, as Wilfred Sellars famously put it, the attempt “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” it is required to engage deeply with the sciences. One positive outcome of Appiah’s work, it is to be hoped, is to lower tensions between the traditional and empirically minded camps and encourage more fertile collaborations. If there is any area in which collaboration seems unlikely, however, it is ethics. Nowhere has the Neuroethics (2010) 3:197–200 DOI 10.1007/s12152-010-9076-2

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Recent Work on Propositions

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Recent Work on Propositions

Thomas Hobbes on "Discourse" in Politics

The salience of language in Hobbes's work has been recognized, but interpretations of his ideas on this subject have been remarkably discordant. The principal reason, this article argues, is that Hobbes is interpreted in the light of modern theories of meaning in language, whereas a coherent account can only be given by understanding the idea of signification current in the seventeenth century. The author contends that an appropriately contextual explication of signification shows not only that Hobbes's ideas on language are very nearly the reverse of those at work in most twentieth-century philosophy of language, but also sheds light on several important aspects of Hobbes's work.

How not to ask a favor in Wolof

Abstract Starting from an incident of pragmatic translation error, this paper explores the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of Wolof requests in comparison with requests in American English. The requests arc first analyzed according to a semantic framework (derived from recent work in philosophy of language) of propositions and conditions pertinent to an utterance's counting as a request. Within this framework are then compared (a) the syntactic forms of these requests, and (b) actual social situations in which they are used. Wolof and American requests differ less in their linguistic form than in the cultural background of concepts and expectations with which members of a society interpret a social situation (and select a particular way of requesting as appropriate). Thus one cannot understand the pragmatics of requests by looking only at their linguistic forms and inferring pragmatic intentions such as degrees of politeness. Rather, one must examine the matching of linguistic form to social situation, ...