HU-phillanguage

(The following is adapted from Laura Schroeter’s article “Two-Dimensional Semantics”) "We can think of  contexts  as what David Chalmers calls ‘centered worlds.’ A centered world is a world, an agent within that world, and a time when the agent exists or utters something within that world <w, a, t>" (The following matrices are adapted from Robert Stalnaker) Trump’s use of ‘I’ in his inaugural address: w1 w2 w3 ⟨ w1,DT,t0 ⟩ DT DT DT The leftmost column represents  context The top row represents the world that takes us to an assessment of the utterance Left is  context  of utterance Top row is  circumstance of evaluation So, evaluating Trump’s use of ‘I’ in w1 requires that we keep the referent of ‘I’ fixed when we plug in w2 and w3.  So, ‘I’ is very much like a rigid designator. In other words, possible worlds get appealed to twice—once at the level of character—and once again at the lev...

Let's see if we can make sense of the differences between Kaplan and Lewis.  Here is one way to see what Lewis is up to: Kaplan-to-Lewis Translation Method S is true relative to context C iff the character of S determines in C some content CON and CON is true relative to C It is important to see that what the above says is that Kaplan’s two levels of meaning are reducible to one level of meaning (remember my remark that Lewis is the arch-reductionist). The left side (the stuff before the ‘iff’) is equivalent to the right side (the stuff after the ‘iff’). So, if the above is correct, Kaplan’s two levels of meaning can be reduced to one level of meaning. It is not as though character and content are gone. They are just combined in one stage. The context C gets all of the stuff relevant to the character stage AND all of the stuff relevant to the content stage. So, C gets bloated in order to handle everything that is relevant for determining a truth-value of S. We just...

2 nd Try :    “x meantNN that p” iff x was intended by S to induce a belief in H and S intends H to recognize the intention of S. Once again, we need to make sure that we understand what the above is saying. Given the past post, I can be brief about this.  Left-side: an utterance x conventionally means that p Right-side: the utterance x is intended by S to bring about a belief in someone H and S intends for H to recognize the intention of S (i.e. to recognize that S intends for H to believe that p) And once again the ‘iff’ part can be broken down into its parts: 3.      If an utterance x conventionally means that p, then the utterance x is intended by S to bring about a belief in someone H and S intends for H to recognize the intention of S (i.e. to recognize that S intends for H to believe that p)              AND 4.      If the utterance x is intended b...

1 st Try : “x meantNN that p” iff x was intended by S to induce a belief in H First, let’s get clear on what this 1 st Try is saying: ‘x’ refers to an utterance of some sort, where even gestures and various other kinds of conventional signals count as utterances (e.g. three rings of the bell…). ‘MeantNN’ stands for ‘conventionally means’ or ‘has a meaning that is not determined by some natural law or whatever.’ ‘p’ refers to the proposition that the utterance expresses. For example, the proposition that my utterance of “Snow is white” and your utterance of “La nieve es blanca” both express the same exact proposition.  So, on the left side we have: an utterance of x conventionally means that p The right side should be fairly clear. It is saying that the utterance is intended to bring about a belief in someone. Putting this all together we get: an utterance of x conventionally means that p iff the utterance of x is intended by S (the utterer) to bring about a belief in someo...