Default Semantics

Jaszczolt, Kasia M.

doi:10.1016/b0-08-044854-2/01033-6

Cited by 9 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…56 56 Levinson (2000), 37–38, and 112–134. See also Harnish (1998 (1976)), 267; Horn (2004), 12–17, and Jaszczolt (2005), 55–58. Cf.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A Dual Aspect Account of Moral Language

Strandberg

2011

Philos Phenomenol Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. It is often observed in metaethics that moral language displays a certain duality in as much as it seems to concern both objective facts in the world and subjective attitudes that move to action. In this paper, I defend The Dual Aspect Account which is intended to capture this duality: A person's utterance of a sentence according to which φing has a moral characteristic, such as "φing is wrong," conveys two things: The sentence expresses, in virtue of its conventional meaning, the belief that φing has a moral property, and the utterance of the sentence carries a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that the person in question has an action-guiding attitude in relation to φing. This account has significant advantages over competing views: (i) As it is purely cognitivist, it does not have the difficulties of expressivism and various ecumenical positions. (ii) Yet, in spite of this, it can explain the close, "meaning-like," connection between moral language and attitudes. (iii) In contrast to other pragmatic accounts, it is compatible with any relevant cognitivist view. (iv) It does not rest on a contentious pragmatic notion, such as conventional implicature. (v) It does not imply that utterances of complex moral sentences, such as conditionals, convey attitudes. In addition, the generalized implicature in question is fully calculable and cancellable.

show abstract

“…56 56 Levinson (2000), 37–38, and 112–134. See also Harnish (1998 (1976)), 267; Horn (2004), 12–17, and Jaszczolt (2005), 55–58. Cf.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is sometimes called “default reasoning” (see e.g. Bach (1984), 37–58, and Jaszczolt (2005), Ch. 2).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Dual Aspect Account of Moral Language

Strandberg

2011

Philos Phenomenol Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Such representations (merger representations, Σs) are compositional by methodological assumption. See Jaszczolt 2005Jaszczolt , 2010Jaszczolt , 2016b common parlance and the common experience (represented in complex concepts) would signal. As such, it is compatible with the B-theory and so with theories of time M advanced in modern physics.…”

Section: Read War and Peace Last Yearmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human Imprints of Real Time: from Semantics to Metaphysics

Jaszczolt

2020

Philosophia

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Investigation into the reality of time can be pursued within the ontological domain or it can also span human thought and natural language. I propose to approach time by correlating three domains of inquiry: metaphysical time (M), the human concept of time (E), and temporal reference in natural language (L), entertaining the possibility of what I call a 'horizontal reduction' (L > E > M) and 'vertical reduction'. I present a view of temporality L/E as epistemic modality, drawing on evidence from the L domain and its correlates in the E and M domains. On this view, the human concept of time is a complex, 'molecular' concept and can be broken down into primitive concepts that are modal in nature, featuring as degrees of epistemic commitment to representations of states of affairs. I present evidence from tensed and tenseless languages (endorsing the L > E path) and point out its compatibility with the view of real time as metaphysical modality (endorsing the E > M path). Keywords Metaphysical time. Real time. Human concept of time. Time in language. Temporal reference. Reductionism. Modal reduction. Default Semantics. Tenseless languages Abbreviations time M Real time/metaphysical time time E Human concept of time time L Time in language 1 The Questions 'Yes, I love life. Why?' 'But you've made up your mind to shoot yourself.' Philosophia

show abstract

“…It is certainly not compositional in the technical sense of this term, as this is a construct in certain semantic theories needed to justify "building block" models of meaning, wherein meaning is inherent in abstract and invariant lexical forms, which are then combined into sentences that express logical propositions (e.g., Fodor and Lepore 2002). Further, the notion of compositional meaning has been thoroughly criticized from distributed and integrationalist quarters (e.g., Love 1990; Taylor 2017; Thibault 2017), as well as from within semantics (e.g., Jaszczolt 2005;Recanati 2012;Travis 2008;Zuidema and De Boer 2009). Certainly, linguistic actions' "meanings" -in the sense of the constraints they impose on interaction dynamics -can be brought about using shorter or longer utterances and, in writing and typography (but not in speech), the elements can be moved around and physically re-combined, but neither of these matches the technical concept of compositionality.…”

