Dear subscribers Professor Robbie Williams (University of Leeds) is giving a talk tomorrow (Thursday) at 18.30 in Winstanley Lecture Hall, Trinity College. The talk is entitled 'Semantic teleology and semantic bookkeeping'. Scroll down for the abstract.
I hope to see many of you there! TPS Committee ABSTRACT: A is twice as long as B. When true, this reports a fact purely about A and B. That the length of C is 2 is not purely a fact about the relation between C and the number 2---indeed, it's incomplete without a specification of a certain bookkeeping convention, whereby we choose a unit of length. The same distinction is present in reporting semantic features of language. Some semantic features of language are invariant across all bookkeeping conventions---perhaps that "eira yn wynn" is true in Welsh iff snow is white. Others are clearly not. For example, the extensions of relational predicates are standardly treated as sets of ordered pairs. That we construct these ordered pairs in Kuratowski's way rather than Wiener's, surely has nothing to do with the underlying semantic facts we're interested in. But there are vexed cases in the middle. The most impressive version of the Skolem-Putnam paradox argues that what we talk about, in the broadest sense (i.e. what lies within the range of our quantifiers) is a matter of mere bookkeeping. The case for this rests on two claims: (i) facts about linguistic usage, construed as liberally as one wishes, dramatically underdetermine what we mean when we say `all'. (ii) tie-breaking constraints not tied to usage (appeals to simplicity, Lewis and Sider on eligibility) may fix the meaning of `all', but only relative to a bookkeeping convention. I'll be putting forward some easy extensions of standard arguments in defence of (i). Evaluating (ii) requires we find some criterion for sorting out which features of theorizing count as bookkeeping conventions, and which capture the real underlying facts. I'll explore and generalize an answer that Hartry Field put forward in the 70s, which requires an independent specification of the point and purpose of thinking about semantics and metasemantics. Field's own answer vindicates (ii). I'll try looking at ways to block it. _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
