One way to silence the powerless, Langton has taught us, is to pre-emptively disable their ability to do things with words. In this paper I argue that speakers can be silenced in a different way. You can let them speak, and obscure the meaning of their words afterwards. My aim is to investigate this form of silencing, that I call retroactive distortion. In a retroactive distortion, the meaning of the words of a speaker is distorted by the effect of a subsequent speech act by a different speaker. After introducing this notion, I explore some reasons why retroactive distortions can be difficult to challenge and argue that, besides constituting a communicative injustice, they can eliminate topics from public consideration and therefore erode public debate.
According to some views (Carston, Fodor), natural language suffers from underdeterminacy, but thought doesn't. According to the underdeterminacy claim, sentence types underdetermine the truth-conditions of sentence tokens. In particular, the semantics of a predicate type seems to underdetermine the satisfaction conditions of its tokens. By contrast, mental representation-types are supposed to determine the truth-conditions of its tokens. In this paper I critically examine these mixed views. First, I argue that the arguments supporting the indispensability of including in one's theory mental representations that are free of the underdeterminacy exhibited by natural language are not sound. As a result, the possibility that mental representation-types are as underdetermined as natural language sentence-types has not been ruled out. Second, I argue that Carston's ad hoc concept-types are as underdetermined as word-types. I finish by arguing that mental representations are also underdetermined in a second sense-mental representation-tokens only determine a partial function from possible worlds to truth-values. UnderdeterminacyThere are reasons to think that the truth-conditional content expressed by an utterance of a well-formed declarative sentence S is not determined by the semantics of S. Here I will focus on the underdeterminacy that can be traced to predicates. The contribution a large class of predicates make to the truth-conditions of an utterance seems to be affected by contextual factors that are not part of the predicate's meaning 1 . Consider the following examples, discussed by Carston ( 2002):(1) The kettle is black.1 Charles Travis has made this point by presenting a variety of examples in which the satisfaction conditions of some predicate shifts across contexts. His examples involve colour predicates ('is green'), artefact terms ('is a desk'), magnitudes ('weighs 80kg'), etc.
McGowan ha proporcionado un meca-nismo lingüístico que explica cómo el lenguaje puede constituir daño. Su idea es que las profe-rencias de manera rutinaria establecen normas-s sobre qué está permitido en un contexto dado. Mi objetivo es argumentar que estas normas-s son sensibles a la posición conversacional del hablante. En concreto, sostengo que la fuerza de la norma establecida depende de la posición del hablante. En algunos casos, el hablante puede incluso carecer de la posición requerida para esta-blecer nuevas normas-s. McGowan has provided a linguistic mechanism that explains how speech can constitute harm. Her idea is that utterances routinely enact s-norms about what is permissible in a given context. My aim is to argue that these s-norms are sensitive to the conversational standing of the speaker. In particular, I claim that the strength of the norm enacted depends on the standing of the speaker. In some cases, the speaker might even lack the standing required to enact new s-norms.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.