Philosophy of Language 780
Spring 2004

Professor Janice Dowell

 

Course Description

 

“When someone speaks truly, what makes his statement true?  We tend to feel that there are two factors: meaning and fact.  A German utters a declarative sentence: ‘Der Schnee ist weiss.’  In so doing he speaks truly, thanks to the happy concurrence of two circumstances: his sentence means that snow is white, and in point of fact snow is white.  If meanings had been different, if ‘weiss’ had meant green, then in uttering what he did he would not have spoken truly.  If the facts had been different, if snow had been red, then again he would not have spoken truly.”

 

        --Quine, Philosophy of Logic

 

The primary aim of this course is to focus on Quine’s first factor and consider classic attempts to ‘say what it is we’re saying’, i.e. what we mean, with our sentences and their subsentential components.  Questions about what our sentences and their components mean arise in a number of areas in philosophy, perhaps most notably metaethics, and are best addressed with the tools the philosopher of language has at her disposal.  Topics will include the sense and reference of singular terms generally and names and definite descriptions in particular, natural kind terms, Kripke’s doctrine of rigid designation, and some of the recent literature by Chalmers and Jackson on two-dimensional semantics, as well as some of precursors to the 2-D framework (notably Stalnaker and Kaplan).  (The 2-D framework can be understood as a filling out of the basic Kripkean framework, resurrecting something like the Fregean notion of sense that drops out of Kripke’s original.)

All of this literature is useful in understanding and settling debates that arise elsewhere in philosophy.  We’ll end the course with a discussion of Jackson’s From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis, which in part relies upon and applies elements of Jackson’s 2-D framework to the debates in metaethics over the existence and nature of moral properties.