Prerequisites
Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Adviser or instructor required.
Course Description
What we talk about when we talk about about (and ‘about’!).
A presupposition of much philosophy of mind and language since at least Frege has been what we might call “monosemanticism,” that the phenomenon of intentionality is fundamentally uniform. The proposition is at once the meaning of the declarative sentence and that to which we’re related in any propositional attitude. Propositions constitute the contents, in some important sense, of both thoughts and sentences. And they determine what those thoughts and sentences are about. In virtue of having the contents they do, thoughts and sentences are apt to have truth conditions and, accordingly, truth values.
A still underdeveloped alternative is “polysemanticism”: that the phenomenon of intentionality is rather fundamentally multiplex. No kind of thing is at once the meaning of a sentence of a natural language and that to which a subject is related in thought. What it is to be the object of an attitude is different in kind from what it is to be the meaning of a sentence.
That idea, for what it’s worth, will be the focus of the seminar: there is more than one way for some thing to present another again—to represent it. And language and thought exploit two different such ways. I think such a view provides a new perspective on long-standing obscurities in philosophy of mind and language, several of which will be revisited and reconstrued. But it is not without its own difficulties.
One central challenge is to explain the nature of communication: an attractively simple view is that (in its paradigm, at least) communication is a matter of one subject’s transmitting the content of a thought of theirs by encoding it in a bit of a common language. But if there’s a sense in which no bit of language can simply encode a thought, then a different account is wanted. If there is time, the seminar will also investigate the motivations for the simple view, and contemplate the prospects for an alternative, according to which communication is not dependent on any content of thought.
Work
Enrolled students will be required to write a substantial term paper. In addition, participants will be expected to take part in online course discussions. Near the end of term, there will be final paper workshops.
Possible Texts
(partial list)
Burge, Davidson, Donnellan, Fodor, Frege, Kripke, Loar, Mates, Putnam, Russell, Salmon