Meaning and Truth Topics in Contemporary Philosophy Editors Joseph Keim Campbell Michael O’Rourke David Shier Editorial Board Members Kent Bach Michael Bratman Nancy Cartwright Richard Feldman John Martin Fischer Nick Gier P.J. Ivanhoe Michael McKinsey John Perry James Rachels Stephen Schiffer Harry Silverstein Brian Skyrms Peter van Inwagen Meaning and Truth Investigations in Philosophical Semantics Edited by Joseph Keim Campbell Washington State University Michael O’Rourke University of Idaho David Shier Washington State University Seven Bridges Press, LLC Fifth Avenue, New York, NY - Copyright © by Seven Bridges Press, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sys- tem, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy- ing, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Executive Editor: Jehanne Anabtawi Managing Editor: Katharine Miller Composition: Bytheway Publishing Services Cover Design: Darby Downey, DD Creative Services Printing and Binding: CSS Publishing Company, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meaning and truth : investigations in philosophical semantics / edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, David Shier. p. cm. — (Topics in contemporary philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (pbk.) .Semantics (Philosophy)—Congresses. I. Campbell, Joseph Keim, – II. O’Rourke, Michael, – III. Shier, David, – IV.Series. B .M *.—dc Manufactured in the United States of America Contents Foreword by Stephen Schiffer vii Editors’ Acknowledgments ix Introduction Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and David Shier 1. Investigations in Philosophical Semantics: A Framework 1 Part I. Cognition and Linguistic Meaning Kent Bach 2. Seemingly Semantic Intuitions 21 Michael McKinsey 3. The Semantic Basis of Externalism 34 Robin Jeshion 4. Acquaintanceless De Re Belief 53 Stephen Schiffer 5. Meanings 79 Part II. Linguistic Meaning and the World Nathan Salmon 6. Mythical Objects 105 v i Meaning and Tru t h Marian David 7. Truth and Identity 124 Kirk Ludwig 8. What Is the Role of a Truth Theory in a Meaning Theory? 142 Jonathan Sutton 9. A New Argument against Modesty 164 Robert Cummins 10. Truth and Meaning 175 Part III. Aspects of Linguistic Meaning Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore 11. Insensitive Quantifiers 197 Emma Borg 12. Deferred Demonstratives 214 Lenny Clapp 13. What Unarticulated Constituents Could Not Be 231 Anne Bezuidenhout 14. Generalized Conversational Implicatures and Default Pragmatic Inferences 257 Kent Bach and Anne Bezuidenhout 15. Distinguishing Semantics and Pragmatics 284 Index 311 Foreword Stephen Schiffer New York University THE PAPERS IN this volume are article versions of selected talks given at the third annual Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference, on Truth and Meaning, held in Moscow, Idaho, and Pullman, Washington, March ‒, . This was the first year the conference was funded to bring in participants from all over the United States, and if, as I expect, future colloquia in the series meet the same high standards, the annual INPC will occupy an important place in American philosophical life. As a high-quality annual colloquium, it will quickly gain the prestige and attention now held by only two other such philosophy col- loquia in the United States, the one at Chapel Hill and the one at Oberlin. I was honored by the invitation to be the keynote speaker at the collo- quium, but I had little idea of what to expect from a philosophy of language colloquium in Moscow, Idaho. Happily for me, it turned out to be one of the best-run and most stimulating philosophy conferences I have ever attended in any area of philosophy. The editors of this volume, Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and David Shier, who must be thanked for conceiving the series and actually getting it to happen, organized and ran the conference with near-awesome skill. The Universities of Idaho and Washington State are to be commended for their generous and wholehearted support, thereby making this new philosophical institution possible, one that will bring to those universities each year a level and excitement of philosophical activity enjoyed at very few other universities. The collection of papers published in this volume, aptly subsumed under the wide-ranging rubric Meaning and Truth, covers most, if not all, of the top- ics in the philosophy of language that are currently of most concern. The papers by Lenny Clapp, Ro b e rt Cummins, Marian David, Kirk Ludwig, Mi c h a e l McKinsey, Jonathan Sutton, and myself deal with foundational questions about the nature of meaning, of meaning theories for particular languages, and the v i i i Meaning and Tru t h analytical relations between meaning and truth. The papers by Emma Borg, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore, Robin Jeshion, and