View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by White Rose E-theses Online THE FOUNDATIONS OF PUBLIC LANGUAGE: WORDS AS SOCIAL ARTEFACTS Nicholas Mark Tasker Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science July 2017 1 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2017 The University of Leeds and Nicholas Mark Tasker The right of Nicholas Mark Tasker to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My supervisors while writing this thesis were Robbie Williams, Gail Leckie and Paolo Santorio. Their extensive comments on drafts have been essential. I’m lucky to have been advised by three excellent philosophers who were generous with their time, extremely professional, and who helped me say what I wanted to say. I don’t know how to thank them enough. For four years I have been part of the Nature of Representation research project. This has been a privilege in so many ways. Thanks to Robbie Williams for engineering this particular social entity. The project – and through it, my research – was funded by the European Research Council. In my fourth year I was funded by a Jacobsen Studentship from the Royal Institute of Philosophy. I’m extremely grateful for these opportunities. There are many wonderful philosophers in Leeds. Thanks to all of them, and to the many academic visitors who’ve given talks or come to conferences, and to the grad students, who are ace. In 2016 I organised a conference on the notion of mental representation in generative linguistics. This was made possible by the Nature of Representation project and graduate attendance was supported by the Analysis Trust. The speakers were Frances Egan, Georges Rey, John Collins, Wolfram Hinzen, Ianthi Tsimpli and David Adger. A few months later some of us were reunited at another event on the same topic at the Norwegian Summer Institute in Language and Mind at CSMN, Oslo. These were formative experiences. In June this year Gail Leckie organised a conference on the metaphysics of words, at which I gave a talk based on chapter three of this thesis. Also speaking were Linda Wetzel, Lee Walters, Mark Richard, Jess Pepp, Robert May and Stefano Predelli. Thanks to them for the discussions, as well as to the conference delegates. Finally, for supporting me personally, thanks to my partner, Stéphanie, as well as to Anne, Brian, Carol, and all the family members who don’t make it into this thesis for alphabetical reasons. 3 ABSTRACT This thesis brings together topics in philosophy of language, social ontology, and generative linguistic theory. The first main contribution is to develop a theory of artefacts, and to apply it to linguistic entities. The general account of artefacts I offer here draws heavily on Amie Thomasson’s work, but I go on to isolate a class of artefacts which I refer to as essentially communicative artefacts, ECAs, and I argue that words fall into this category. One benefit of this approach is that insights arising from social ontology can be used to remedy deficiencies in philosophical discussions of words: for example, I show why the failure of form- theoretic approaches to word individuation poses a significant obstacle to attempts to deploy Searleian assumptions about social ontology in a theory of words. The second main contribution is to provide an account of public language which is compatible with developments in generative linguistics. Too often, philosophical discussions of words ignore conceptions of language which are prevalent in linguistics, which means that fruitful connections between the disciplines are missed, and that worries expressed by linguists about philosophical conceptions of public language go unanswered. My account of words is intended not only to be compatible with generative linguistic theory, but also to be thoroughly embedded in the philosophy of science and mind which animates generative linguistic theorising. From this vantage point, I evaluate a range of sceptical arguments which have been levelled against public language views. I conclude that what the philosophy of generative linguistics recommends is not an eliminativist position with respect to public language, nor a naively scientistic one, but a practical, principled, methodological preference. A third contribution is to provide original objections to extant theories of words, including those due to David Kaplan, Herman Cappelen, and Zoltan Szabo. 4 CONTENTS Introduction........................................................................................................................ 10 Chapter 1: Artefacts ...................................................................................................... 25 1. Intentionalism about Artefacts....................................................................................... 26 1.1 The authorial connection.......................................................................................... 26 1.2 Intended functions or intended features? .............................................................. 29 1.3 Success conditions..................................................................................................... 30 1.4 Metaphysical assumptions ........................................................................................ 31 2. Motivating Intentionalism............................................................................................... 32 2.1 Swamp artefacts ......................................................................................................... 32 2.2 Minimal creation and exaptation............................................................................. 33 2.3 Reference to artefacts................................................................................................ 37 3. Artefact Kinds................................................................................................................... 40 3.1 Matching conceptions............................................................................................... 41 3.2 Ignorant artisans ........................................................................................................ 42 3.3 Self-referentiality........................................................................................................ 44 3.4 The structure of artefact concepts .......................................................................... 46 4. Artefacts and Recognisability.......................................................................................... 51 4.1 Thomasson on recognisability ................................................................................. 52 4.2 Clarifications of Thomasson on recognisability.................................................... 54 4.3 Recognisability and publicness ................................................................................ 58 4.4 Recognisability and exaptation................................................................................. 62 5. Objections and Replies.................................................................................................... 63 5.1 Automated production.............................................................................................. 63 5.2 Over-intellectualisation............................................................................................. 65 5.3 Not all artefacts.......................................................................................................... 65 6. Conclusion......................................................................................................................... 67 5 Chapter 2: Words as Artefacts............................................................................... 68 1. Applying the Account to Words .................................................................................... 69 1.1 A fruitful analogy....................................................................................................... 69 1.2 Swamp words, minimal creation, exaptation......................................................... 69 1.3 Bringing the internalist and externalist perspectives together............................. 73 2. Intending Words............................................................................................................... 77 2.1 Speedy and spontaneous intentions........................................................................ 78 2.2 Mental representation in linguistics......................................................................... 85 2.3 Intending and cognizing ........................................................................................... 89 2.4 Intentional under what descriptions?...................................................................... 93 3. Types of Words ................................................................................................................ 98 3.1 Word pluralism........................................................................................................... 98 3.2 The intuitive