José L. Zalabardo defends a pragmatist account of what grounds the meaning of central semantic discourses―ascriptions of truth, of propositional attitudes, and of meanings. He argues that it is the procedures that regulate acceptance and rejection that give the sentences of these discourses their meanings, and explores the application of the pragmatist template to ethical discourse. The pragmatist approach is presented as an alternative to representationalist accounts of the meaning grounds of declarative sentences, according to which a sentence has the meaning it has as a result of links with the bits of the world that it purports to represent. Zalabardo develops a version of the open-question argument to support the claim that the meaning grounds of the discourses he focuses on cannot receive representationalist accounts. It is generally assumed that a declarative sentence cannot perform the function of representing the world unless it has a representationalist meaning ground. Zalabardo rejects this assumption, arguing that sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds can represent the world in exactly the same sense that sentences with representationalist meaning grounds do. This requires that there are states of affairs that the target sentences represent as obtaining, and Zalabardo develops an account of the nature of the states of affairs that can play thisrole for sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds. Pragmatist Semantics concludes by developing the suggestion that the meaning grounds of all our representational discourses might be ultimately pragmatist.
Author(s): José L. Zalabardo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Commentary: Improvements with respect to 6518935365D33067454569A2BCFDDB53: uniform page size, bookmarks, pagination
Pages: 249
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Preface
1. Representational Discourse
1.1 Propositional Representation and Meaning Grounds
1.2 A Version of Representationalism
1.3 Reference Failure and Representation
1.4 Descriptive Semantics and Foundational Semantics
1.5 Conclusion
2. The Open-Question Argument in Ethics
2.1 Open Questions and Synonymy
2.2 The Naturalist Strikes Back
2.3 The Argument Revised
2.4 Moral Twin-Earth
2.5 Moral Motivation
2.6 Moral Intuitionism
2.7 Conclusion
3. The Open-Question Argument in Semantics
3.1 Truth Ascriptions
3.2 Propositional Attitudes
3.3 Meaning
3.4 Guidance
3.5 Conclusion
4. Some Reactions
4.1 Pragmatist Representationalism
4.1.1 Ethical Subjectivism
4.1.2 Protagorean Relativism
4.1.3 Interpretivism
4.2 The Flight from Representation
4.2.1 Ethical Non-cognitivism
4.2.2 Deflationism about Truth
4.2.3 Instrumentalism about the Attitudes
4.2.4 Kripke’s Sceptical Solution
4.3 Representation Regained
4.4 Conclusion
5. Pragmatist Meaning Grounds
5.1 Assertibility Conditions
5.2 Justification?
5.3 Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use
5.4 Assertion and Acceptance
5.5 Pragmatist Meaning Grounds
5.6 Pragmatism and Its Fellow Travellers
5.6.1 Pragmatist Representationalism vs. Genuine Pragmatism
5.6.2 Pragmatism vs. Non-cognitivism
5.6.3 Rationalist Pragmatism
5.7 The ‘Explanation’ Explanation
5.8 Conclusion
6. Belief and Desire
6.1 Belief, Desire, Behaviour
6.2 The Intentional Stance
6.3 Indeterminacy and Charity
6.4 The Ontogenesis of the Intentional Stance
6.5 The Curse of Knowledge
6.6 The Hybrid Policy and the Meaning Grounds of Belief and Desire Ascriptions
6.7 Other Conditions
6.7.1 Causation
6.7.2 Representation
6.7.3 Mind Reading
6.7.4 Self-Interpretations
6.7.5 Linguistic Evidence
6.8 Conclusion
7. Meaning and Truth
7.1 Radical Translation/Interpretation
7.2 Compositionality
7.3 Meaning and Belief
7.4 Charity
7.5 Permutations
7.6 Familiarity
7.7 Reference and Causation
7.8 Projection
7.9 Linguistic Interpretation and Non-linguistic Belief Ascription
7.10 Self-Interpretation
7.11 Consequences of Pragmatism
7.12 Truth Ascriptions
7.13 Representational Discourse
7.14 Wright’s Discipline: Cognitive Command
7.15 Ideal Conditions
7.16 Conclusion
8. Harmony and Abstraction
8.1 The Problem of Harmony
8.2 An Idea of Quine’s
8.3 Abstraction
8.4 Two Readings of Abstraction Principles
8.5 Abstraction and Predicate Reference
8.6 The Two-Way Approach
8.7 Some Consequences of the Two-Way Approach
8.8 Abstraction and the Problematic Discourses
8.9 Aufhebung?
8.10 Conclusion
9. The Primacy of Practice
9.1 Theoretical Science
9.2 Lewisian Humility
9.3 Epistemological Challenges to Lewis’s Argument
9.4 Quidditism and Combinatorialism
9.5 Ramseyan Structuralism
9.6 Other Options
9.7 Pragmatist Meaning Grounds for Theoretical Science
9.8 A Pragmatist Progress
9.9 Pragmatist Meaning Grounds and Genuine Representation
9.10 A Regress Argument
9.11 Tu quoque?
9.12 Conclusion
Epilogue: The Meaning Grounds of Meaning-Ground Specifications
References
Index
