Stephen Schiffer

Meanings and Concepts

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.

Belief Ascription and a Paradox of Meaning

I shall do four things in this paper. First, I shall propose a certain theory of the semantics of belief ascriptions as being the best theory of their semantics relative to a certain assumption. Second, I shall raise three problems for this best theory. Third, I shall make what I hope is an interesting connection between the main issue addressed and the vexing question about the form that a meaning theory for a particular language must take. And fourth, I shall close with a brief look at a paradox that will by then have been generated, and an equally brief statement of the solution to it that I am inclined to favor.

Reply to Ray

T is a compositional supervenience theory for a language L with respect to an agent x iff T is a finitely axiomatized theory whose axioms ascribe a physical property to each word and primitive structure of L, and T has, for each sentence oof L, a theorem that ascribes to oa physical property P such that (1) os having P is logically equivalent to the parts and structure of ohaving the physical properties Ts axioms ascribe to them and (2) it is metaphysically sufficient for xs believing L(o-) that oboth has P and is tokened in xs belief box.

Meaning In Speech and In Thought

If we think in a lingua mentis, questions about relations between linguistic meaning and propositional-attitude content become questions about relations between meaning in a public language (p-meaning) and meaning in a language of thought (t-meaning). Whether or not the neo-Gricean is correct that p-meaning can be defined in terms of t-meaning and then t-meaning defined in terms of the causal-functional roles of mentalese expressions, its apt to seem obvious that separate accounts are needed of p-meaning and t-meaning, since p-meaning, unlike t-meaning, must be understood at least partly in terms of communication. Paul Horwich, however, claims that his ‘use theory of meaning’ provides a uniform account of all meaning in terms of ‘acceptance properties’ that, surprisingly, implicate nothing about use in communication. But it turns out that the details of his theory belie his claim about it.