Language without information exchange

Abstract

This paper attempts to revive a once‐lively program in the philosophy of language—that of reducing linguistic phenomena to facts about mental states and actions. I argue that recent skepticism toward this project is generated by features of traditional implementations of the project, rather than the project itself. A picture of language as essentially a mechanism for cooperative information exchange attracted theorists to metasemantic accounts grounding language use in illocutionary action (roughly, using an utterance to elicit a propositional attitude). When this picture is rejected, a metasemantics grounding language in locutionary action (using an utterance to direct attention) emerges as a more viable proposal, dissolving an intractable issue for traditional theories: the metasemantics of subsentential expressions.

Rule‐Following II: Recent Work and New Puzzles

“…The question then reappears as one about meaning in public language. But there are several proposals about what it is for expressions to have meanings in a public language, for example, in terms of conventions or rules of use which relate the expressions to mental states (Keiser, 2022;Lewis, 1975;Reiland, 2023b).…”

“…The question then reappears as one about meaning in public language. But there are several proposals about what it is for expressions to have meanings in a public language, for example, in terms of conventions or rules of use which relate the expressions to mental states (Keiser, 2022; Lewis, 1975; Reiland, 2023b). Naturally, one would now expect the worry to reappear either at the level of individual “competence” with the language, at the level of meaningful use on an occasion, or at the level of representation/content.…”

Copying and its place in product development: definitions and practices by fashion industry personnel

“…44,45 With the ease of electronic communication, trend watchers, fashion bloggers and other social media followers are continuously, and sometimes simultaneously, reviewing, discussing and copying the latest fashions. Terms from textbooks that include methods for copying [46][47][48] and from research studies about product development [49][50][51] were used in conjunction with fashion adoption theory as the framework to guide the questions and data analysis for this research.…”

Active Inference and Cooperative Communication: An Ecological Alternative to the Alignment View

“…7 Moreover, it could be argued that various other types of use of linguistic communication do not seem to aim at mental state alignment. For instance, linguistic communication can be used for social bonding, entertainment, various types of rituals, etc., which intuitively count as cooperative communication (but might not count as cooperative communication in Vasil et al's sense if they define it as aiming toward mental states alignment) but do not necessarily aim to elicit similar mental states (see Keiser, 2020). acts of communication produced to coordinate complementary behavior will often be imperative acts of language 8 .…”