Abstract
In this chapter I position the original DTM amongst four classic theories: Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics, Wifried Sellars’ theory of language, Quine’s behavioral theory of language and Davidson’s truth conditional semantics. I argue that some of the similarities and differences between the DTM and these theories help to understand distinctive features of Ajdukiewiczian account.
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Notes
- 1.
One of the obvious reasons for this is that the work wasn’t actually written by de Saussure, but has been reconstructed posthumously from his students’ notes.
- 2.
We will see a modern version of the same observation in Jaroslav Peregrin’s theory discussed in Chap. 7.
- 3.
See Harris (1996) for a comprehensive comparison of later Wittgenstein and de Saussure.
- 4.
De Saussure could argue that the pieces are initially defined by their positions and that the differences between classes of chess pieces are system-relative. The only thing we need is for them to differ, but how this difference is presented becomes completely arbitrary. This is why we can have so many representations of chess.
- 5.
This was pointed out to me by Robert Brandom in a private conversation.
- 6.
- 7.
See George (2000) for a good summary of change in Quine’s view on the notion of observation.
- 8.
This line of argumentation attracted criticism in Sober (1993).
- 9.
Davidson would probably have retorted that no other notion functions this way.
- 10.
Although Tarski talks about “satisfaction”, Davidson does not hide the fact that it boils down to reference.
- 11.
In the sense that we can take them for granted as “semantic talk” and explain its meaning relative to a given community.
- 12.
However, as Pagin points out in the same essay, this switch in perspective is by no means trivial as the speaker has to recognize others as linguistic community members (Pagin 2013).
- 13.
Note that this example is very specific since it contains words that belong to a specialized vocabulary.
- 14.
This assumes that we will be able to solve the problem of extrapolation of meaning I pointed out in Chap. 3, but we already know that we have to do something about it.
- 15.
Let us assume for the sake of this argument that all of these sentences are axiomatic directives of our language.
- 16.
Note how well this word fits in this context.
- 17.
At least according to the interpretation I wish to use in the revised version of the theory, since, as we saw in Chap. 3, the original formulation is a bit indecisive in this respect.
- 18.
Classic examples of malapropisms come from Shakespeare, who ridicules characters of lower social status who try to impress others by using sophisticated vocabulary.
- 19.
This is a quote from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The Rivals (1979), in which one of the characters (Mrs Malaprop) makes many errors in this vein. This is the play from which the term “malapropism” originated, although the phenomenon was, of course, recognized much earlier.
- 20.
We do it a lot. I have made a deliberate spelling mistake in the word “correct”. Did you spot it?
- 21.
For example, he uses a similar argumentation about the impossibility of translation between two languages in order to explain our inability to reduce psychological vocabulary to the physiological one.
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Grabarczyk, P. (2019). The DTM Among Classic Theories. In: Directival Theory of Meaning. Synthese Library, vol 409. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18783-5_4
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