Dear all, The Moral Sciences Club's next meeting will be held on Tuesday 1st November. We are delighted to welcome Professor Mark Richard (Harvard), who will be giving a talk entitled "Meanings as Species". Here is the abstract:
Suppose we accept what I take to be Quine’s view in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, that there are no analyticities, that no statement is immune from revision, that no statement is a fixed point in inquiry. Does that mean, as Grice and Strawson and many others suggest, that we must reject talk of sameness of meaning, or that the notion of meaning has no explanatory power? Not at all. Quine’s claims are best understood, I think, as suggesting that we need to think of word and phrase meaning as a dynamic phenomenon: meanings are population level entities, in many ways like species. A phrase’s meaning in a population is constituted by those presuppositions of speakers that are, as we might call it, interpretive common ground: roughly those presuppositions that it is common knowledge that users of the phrase expect auditors to recognize that they make in use and expect auditors to employ in interpretation. Just as the genomic and phenotypical profile of a species changes over time without the species ceasing to exist –there can be changes in the species a population lineage realizes without there being a change of the species it realizes –so there can be changes in what constitutes the meaning, the interpretive common ground, of a word in a population without a change of what the word means. Quine’s remarks on analyticity are a straightforward consequence. In this talk I will develop a view of meaning that reflects this biological analogy. I’ll discuss how we should understand linguistic competence, the relations between this notion of meaning and reference, truth, and the notion of a proposition. And I will say some (not altogether satisfactory) things about the issue linguistic version of the species problem –the problem, that is, of giving tolerably illuminating criteria for when changes in what constitutes a word’s meaning are not just changes in but changes of meaning. The meeting will be held at 2:30 until 4:15, in the **Jane Harrison Room** at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. Please note that this is a different room from the past few weeks, but there will be signposts from the Porters' Lodge as usual. For those who have not yet paid, there is a yearly membership fee of £7.50 for students and £15 for others, or a one-off fee of £3 (£2 for students). These can be purchased online at: http://onlinesales.admin. cam.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=75&prodvarid=87 We look forward to seeing you there. -- Matt Dougherty, James Hutton, and Li Li Tan Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ 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 Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
