How to Do Things With Words

In this provocative book, Barwise and Perry tackle the slippery subject of \"meaning, \" a subject that has long vexed linguists, language philosophers, and logicians.

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Situations and Attitudes.

Naming and necessity

Convention: a philosophical study

Conclusions and Recommendations, are particularly interesting in view of the controversies aroused by the Warnock Report. Many of the recommendations contained here are similar to Warnock's (for example, concerning the legitimacy of AID children, the need for a licensing authority to supervise the work ofAID and IVF centres, etc), but others are at odds with the corresponding Warnock recommendations. In general, the authors place higher value on the family as an institution than did the Warnock Committee and display a much livelier awareness of the possible social dangers of the new techniques. One weakness of the book is that since its authors are approaching these topics from the standpoint of social scientists, their recommendations for legislative action which surely must be based on properly ethical considerations, not merely sociological ones seem devoid of any satisfactory rational support. For example, they concede that experimentation on human embryos is an objectionable practice, since 'the material acting as the subject of the experimentation is a human being at the beginning of its individual development' (p 178); but the practical recommendation which they make concerning this practice is disappointingly feeble:

https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/12/3/165.full.pdf

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Increasingly philosophers (and linguists) are turning their attention to slurs— a lexical category not much explored in the past. These are expressions that target groups on the basis of race (‘nigger’), nationality (‘kraut’), religion (‘kike’), gender (‘bitch’), sexual orientation (‘fag’), immigrant status (‘wetback’) and sundry other demographics. Slurs of a racial and ethnic variety have become particularly important not only for the sake of theorizing about their linguistic distribution adequately but also for the implications their usage has on other well-worn areas of interest. In “Reference, Inference, and The Semantics of Pejoratives,” Timothy Williamson discusses the merits of Inferentialism by looking at Dummett’s treatment of the slur ‘boche.’ Mark Richard attempts to show that, contrary to a commitment to minimalism about truth, one is not conceptually confused in holding that slurring statements are not truth-apt discursive discourses, i.e. statements that are neither true nor false, but still represent the world to be a certain way. Others, like David Kaplan, argue that slurs force us to expand our very conception of meaning. Slurs also rub up against various other issues like descriptivism versus expressivism as well as the semantic/pragmatic divide (cf. Potts). Slurs’ effects on these issues make it difficult to ignore them and still give an adequate theory of language. In this paper, we will be particularly interested in the potential slurs carry to offend. Though xenophobes are not offended by slurs, others are—with some slurs more offensive than others. 2 Calling an Asian businessman ‘suit’ will not rouse the same reaction as calling him ‘chink’. Even co-extensive slurs vary in intensity of contempt. Christopher Darden once branded ‘nigger’ the

Slurring Words 1

We consider Pustejovsky's account of the semantic lexicon. We discuss and reject his argument that the complexity of lexical entries is required to account for lexical generativity. Finally, we defend a sort of lexical atomism: though, strictly speaking, we concede that lexical entries are typically complex, still we claim that their complexity does not jeopardize either the thesis that lexical meaning is atomistic or the identification of lexical meaning with denotation.

The Emptiness of the Lexicon: Reflections on James Pustejovsky's The Generative Lexicon

Recent literature in the philosophy of language and linguistics divides the explanatory landscape into two broad camps: content-based and non-contentbased, with the consensus being that (uses of) slurs express negative attitudes toward their targets. Content-based theorists adopt different strategies for implementing this view, but all agree that slurs (or their uses) communicate offensive content. In this essay, we will challenge the consensus and defend a non-contentbased view. According to us, slurs are prohibited not on account of offensive content they manage to get across, but rather because of relevant edicts surrounding their prohibition. We will argue that Prohibitionism, a term we coined, accounts for all the relevant data, namely, both variation in degrees of offense among slurs and their nonoffensive uses, better than the content-based competitors. We will proceed as follows: First, we will present our positive view and address specific issues that arise for it. Next, we will defend our view from objections, possible and actual. And finally, we will compare Prohibitionism with certain alternatives and show why we believe it to be superior. Before we dive in, several clarifications are in order. bs_bs_banner

What did you call me? slurs as prohibited words

Imagination and Convention is a provocative and stimulating book. When asked to give an example of a clear case where philosophy has made indisputable progress, one of the few candidates that comes to mind is something like a broadly construed Gricean theory of conversational implicatures: something along the lines of Grice’s theory has to be right, that is any theory that essentially involves inferential processes, Relevance Theory included. Nevertheless, in their book, Lepore and Stone make a pretty good case against anything that resembles a Gricean theory. They argue extensively that there is no real theoretical use for the notion of conversational implicature. It is not just that they disagree with a Gricean account of conversational implicatures, they deny the phenomenon altogether. They also offer a plausible alternative to a Gricean theory of linguistic communication: one that relies heavily on linguistic conventions and imagination, rather than on pragmatic mechanisms. A broadly construed Gricean theory of conversational implicature is no longer indisputable. In a sense, Gricean theory and Lepore and Stone’s theory are radically different. The former theory allows a simplification of semantics by complicating pragmatics, while the latter seeks to simplify pragmatics by complicating semantics. Of course, each theory argues for principled reasons to go one way or another. Grice’s core insight is

Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language

INTRODUCTION A certain metaphysical thesis about meaning that we'll call Informational Role Semantics (IRS) is accepted practically universally in linguistics, philosophy and the cognitive sciences: the meaning (or content, or`sense') of a linguistic expression 1 is constituted, at least in part, by at least some of its inferential relations. This idea is hard to state precisely, both because notions like metaphysical constitution are moot and, more importantly, because different versions of IRS take different views on whether there are constituents of meaning other than inferential role, and on which of the inferences an expression occurs in are meaning constitutive. Some of these issues will presently concern us; but for now it will do just to gesture towards such familiar claims as that: it's part and parcel of dog meaning dog 2 that the inference from x is a dog to x is an animal is valid; it's part and parcel of boil meaning boil that the inference from x boiled y to y boiled is valid; it's part and parcel of kill meaning kill that the inference from x killed y to y died is valid; and so on. (See Cruse, Ch. 1 and passim.) IRS brings in its train a constellation of ancillary doctrines. Presumably, for example, if an inference is constitutive of the meaning of a word, then learning the word involves learning that the inference holds. If dog means dog because dog-> animal is valid, then knowing that dog-> animal is valid is part and parcel of knowing what the word dog means; and, similarly, learning that x boiled y-> y boiled is part and parcel of learning what boil means, and so forth. IRS constrains grammatical theories. The semantic lexicon of a language is supposed to make explicit whatever one has to know to understand the lexical expressions of the language, so IRS implies that meaning constitutive inferences are part of the semantic lexical entries for items that have them. Lexical entries are thus typically complex objects (`bundles of inferences') according to standard interpretations of IRS. It is this latter thesis that will primarily concern us in the present discussion. For reasons that we've set out elsewhere, we doubt that IRS can be sustained (Fodor and Lepore, 1992); a fortiori, we doubt the cogency of arguments that take IRS as a premise. The primary question in what follows will be whether there are any persuasive arguments …

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Ernie Lepore

Papers

Slurring Words 1

The Emptiness of the Lexicon: Reflections on James Pustejovsky's The Generative Lexicon

What did you call me? slurs as prohibited words

Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language

The emptiness of the lexicon: Critical reflections on J. Pustejovsky's the generative lexicon