Paul Pietroski. “Meaning Before Truth”:http://www.wam.umd.edu/%7Epietro/research/papers/mbt.pdf (for a volume of essays on contextualism)
bq. This paper extends the line of thought in “The Character of Natural Language Semantics.” A running theme is that Chomsky offers a conception of semantics that lets us preserve what is right about truth-conditional semantics–and this has less to do with truth than the usual rhetoric suggests–while also preserving late-Wittgensteinian/Austinian insights about the relation between truth, meaning, and context. There are three main sections: one about the relevance of negative facts (and nativism) for semantics, and why this tells against both “deflationary” conceptions of meaning and Quine-Davidson “interpretability” conceptions; one that reviews some familiar reasons for rejecting the hypothesis that names denote things in the environment; and one that concedes externalism about truth, while noting that externalism about linguistic meaning does not follow. The paper ends with a brief tour of some alternatives, and some familiar reasons for rejecting the hypothesis that predicates are satisfied by things in the environment. (Further work along these lines is planned, but not before summer 2004: a companion paper “Character Before Context,” for a volume of essays honoring Robert Stalnaker; and a monograph Semantics without Truth Values, for OUP.)
Home > About This Post
This entry was posted by fintel on Sunday, September 28th, 2003, at 7:53 pm.
Subscribe to the
RSS 2.0 feed for all comments to this post.
Post a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.