Abstract
Sentences, speech acts, and thoughts are alike in that they have propositional content. Thus, ‘La neige est blanche’ means that snow is white; in uttering ‘Over my dead body’, Betty was letting you know that the probability of her going out with you wasn’t very high; and one of your mental states is a belief that Palermo is south of Rome. Because sentences, speech acts, and thoughts all have propositional content, one can’t sensibly limit one’s semantic interests to the philosophy of language; the theory of content, my concern in this paper, is defined by issues that cut across both the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind.
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Notes
For present purposes, I count that-clauses as referential singular terms even if they’re to be analyzed on an analogy with Russell’s treatment of primary occurrences of definite descriptions.
MIT Press (1987).
They don’t quite function in this way when they’re being quantified into, as in `Mary believes of some student that he plagiarized his paper’.
MIT Press (1992).
I ignore tense and temporal reference for simplicity.
See my “The Mode-of-Presentation Problem,” in C. Anderson and J. Owens, eds., Propositional Attitudes (Stanford: CSLI (1990)), and “Belief Ascription,” The Journal of Philosophy,LXXXIX, 10 (October 1992): 499–521.
Schiffer, op. cit.
Ibid., p. 121.
The position now to be sketched without a supported defense is more fully elaborated, and defended, in my “Language-Created Language-Independent Entities,” Philosophical Topics 24 (1) (1996): 149–167. See also my “A Paradox of Meaning,” Noûs 28 (1994): 279–324, Mark Johnston, “The End of the Theory of Meaning,” Mind & Language 3 (1988): 153–185, and Robert Stalnaker, “On What Possible Worlds Could Not Be,” in A. Morton and S. Stich, eds., Benacerraf and His Critics (Blackwell (1996)).
Johnston, op. cit., p. 38.
What follows is culled from “A Paradox of Meaning,” pp. 311–313.
Alex Barber, in “The Pleonasticity of Talk About Concepts,” forthcoming in Philosophical Studies,also develops a theory of what he, too, calls pleonastic concepts. Although our two conceptions of pleonastic concepts aren’t the same, there are, as you’d expect, important affinities, and I especially applaud his implying that concepts are mere epiphenomena of the something-from-nothing linguistic transformations by which they’re introduced.
A Paradox of Meaning.“
See also Jerry Fodor, “Review of Stephen Schiffer’s Remnants of Meaning,” A Theory of Content and Other Essays (MIT Press (1990)).
See especially “A Paradox of Meaning.”
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Schiffer, S. (1999). Meanings and Concepts. In: Korta, K., Sosa, E., Arrazola, X. (eds) Cognition, Agency and Rationality. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 79. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1070-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1070-1_5
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