Meaning and the World
Committee: Michael Kremer (co-chair), Malte Willer (co-chair), James Conant, and Robert Brandom (external)
A semantic theory for a natural language aims to assign "semantic values" to the words, phrases, and sentences of that language. These semantic values are meant to be formal models of the meanings of these words, phrases, and sentences that are grasped by speakers of that language. Existing semantic theories, by and large, take these semantic values to contain "worldly" entities of which speakers are supposed to have knowledge, such as possible worlds or things in the actual world such as, objects, properties, and relations. In this dissertation, I argue against any such semantic theory, against any species of what I call "worldly semantics." There is, I claim, a basic problem of circularity with such theories: worldly semantic theories require that speakers are capable of having knowledge of the worldly entities that figure into semantic values of words, phrases, and sentences independently of their knowledge of the meanings of these words, phrases, and sentences, but their knowledge of these worldly entities is in fact dependent on their knowledge of these meanings. In response to this fundamental problem, I propose a version of conceptual role semantics, drawing from Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom, according to which the worldly contents that are taken to be antecedently given by worldly semantic theories are understood as nothing other than reifications of conceptual roles. This makes space for an account of the real relation between language and the world with the surprising consequence that, though many proponents of traditional worldly semantic theories have taken conceptual role semantics to be, in the words of Jason Stanley, "useless for understanding the language-world relation," only such a semantic theory enables us to non-circularly understand the relation between language and the world.
Chapter 1 draft, Chapter 2 draft
Committee: Michael Kremer (co-chair), Malte Willer (co-chair), James Conant, and Robert Brandom (external)
A semantic theory for a natural language aims to assign "semantic values" to the words, phrases, and sentences of that language. These semantic values are meant to be formal models of the meanings of these words, phrases, and sentences that are grasped by speakers of that language. Existing semantic theories, by and large, take these semantic values to contain "worldly" entities of which speakers are supposed to have knowledge, such as possible worlds or things in the actual world such as, objects, properties, and relations. In this dissertation, I argue against any such semantic theory, against any species of what I call "worldly semantics." There is, I claim, a basic problem of circularity with such theories: worldly semantic theories require that speakers are capable of having knowledge of the worldly entities that figure into semantic values of words, phrases, and sentences independently of their knowledge of the meanings of these words, phrases, and sentences, but their knowledge of these worldly entities is in fact dependent on their knowledge of these meanings. In response to this fundamental problem, I propose a version of conceptual role semantics, drawing from Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom, according to which the worldly contents that are taken to be antecedently given by worldly semantic theories are understood as nothing other than reifications of conceptual roles. This makes space for an account of the real relation between language and the world with the surprising consequence that, though many proponents of traditional worldly semantic theories have taken conceptual role semantics to be, in the words of Jason Stanley, "useless for understanding the language-world relation," only such a semantic theory enables us to non-circularly understand the relation between language and the world.
Chapter 1 draft, Chapter 2 draft