Section: Ungrounding Symbols From Icons and Indexesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity

Steffensen

Harvey

2018

Cognitive Semiotics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Human language is extraordinarily meaningful. Well-spoken or well-written passages can evoke our deepest emotions and elicit all manner of conscious and subconscious reactions. This is usually taken to be an insurmountable explanatory challenge for ecological approaches to cognitive science, the primary tools of which concern coordination dynamics in organism-environment systems. Recent work (Pattee, H. H. & J. Rączaszek-Leonardi 2012. Laws, Language, and Life. Dordrecht: Springer) has made headway in describing the meaningfulness of linguistic units — the kind of meaning that we perceive as mediated by specific symbols — within an ecological framework, by building an account based on Howard Pattee’s conceptualization of symbols as physical, replicable, historically-selected constraints on the dynamics of self-organizing systems (Pattee, H. H. 1969. How does a molecule become a message?. Developmental Biology 3(supplemental). 1016; Pattee, H. H. 1972. Laws and constraints, symbols and languages. In C. H. Waddington (ed.), Towards a Theoretical Biology, 248–258. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). In order to propose an “interactivity-based” approach to linguistic meaning, this paper takes the following steps: first, it rejects the view of linguistic meaning as fully independent from organism-environment interactions, as exemplified by formal approaches in philosophical semantics. Second, it presents a cutting-edge example of an ecological approach to symbols, namely Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi’s (Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 2009. Symbols as constraints: The structuring role of dynamics and self-organization in natural language. Pragmatics and Cognition 17(3). 653–676. DOI:10.1075/pandc.17.3.09ras; Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 2016. How does a word become a message? An illustration on a developmental time-scale. New Ideas in Psychology 42, Supplement C: 46–55. DOI:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.08.001) version of Pattee’s symbols-as-constraints model. Third, it reviews and critiques a recent attempt (Rączaszek-Leonardi, J., I. Nomikou, K. J. Rohlfing & T. W. Deacon. 2018. Language development from an ecological perspective: Ecologically valid ways to abstract symbols. Ecological Psychology 30(1). 39–73) to integrate the symbols-as-constraints model with Terrence Deacon, T. W. 1997. The Symbolic Species. New York: W. W. Norton and Company; Deacon, T. W. 2011. The symbol concept. In M. Tallerman & K. R. Gibson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, 393–405. Oxford: Oxford University Press) semiotic view of symbols, arguing that the properties ascribed to linguistic symbols, both by Deacon and very widely throughout the cognitive sciences, are not properties of individual instances of linguistic action. Rather, they belong to a particular mode of description that draws generalizations across the phenomenological experience of many language users. Finally, it lays out the core components of a novel “interactivity-based” approach to linguistic meaning. On this view, human beings engage in constant, hyper-flexible entrainment and enskillment that produces tremendous perceptual sensitivity to vocal and acoustic patterns. This sensitivity enables us to coordinate our in-the-moment behavior with large-scale behavioral patterns within a larger population, and to compare our own actions to those large-scale patterns. Thus, the most important contribution made by an interactivity-based approach is that it accounts adequately for the role played by population-level behavioral patterns in the control of short-timescale, here-and-now linguistic actions. In so doing, it offers the grounds for an ecological account of rich linguistic meaning.

show abstract

Default Semantics

Cited by 9 publications

References 2 publications

A Dual Aspect Account of Moral Language

A Dual Aspect Account of Moral Language

Human Imprints of Real Time: from Semantics to Metaphysics

Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About