Knowledge of Meaning

Larson, Richard Κ.; Segal, Gabriel

doi:10.7551/mitpress/4076.001.0001

Cited by 555 publications

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“…Larson and Segal (1995) provide the following case. Suppose that X, after a particularly awful philosophy talk, says in a heavily sarcastic tone, 'That was, like, really good.'…”

Section: Non-semantic Features Encoded In the Complement Clausementioning

confidence: 98%

On an Alleged Connection Between Indirect Speech and the Theory of Meaning

Cappelen

Lepore

1997

Mind & Language

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A semantic theory T for a language L should assign content to utterances of sentences of L. One common assumption is that T will assign p to some S of L just in case in uttering S a speaker A says that p. We will argue that this assumption is mistaken.1. La terra si muove. 2. Galileo said that the earth moves.MA, and related assumptions, have important implications both for how to conceptualize the semantic programme in general and for constraints on the semantics for indirect speech in particular. MA issues in an intuitive, Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at

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“…Larson and Segal (1995) provide the following case. Suppose that X, after a particularly awful philosophy talk, says in a heavily sarcastic tone, 'That was, like, really good.'…”

Section: Non-semantic Features Encoded In the Complement Clausementioning

confidence: 98%

On an Alleged Connection Between Indirect Speech and the Theory of Meaning

Cappelen

Lepore

1997

Mind & Language

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“…Initial attempts to execute the Davidsonian program involved a translation of natural language into a familiar formal language like first order logic, but subsequent work by Higginbotham (1985), Larson and Ludlow (1993) and Larson and Segal (1995) have offered that one should rather provide a recursive characterization of truth directly for linguistic forms.…”

Section: Presentist Semantics With E-type Temporal Anaphoramentioning

confidence: 99%

Metaphysical Austerity and the Problems of Temporal and Modal Anaphora

Ludlow

2001

Nous

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“…But this strikes me as a bizarre interpretation of the Davidsonian program, especially as developed in recent years; see Evans (1981), Higginbotham (1985Higginbotham ( , 1986, Taylor (1985), Parsons (1990), Schein (1993), Larson and Segal (1995), etc. But Horwich provides no citations for this view, which he thinks is 'widely accepted' (p. 517); and in my opinion, no sane Davidsonian would accept it.…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Chomsky (1977Chomsky ( , 1986Chomsky ( , 2000 and others-e.g., Higginbotham (1985), Larson and Segal (1995)-have made these points repeatedly. But it doesn't follow that if you can associate each sentence of English with its meaning, you thereby understand English (or its sentences)-at least not if understanding is taken to be the natural phenomenon exhibited by native speakers.…”

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confidence: 98%

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The Undeflated Domain of Semantics

Pietroski

2000

Sats

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It is, I suppose, a truism that an adequate theory of meaning for a natural language L will associate each sentence of L with its meaning. But the converse does not hold. A theory that associates each sentence with its meaning is not, by virtue of that fact, an adequate theory of meaning. For it is also a truism that a semantic theory should explain the (interesting and explicable) semantic facts. And one cannot decree that the relevant facts are all reportable with instances of schemata like 's means that p' or 's, by virtue of its meaning, is true iff p'. Investigation suggests that there is much more for semanticists to explain: natural languages exhibit synonymies, ambiguities, and entailments; for any string of words, there are endlessly many meanings it cannot have; there are semantic generalizations, including crosslinguistic generalizations, that go uncaptured and unexplained by merely associating sentences with their meanings; etc. Initially, one might think these facts are "peripheral" and can thus be ignored if the aim is to explain why sentences mean what they do. But the study of natural language suggests otherwise. (One can't tell, in advance of investigation, which facts are peripheral to a given domain. It was initially tempting to think that one could ignore falling bodies, and the tides, if the aim was to explain why planets move as they do.)We find out what a theory of meaning can and should explain by doing semantics. We start by trying to explain a range of facts pretheoretically regarded as semantic; and then we see where inquiry leads. This would be too obvious to mention, much less write about, except that some philosophers seem to have lost track of the point. And this is not harmless ignorance of empirical research. For it has been coupled with the observation that one can, without deploying the theoretical apparatus that semanticists standardly deploy, specify trivial algorithms that associate each sentence of a language with its meaning. Thus, confusion about the aims of semantics-and failure to consider its successes-is easily transformed into skepticism about the need for nontrivial theories of the sort that semanticists try to offer. So I will be stressing that facts like those reported with (1) 'Dogs bark' means that dogs bark reflect the tip of an iceberg.Another truism is that speakers of English understand English sentences. If you know English, then modulo performance limitations, you can associate

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Knowledge of Meaning

Cited by 555 publications

References 0 publications

On an Alleged Connection Between Indirect Speech and the Theory of Meaning

On an Alleged Connection Between Indirect Speech and the Theory of Meaning

Metaphysical Austerity and the Problems of Temporal and Modal Anaphora

The Undeflated Domain of Semantics

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