Wittgenstein as a Gricean Intentionalist

According to the dominant view, the later Wittgenstein identified the meaning of an expression with its use in the language and vehemently rejected any kind of mentalism or intentionalism about linguistic meaning. I argue that the dominant view is wrong. The textual evidence, which has either been misunderstood or overlooked, indicates that at least since the Blue Book Wittgenstein thought speakers' intentions determine the contents of linguistic utterances. His remarks on use are only intended to emphasize the heterogeneity of natural language. Taking into account remarks written after he finished the Investigations, I show how Wittgenstein anticipated the basic tenets of Gricean intention-based semantics. These are, in particular, the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ meaning and the distinction between what a speaker means by an utterance and what the expression uttered means in the speaker’s natural language. Importantly, Wittgenstein also believed that only the meaning of the speaker determined the content of ambiguous expressions, such as ‘bank’, on a particular occasion of utterance

Representation without Thought: Confusion, Reference, and Communication

Philosophy of mind has been dominated, since Frege, by a puzzle-driven methodology. This tradition aims to provide a coherent system for describing specific semantic features of all conceivable cases where the speaker is confused about the identity of an object. The first chapter develops a theory on which confused identity is a mental state of an agent who either believes falsely that a = b or believes falsely that a ≠ b. Many influential arguments in philosophy are puzzle-driven; Kripke on semantic and speaker reference, Reimer and Kaplan on demonstratives. I show in detail how these and other arguments are invalidated because of doubtful assumptions about confused identity. The alternative is \u27explanation-driven semantics.\u27 Combining Gricean intentionalism and teleosemantic ideas - which are usually thought to be in strict opposition - I show that the basic task of a theory of meaning is to explain how humans express and communicate their thoughts so successfully by linguistic means. Puzzle-driven semantics has no relevance to this project. Confused speakers are \u27abnormal\u27 in Millikan\u27s sense: their mental state disrupts the proper function of the relevant singular terms in their idiolect or language of thought. My positive theory defines a notion of \u27edenic reference,\u27 which idealizes away from confusion in defining the proper function of singular terms. Speakers must satisfy certain cognitive constraints if their utterances are to have a role in explaining the maintenance of a practice of using a singular term in a population. A related constraint on coreference states, roughly, that if a speaker utters a simple sentence containing more than one singular term, she cannot be indifferent as to whether they are intended to refer to the same thing or to distinct things. Such indifference is not impossible, but it disturbs the proper function of the linguistic construction - or what Grice called the \u27optimal\u27 mental state with respect to a form of linguistic behavior

Wittgenstein's Thought Experiments and Relativity Theory

In this paper, I discuss the similarity between Wittgenstein’s use of thought experiments and Relativity Theory. I begin with introducing Wittgenstein’s idea of “thought experiments” and a tentative classification of different kinds of thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s work. Then, after presenting a short recap of some remarks on the analogy between Wittgenstein’s point of view and Einstein’s, I suggest three analogies between the status of Wittgenstein’s mental experiments and Relativity theory: the topics of time dilation, the search for invariants, and the role of measuring tools in Special Relativity. This last point will help to better define Wittgenstein’s idea of description as the core of his philosophical enterprise

Nauðsyn og sannleikur

Þessi ritgerð fjallar um tilraunir heimspekinga til að setja fram útskýringar á nauðsynlegum sannindum. Sérstaklega er grafizt fyrir um það hvaða merkingu það getur haft að útskýra nauðsyn með því að finna „uppsprettu“ hennar. Ýmsar kenningar eru vegnar og metnar og síðan reynir höfundur að stinga upp á ákveðinni hugmynd um það hvernig bezt væri að skilja kröfuna um slíka heimspekilega greinargerð. Tillagan er um leið kenning um nauðsyn og heimspekilega aðferðafræði. Í henni felst að til séu „innhverfar“ skýringar og „úthverfar“ skýringar. Þær fyrri tengja fyrirbærið öðrum rökfræðilega skyldum fyrirbærum en þær síðari reyna að bregða birtu á tengsl þess við ástand mannsins í heiminum. Færð eru rök fyrir því að innhverf skýring á nauðsyn felist í einhvers konar „samhengishyggju“ þar sem innri uppspretta nauðsynjar er talin vera bæði samhengið sem hin nauðsynlega sanna setning er notuð í og samhengi sömu setningar við skyldar setningar. Úthverfa skýringu má finna í því sem ég kýs að kalla „samræmishyggju“ eða „samkomulagshyggju“. Þá er nauðsyn útskýrð með tilliti til þeirra tilfallandi skilyrða heimsins og mannlegs eðlis sem gera fyrirbærið mögulegt yfirleitt. Tengslin á milli þessara tveggja sjónarhorna á nauðsynleg sannindi eru býsna flókin, og stór hluti tilraunarinnar til að útskýra nauðsyn felst í að reyna að varpa ljósi á þetta margslungna samband

Wittgenstein’s Thought Experiments and Relativity Theory

In this paper, I discuss the similarity between Wittgenstein’s use of thought experiments and Relativity Theory. I begin with introducing Wittgenstein’s idea of “thought experiments” and a tentative classification of different kinds of thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s work. Then, after presenting a short recap of some remarks on the analogy between Wittgenstein’s point of view and Einstein’s, I suggest three analogies between the status of Wittgenstein’s mental experiments and Relativity theory: the topics of time dilation, the search for invariants, and the role of measuring tools in Special Relativity. This last point will help to better define Wittgenstein’s idea of description as the core of his philosophical enterprise

Compositionality and Sandbag Semantics

It is a common view that radical contextualism about linguistic meaning is incompatible with a compositional explanation of linguistic comprehension. Recently, some philosophers of language have proposed theories of 'pragmatic' compositionality challenging this assumption. This paper takes a close look at a prominent proposal of this kind due to François Recanati. The objective is to give a plausible formulation of the view. The major results are threefold. First, a basic distinction that contextualists make between mandatory and optional pragmatic processes needs to be revised. Second, the pragmatic theory can withstand a Davidsonian objection only by rejecting the importance of a distinction between primitive and non-primitive semantic items. Thirdly, however, the theory is now open to a worry about how it should be understood: either the theory consists in a very broad functionalist generalization about communication, which makes it explanatorily inert, or it boils down to a highly particularist view about linguistic meaning. Finally, I argue that Recanati's notion of 'occasion meaning' is problematic and suggest replacing it with the notion of speaker meaning, which is explanatorily more basic