A narrow path from meanings to contents
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A narrow path from meanings to contents Paul M. Pietroski1
Accepted: 12 February 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In this comment on Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne’s illuminating book, Narrow Content, I address some issues related to externalist conceptions of linguistic meaning. Keywords Narrow content Linguistic meaning Polysemy
If you’re like me, you’re wondering why I’m a participant in this discussion. (I don’t write papers about narrow content. When the topic comes up, I usually try to remain neutral, refer to others, and talk about linguistic meaning instead.) Yet if I have a Twin-Earth duplicate, he doesn’t wonder why I’m a participant in this discussion, and this confuses both of us. We’ve never been able to see how our thoughts could differ in any psychologically important respect. We learned to live with this, with help from our respective Jerry Fodors, in part by invoking narrow contents. But now Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne—henceforth, J&J—have provided interesting and powerful arguments which make it seem that none of our thoughts have narrow contents. This makes me and my twin worry that none of our thoughts are the same in any theoretically interesting respect. It also makes us suspect that something went wrong, perhaps long ago. We’re inclined to blame our respective Putnams, for reasons I’ll get to. But in any case, I think it’s important to distinguish intentional contents from linguistic meanings, and not slide from claims about one kind of significance to claims about another kind of significance.
& Paul M. Pietroski [email protected] 1
New Brunswick, USA
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P. M. Pietroski
J&J regularly apply this distinction in their remarkably clear book, especially when they contrast Putnam-style claims about the meanings of words with Burgestyle claims about the contents of thoughts. J&J are also admirably explicit about their tendency to suppose (along with ‘‘much of the literature’’) that there is a ‘‘straightforward route from the semantic properties of utterances of linguistic expressions to the corresponding thought constituents.’’ Modulo a few niceties, they think the content of a sentential utterance is the content of the thought expressed by the sentence (in the context of utterance). If there’s also a straight-ish route from expression meanings to the semantic properties of utterances of those expressions, then there’s a pretty straight route from sentence meanings to the thoughts expressed by sentences in contexts. Some time-slices of Fodor accepted this starting point, for dialectical reasons. J&J have convinced me that friends of narrow content should not follow these Fodor-slices, and instead be less concessive than Fodor was. Given space constraints and the other participants, I won’t discuss J&J’s ‘‘mirror man’’ or their arguments concerning duplication, metaphysical constraints on notions of content, and various notions of two-or-three-dimensional contents. For many readers, these will rightly be the most interesting parts of the book. But my report on these parts wo
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