Abstract
In this chapter, I leave the historical perspective behind and start to develop the new version of the DTM (which I call simply the nDTM). The chapter starts by revisiting some of the unsolved problems discussed in Chap. 3, such as Alfred Tarski’s challenge and the criteria for choosing meaning directives. Next, we revisit the problem we left in Chap. 4, that is the question of how indeterminacy of translation affects the DTM. The chapter wraps up with the presentation of the new version of meaning directives.
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- 1.
This relation is very similar to the example we used earlier of the difference between conjunction and disjunction.
- 2.
We might ask whether the person using the beech/elm description does actually have any empirical directives connected to these terms. Although empirical languages can contain cases like this, maybe it is possible only with terms with no empirical directives. I believe that even if the original example does not give us the ability to answer this question, we might easily modify it in order for it to fit the DTM. It is easy to imagine a person who cannot differentiate between beeches and elms not because she has no empirical associations with them, but because the circumstances she uses to assert the sentence “This is a beech” and the sentence “This is an elm” are the same. If she is not observant enough to differentiate between the trees, her perceptual experiences of beeches and her perceptual experiences of elms are identical. This means that she could use the same empirical directives to accept sentences about elms and sentences about beeches.
- 3.
I use expressions “Narrow meaning” and “narrow linguistic content” interchangeably.
- 4.
Of course, this scepticism is open to debate. As pointed out by William Bechtel, the development of cognitive science should encourage us to use at least some mental vocabulary (Bechtel 1988).
- 5.
It goes without saying that if you wanted to argue that these two situations (the natural and the artificial) are “the same”, you would be only adding to the confusion as the identity condition capable of equating them remains to be explained.
- 6.
Where “this” will be replaced by a relational description of the distribution of this item.
- 7.
As pointed out by Zabludowski (1989), explaining this notion of “compatibility” might be inconsistent with Quine’s own strict requirements for semantics.
- 8.
It is easy to imagine that some linguists might want to present the foreign language as fundamentally different from their own; it is quite possible that this is what happened to Sapir and Whorf when they exaggerated the differences between English and Hopi.
- 9.
This is possible because the expression can be analysed both as a sentence and as the only term that the sentence contains.
- 10.
Or do we? As we will see, the upshot of the experiment is that we cannot know for sure.
- 11.
This assumption is actually shared with Quine, but it is important to single it out because, as we have seen above (in the example of indeterminacy proposed by Massey), it is sometimes disregarded by his interpreters.
- 12.
As pointed out by Roger Gibson, this is an assumption that can just as well be attributed to Quine (Gibson 2000).
- 13.
Note that you do not have to look into science fiction scenarios to find much more convoluted examples. Real computers represent 0 and 1 by different means. For example, they are represented as different voltages in the processor but at the same time as different polarities on the magnetic hard drive.
- 14.
Some researchers, for example Lila Gleitman, believe that it is quite easy to find duality examples even in natural language. As she points out, “[w]henever the hounds are chasing the fox, the fox is fleeing from the hounds. If some hounds are racing, even with evil intentions, toward a brave fox who holds its ground, they cannot be said to be chasing him” (Gleitman 1990).
- 15.
It is, of course, conceivable that some future technological development could make internal states observable to the community. In this case, they might just as well have been used as outputs. For example, a directive could demand that the user imagines a certain object.
- 16.
It is important to stress that claims like these have the status of hypotheses in the nDTM and have to be tested empirically on the given community – in this particular example, an English-speaking community.
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Grabarczyk, P. (2019). Stepping Outside the Original DTM. In: Directival Theory of Meaning. Synthese Library, vol 409. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18783-5_5
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