Reply to Pietroski
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Reply to Pietroski Juhani Yli-Vakkuri1 • John Hawthorne1,2
Accepted: 6 September 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In this reply to Paul Pietroski’s comment on our book Narrow Content (Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne in Narrow content. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2018), we address his concern that we assume too tight a connection between sentences and contents and thus ignore polysemy. We argue that we were not relying on problematic disquotational assumptions and that our arguments are fully compatible with rampant polysemy. We also argue that Pietroski’s strategy of making room for a theoretically interesting kind of narrow content by giving up the idea that contents determine extensions at indices doesn’t save him from our ‘‘Mirror Man’’ counterexamples. We argue finally that narrow polyadic relations of the sort that feature in our final chapter are better suited than narrow content assignments for Pietroski’s explanatory needs. Keywords Narrow mental content Semantic externalism Semantic internalism Polysemy Indexicality Disquotation Tarski’s theorem
The phenomenon of polysemy is a central theme in Paul Pietroski’s (2020) discussion of our book Narrow Content (NC). Polysemy is the kind of contextsensitivity displayed by most natural language words, as illustrated in a number of examples by Chomsky, echoed by Pietroski. ‘That is water’ might express one proposition—a true one—in a context where the speaker is referring to a 150 ml sample drawn from the St. Lawerence River in Montreal, while expressing a different proposition—a false one—in a context where the speaker is referring to a & Juhani Yli-Vakkuri [email protected] 1
Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia
2
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA
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J. Yli-Vakkuri, J. Hawthorne
150 ml cup of tea, even though the second sample has a much higher H2O content than the first. Each proposition has an equally legitimate claim to being the semantic content of the sentence in the context. These are not examples of ‘conversational implicatures’, ‘conventional implicatures’, ‘speaker’s meanings’, or other phenomena whose study belongs to pragmatics rather than semantics. Nor are they examples of ‘indexicality’, in that they do not at all resemble paradigms like ‘I’ and ‘actually’ whose context-independent meanings we can fruitfully represent, following Kaplan (1977/1989), as ‘characters’ or functions from contexts to contents. This is what we take Pietroski to mean when he speaks of contextsensitivity that ‘can’t plausibly accommodated in Kaplanian ways’, and we agree with him. (On Pietroski’s favored way of understanding polysemy, polysemous words express different concepts on different occasions of use. We tried to steer clear of the ideology of concepts, since it seemed to us a bit fraught. But we have no objection to Pietroski’s using the term ‘concept’ in the way that he does.) Since context-sensitivity was not relevant to our discussion, we simply ignored it. Pretty much all of the words we used or m
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