Research
Research
This paper explores the idea inspired by Williamson (2007) that the meaning of a name is the object such that assigning it as referent maximises knowledge. After situating this idea in a charity-based tradition of interpretation and making it more precise, I argue that it suffers from serious problems. I then show why these problems raise a challenge for charity-based frameworks more generally.
I present two cases each involving one name with multiple candidate referents. These cases raise a problem for Lewis’s (1983) influential account of convention as it applies to language use, and are more generally an important challenge for the project of meta-semantics. The problem is that the account does not privilege, among two possible languages, the one that is (intuitively) being used by the population in question. The source of the problem is a certain pattern of entailments that do not violate compositionality constraints. I explore whether a natural adjustment to the account based on counterfactual regularities might block the problem. I conclude that it doesn’t.
I illustrate what is puzzling about linguistic reference change independently of Kripke's (1980) well-known causal picture. The puzzle threatens many contemporary and non-contemporary accounts of reference fixing including Evans' (1973, 1982) accounts which were motivated by cases of reference change themselves. I also suggest a way out of the puzzle by exploiting the speaker's acceptance patterns of indicative conditionals.
Under a convention based meta-semantics along the lines of Lewis’s (1983) influential account, communities uttering only relatively simple sentences (simple communities) are semantically profuse: their sentences express multiple propositions. Once a community utters more complex sentences however, traditional predictions can be made with respect to how many propositions their sentences express.
Is 'Believe' Vague and Why does it matter ? (In Progress)