Nathan Salmon bring specific questions about reference and quantification to bear on more general questions about the nature of meaning. And the contributions by Kent Bach and Anne Bezuidenhout concern the semantics/pragmatics distinction. (More de- tailed introductory comments on these papers is provided in the editors’ intro- duction.) I hope readers of these papers will be as stimulated and informed by them as we, the participants of the conference, were by the talks on which they were based. Editors’ Acknowledgments T H E E S S AY S I N this volume are descendants of some of the papers delive re d at the third Inland No rt h west Philosophy Conference (INPC), held Ma rc h – , , in Mo s c ow, Idaho, and Pullman, Washington. For their finan- cial and administrative support of the conference, we are grateful to the Philosophy departments of Washington State Un i versity (Michael Ne v i l l e , Chair) and the Un i versity of Idaho (Kathryn Paxton George, Chair), the College of Liberal Arts at Washington State Un i versity (Barbara Couture , Dean), the College of Letters and Science at the Un i versity of Idaho (Ku rt Olsson, Dean), and the Re s e a rch offices at the two universities. The INPC Steering Committee, consisting of Ma ry Bl o o d s w o rth, Ray Da c e y, Ro b e rt Epperson, David Garrison, Ha r ry Si l verstein, and Ku rt To rell, played a big role in making the conference happen, and we are grateful to them for their time and energy. Special thanks are also due to Jean Mc In t i re, Dee De e Torgeson, and Angie W h i t n e y. In addition, we are grateful to the Franklin J. Matchette Foundation for a grant to sponsor the INPC Keynote Lecture de- l i ve red by Stephen Schiffer, and to the Idaho Humanities Council, a state- based affiliate of the National En d owment for the Humanities, for its con- sistent and unflagging support of the confere n c e . After the INPC was held, difficult decisions had to be made about which of the many excellent conference papers would be included in this volume. We were aided in this task by a number of quick and conscientious referees, to whom we owe a substantial debt of gratitude. Here is that list of creditors: Paddy Blanchette, Mary Bloodsworth, Eros Corazza, Andrew Cortens, James Edwards, Reinaldo El u g a rdo, Ro b e rt Epperson, Heimir Geirsson, Nick Gi e r, Mi c h a e l Losonsky, Peter Ludlow, Marga Reimer, Samuel Rickless, Harry Silverstein, Rob Stainton, Russell Wahl, Leora Weitzman, and Jonathan Westphal. We thank Seven Bridges Press for their help on this book project in all of its stages. Also, the contributing authors have been wonderful to work with on this project, and we are grateful to them. x Meaning and Tru t h Finally, we thank our families for their support during conference prepara- tions and the editing process. Extra special thanks go out to Delphine Keim Campbell, Rebecca O’Rourke, and Phyllis Shier, the three people to whom this book is dedicated. running head x i chapter 1 Investigations in Philosophical Semantics: A Framework Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and David Shier Framing the Th eo ry of Meaning The Big Picture MEANING IS EVERYWHERE—in our thoughts, in our words, in our actions, in the world. Wherever we turn, it is there. Each of us crafts a life around the meaning we find, setting goals, acting and reacting according to what we take this meaning to be. There is, of course, nothing new in this observation. It de- scribes our experience in a way that collects together a varied set of features that do not form a natural category. As such, it may motivate a theoretical investi- gation into the nature of meaning, but it will not ground one. A ground for a theory of meaning can only be recovered if this observation is focused. There are a number of ways to do this. We might focus, for instance, on those aspects that are regarded as generally meaningful, as opposed to those that have meaning for specific individuals or select groups. Alternatively, we might focus on meaning- ful human actions, attending to other appearances of meaningfulness only when they are relevant to an understanding of action. Still another way is to focus on those aspects of meaning that are grounded in representation, or roughly, things that have the function of standing for or signifying something beyond themselves. For instance, photographs, diagrams, realistic drawings, sentences, discourses, and so on. Attempts at isolating these for investigation reveal that other similar things do not count as representa- tions—doodles, say, or random strings of letters. Thus, the first question that arises for one who chooses this approach is What is the difference between repre- sentations and similar things that are not representations? An answer to this ques- tion should make clear the properties that distinguish representations from non- representational objects.