The meaning of meaning-fallibilism

Much discussion of meaning by philosophers over the last 300 years has been predicated on a Cartesian first-person authority (i.e. ‘infallibilism’) with respect to what one’s terms mean. However this has problems making sense of the way the meanings of scientific terms develop, an increase in scientific knowledge over and above scientists’ ability to quantify over new entities. Although a recent conspicuous embrace of rigid designation has broken up traditional meaning-infallibilism to some extent, this new dimension to the meaning of terms such as ‘water’ is yet to receive a principled epistemological undergirding (beyond the deliverances of ‘intuition’ with respect to certain somewhat unusual possible worlds). Charles Peirce’s distinctive, naturalistic philosophy of language is mined to provide a more thoroughly fallibilist, and thus more realist, approach to meaning, with the requisite epistemology. Both his pragmatism and his triadic account of representation, it is argued, produce an original approach to meaning, analysing it in processual rather than objectual terms, and opening a distinction between ‘meaning for us’, the meaning a term has at any given time for any given community and ‘meaning simpliciter’, the way use of a given term develops over time (often due to a posteriori input from the world which is unable to be anticipated in advance). This account provocatively undermines a certain distinction between ‘semantics’ and ‘ontology’ which is often taken for granted in discussions of realism

The role of feedback in building design 1980–2018 and onwards

This is a paper updating the paper I wrote on this topic for BSERT in issue 1 volume 1 in 1980. The original paper set out the causes of failure in building design as being due to various issues such as an inadequate brief, lack of data, poor communication, inadequate analysis or synthesis, quirks of human behaviour which could all contribute. Systematic appraisal – now referred to as post-occupancy evaluation – of buildings in use provides feedback which helps us to understand why theory and practice do not always agree and also gives evidence for improved building economics. It concluded that we have to involve users more in the design of buildings, and for the next generations, we need a much broader based education of building designers. This paper continues the theme by considering the latest methods of measurement and assessment which provide feedback data for sustainability but focusing more on health and wellbeing rating assessments

The Enactive Philosophy of Embodiment: From Biological Foundations of Agency to the Phenomenology of Subjectivity

Following the philosophy of embodiment of Merleau-Ponty, Jonas and others, enactivism is a pivot point from which various areas of science can be brought into a fruitful dialogue about the nature of subjectivity. In this chapter we present the enactive conception of agency, which, in contrast to current mainstream theories of agency, is deeply and strongly embodied. In line with this thinking we argue that anything that ought to be considered a genuine agent is a biologically embodied (even if distributed) agent, and that this embodiment must be affectively lived. However, we also consider that such an affective agent is not necessarily also an agent imbued with an explicit sense of subjectivity. To support this contention we outline the interoceptive foundation of basic agency and argue that there is a qualitative difference in the phenomenology of agency when it is instantiated in organisms which, due to their complexity and size, require a nervous system to underpin their physiological and sensorimotor processes. We argue that this interoceptively grounded agency not only entails affectivity but also forms the necessary basis for subjectivity

Significados no intencionales: de la exclusión a la inclusión

La pragmática de tradición griceana es una importante corriente teórica en filosofía del lenguaje y lingüística. Gracias a ella se entienden de forma cabal aspectos fundamentales de la comunicación intencional. Sin embargo esta tradición teórica no se dedica especialmente al estudio de la transmisión y el reconocimiento de significados no intencionales, por ejemplo ciertos significados que se evocan en actos fallidos, juegos de palabras no buscados y errores del habla. Trataré de mostrar aquí que el estudio de estos significados no intencionales es pertinente para una teoría general de la producción y la comprensión de enunciados. En este sentido, la lingüística neurocognitiva (Lamb 1999, 2004, 2013) considera estos significados no intencionales y a partir de ellos no sólo puede explicar cómo se organiza y cómo funciona el sistema lingüístico de un hablante o de un oyente, sino que además aparece como un interesante complemento de la pragmática.Gricean pragmatics is one of the mainstreams in philosophy of language and linguistics. it has been instrumental in fully understanding fundamental aspects of intentional communication. However, this theoretical tradition has not been especially concerned with the transmission and recognition of unintentional meanings, for example meanings evoked by Freudian slips, unintended puns, and slips of the tongue. Here I aim at showing that the study of such unintentional meanings is relevant for a general theory of utterance production and utterance comprehension. Neurocognitive linguistics (Lamb 1999, 2004 and 2013) has approached those unintentional meanings and has explained how the linguistic system of speaker or a hearer is organized and how it works, and it also figures as an interesting complement of pragmatics.Fil: Gil, Jose Maria. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Mar del Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata; Argentin

Meaning in Animal Communication: Varieties of meaning and their roles in explaining communication

Why explain the communicative behaviours of animals by invoking the information/meaning 'transmitted' by signals? Why not explain communication in purely causal/functional terms? This thesis addresses active controversy regarding the nature and role of concepts of information, content and meaning in the scientific explanation of animal communication. I defend the methodology of explaining animal communication by invoking the 'meaning' of signals, and responds to worries raised by sceptics of this methodology in the scientific and philosophical literature. This task involves: showing what facts about communication non-informational methodology leaves unexplained; constructing a well-defined theory of content (or 'natural meaning') for most animal signals; and getting clearer on what cognitive capacities, if any, attributing natural meaning to signals implies for senders and receivers. Second, it weighs into comparative debates on human-nonhuman continuity, arguing that there are, in fact, different notions of meaning applicable to human communication that have different consequences for how continuous key aspects of human communication are with other species

Pragmatic approach to modality and the modals: with application to literary Arabic

This study sets out a pragmatic speaker-based approach to modality and the modals and applies it to Literary Arabic. The pragmatic framework is based on Searle's (1983) Theory of Intentionality, which is slightly modified to be capable of accounting for the pragmatic implications of the modals. It is postulated that linguistic expressions have 'sense meaning', 'referential meaning' and 'Intentional meaning' and that modal meaning is basically 'Intentional'. The Intentional meaning of the modals is analysed in terms of: i) the speaker's assumptions about his addressee at the time of utterance, ii) his belief or desire with respect to what he is speaking about, and iii) his intention or purpose of producing the illocutionary. act(i.e., the Preparatory Conditions, Sincerity Condition and Illocutionary Point Condition, respectively). In performing the illocutionary act, the speaker's belief, desire, etc. are assumed to be externalized by means of a logically-prior illocutionary act of 'Informing', which is postulated to secure the illocutionary uptake through a complex intention-in-action on the part of the speaker. Non-deontic modal implications are discussed and formalized in chapter 3. They are further clarified through the different environments of Tense, Negation and Interrogation, (chapters 4-6). Chapter 7 discusses the Intentional meaning of Deontic Modality, i. e., PERMISSION and OBLIGATION