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Abstract:Temporal externalists argue that ascriptions of thought and utterance content can legitimately reflect contingent conceptual developments that are only settled after the time of utterance. While the view has been criticized for failing to accord with our "ordinary linguistic practices", such criticisms (1) conflate our ordinary ascriptional practices with our more general beliefs about meaning, and (2) fail to distinguish epistemically from pragmatically motivated linguistic changes. Temporal externalism relates only to the former sort of changes, and the future usage relevant to what we mean reflects reason-driven practices that are rational for us to defer to.A number of authors have recently defended a type of "temporal externalism" (hereafter TE) according to which, roughly, ascriptions of thought and utterance content can legitimately reflect contingent conceptual developments that were only settled after the time of utterance. There are different explanations of why this should be the case, with some taking what we mean to supervene at least in part upon our future usage, while others take such ascriptions to show that meaning does not supervene upon usage at all.1 Nevertheless, all versions of TE deny what I will here call 'presentism', namely, the view that what we mean by a term at a time necessarily supervenes upon our use up to that time.2 The response to TE has typically been little more than the proverbial incredulous stare, but Jessica Brown has progressed from the stare to actual criticisms of TE, and the most serious of these relate to how TE supposedly "fails to
Abstract:Temporal externalists argue that ascriptions of thought and utterance content can legitimately reflect contingent conceptual developments that are only settled after the time of utterance. While the view has been criticized for failing to accord with our "ordinary linguistic practices", such criticisms (1) conflate our ordinary ascriptional practices with our more general beliefs about meaning, and (2) fail to distinguish epistemically from pragmatically motivated linguistic changes. Temporal externalism relates only to the former sort of changes, and the future usage relevant to what we mean reflects reason-driven practices that are rational for us to defer to.A number of authors have recently defended a type of "temporal externalism" (hereafter TE) according to which, roughly, ascriptions of thought and utterance content can legitimately reflect contingent conceptual developments that were only settled after the time of utterance. There are different explanations of why this should be the case, with some taking what we mean to supervene at least in part upon our future usage, while others take such ascriptions to show that meaning does not supervene upon usage at all.1 Nevertheless, all versions of TE deny what I will here call 'presentism', namely, the view that what we mean by a term at a time necessarily supervenes upon our use up to that time.2 The response to TE has typically been little more than the proverbial incredulous stare, but Jessica Brown has progressed from the stare to actual criticisms of TE, and the most serious of these relate to how TE supposedly "fails to
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