Introduction: Foundational Issues in Philosophical Semantics
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Introduction: Foundational Issues in Philosophical Semantics Carlotta Pavese1 · Andrea Iacona2
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
This issue encompasses eight papers that have been presented at the Topoi Conference 2018—Foundational Issues in Philosophical Semantics—which took place in Turin in June 2018 and was organized by the Center for Logic, Language, and Cognition (LLC) at the University of Turin. The issue also includes five more papers that have been invited or obtained through a call. The papers are topically divided into three main sections that reflect quite closely the original structure of the conference: Choice of paradigm, Core topics in philosophical semantics, and Pragmatics and Communication.
1 Section I: Choice of Paradigm The five papers in this section discuss different foundational frameworks in the theory of meaning. In “Fostering Liars”, Pietroski argues that two classical problems for a Davidsonian theory of meaning are fatal for it, when combined. Davidson conjectured that suitably formulated Tarski-style theories of truth can “do duty” as theories of meaning for the spoken languages that humans naturally acquire. But this conjecture faces at least two old objections: Foster’s problem and the Liar Paradox. Foster noted that given a theory of the sort Davidson envisioned, for a language L, there will be many equally true theories whose theorems pair endlessly many sentences of L with very different specifications of whether or not those sentences are true. And if L includes the word ‘true’, then for reasons stressed by Tarski, it is hard to see how any truth theory for L could be correct. Pietroski * Andrea Iacona [email protected] Carlotta Pavese [email protected] 1
Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell University, 218 Goldwin Smith Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
Department of Philosophy and Education, Center for Logic, Language, and Cognition, University of Turin, Via S. Ottavio 20, 10124 Torino, Italy
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mounts a sustained argument that appealing to possible worlds will not help with Foster’s Problem, for reasons that Chomsky (1957, 1977, 1995) discussed in the 1950s, and appealing to trivalent models of truth will not avoid concerns illustrated with Liar Sentences. In “Behavioral Foundations for Expression Meaning,” Megan Stotts proposes an alternative to a well-established tradition in the philosophy of language, according to which 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. Stotts explores the possibility of understanding the meaningfulness of linguistic expressions just in terms of observable linguistic behavior. Specifically, the view explored is one on which 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
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