How to Understand Language: A Philosophical Enquiry 9780773594654
Why are philosophers, as opposed to, say, linguists and psychologists, puzzled by language? How should we attempt to she
151 52 14MB
English Pages [287] Year 2010
Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
1. The puzzles of language
1.1 The uses of language
1.2 Words and meanings
1.3 Compositionality
1.4 The normativity of meaning
2. The starting-point for analysis
2.1 Knowledge
2.2 Linguistic meaning
2.3 Frege's distinction between sense and reference
2.4 Russell's theory of descriptions
2.5 Kripke's attack on descriptivism about names
2.6 Analysis and singular terms
3. Analysing sentence-meaning
3.1 Specifying sentence-meaning
3.2 Natural and non-natural meaning
3.3 Speaker-meaning
3.4 Sentence-meaning
3.5 Problems for Grice's account
4. Analysing synonymy
4.1 The analytic-synthetic distinction
4.2 Holism
5. Radical translation
5.1 The indeterminacy of translation (the argument from below)
5.2 Methodological considerations
5.3 The indeterminacy of translation
5.4 Quine's conclusions on meaning
5.5 Evans's response
6. The structure of a theory of meaning
6.1 What is a theory of meaning?
6.2 Systematicity
6.3 The distinction between sense and force
6.4 The centrality of assertion
6.5 Use-conditions versus truth-conditions
6.6 Use-conditional theories of understanding
7. Radical interpretation
7.1 Constraints on an adequate theory of truth
7.2 The Principle of Charity
7.3 An application: saying that
7.4 Compositionality and extensionality
7.5 Davidson and Foster
7.6 Dummett on Davidson
8. Linguistic norms, communication and radical interpretation
8.1 Davidson on communication
8.2 A non-normative conception of meaning?
8.3 Norms and mistakes
8.4 A generalization of the argument?
9. Linguistic normativity
9.1 Norms and prescriptions
9.2 Correctness-conditions, practical reasoning and norms
9.3 Non-literal uses of language
9.4 Are the norms substantial?
10. Radical or robust?
10.1 The mysteriousness of language
10.2 Doing away with radical interpretation
10.3 Indeterminacy of reference
10.4 Arguments for robust publicity
10.5 Rejecting indeterminacy of reference
11. Language and community
11.1 Natural language is essentially communal: semantic externalism
11.2 Communication requires publicity of meaning
12. Rules and privacy: the problem
12.1 The problem of rule-following
12.2 Kripke's sceptical solution
12.3 Problems for the sceptical solution
13. Rules and privacy: the solution?
13.1 Can there be a private language?
13.2 Platonism about rules
13.3 Consensualism
13.4 Finding a way forward
13.5 Back to the theory of meaning
13.6 Privacy and first-personal authority
14. Truth-conditions versus use-conditions
14.1 Dummett's attack on truth-conditional theories
14.2 Brandom on inferentialism versus representationalism
14.3 Use-conditional accounts of meaning
14.4 The problematic pairs
14.5 The analytic-synthetic distinction
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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