*Reference and *relevance.
Item
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Title
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*Reference and *relevance.
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Identifier
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AAI3325436
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identifier
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3325436
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Creator
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Baumann, Pierre.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Stephen Neale
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Date
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2008
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Philosophy | Language, General
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Abstract
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Implicit in much of contemporary philosophy of language is a certain picture of linguistic communication, which may be called the "code model." Linguistic communication on the code model works like mailing a package: the sender (the speaker) places the item (the thought) in a box (the sentence) and the recipient (the hearer) takes out the very item from the box (understands the thought encoded by the sentence). Thus, if the hearer masters the language (knows the code), she should have no problem identifying the thought or proposition the speaker wants to express by her utterance. Non-literality, indexicality, and ambiguity complicate this simple picture, but in general it is assumed that sentence meaning and syntax suffice to determine the proposition expressed by a literal utterance.;Hand-in-hand with the code model of linguistic communication goes the idea that certain expressions are inherently referential: they pick out or represent entities in the world as a matter of their linguistic meaning and the syntactic category to which they belong. That is, these "referring expressions" refer to things as a matter of their semantics. So, a hearer familiar with the referring expressions of her language should be able to determine the object referred to by a speaker's use of a referring expression (the expression's truth-conditional value) simply on the basis of her linguistic competence, on her knowledge of the code.;Various authors, notably Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and following them, Robyn Carston, Francois Recanati, Anne Bezuidenhout, and Stephen Neale, have argued in recent years that the code model is deeply flawed. In broad agreement with them, this dissertation criticizes one important element of the code model, the notion of semantic reference. The main thesis it defends is that semantic reference is a dubious notion and that reference is best understood pragmatically. The dissertation does not attempt to prove this thesis, since to do so it would have to consider every single type of noun phrase (NP)---too ambitious a task. Instead, the thesis is supported through two case studies. The first case study, developed in Chapters 2-4, concerns a type of NP that is standardly held to have a referential semantics: proper names. The second case study, developed in Chapter 5, concerns a type of NP that is standardly held to have a non-referential semantics: NPs of the syntactic form "every F." In both cases, it is shown that: (a) The expression in question may be literally interpreted referentially or non-referentially; (b) Depending on whether it is interpreted referentially or non-referentially, the expression may have a truth-conditional value that is not the one predicted by the standard semantic analysis of the expression; (c) The type of truth-conditional value the NP may have on a given occasion of use is pragmatically determined in accordance with Relevance-Theoretic principles of interpretation.;These results parallel recent work on demonstratives suggesting that they admit of literal referential and non-referential interpretations. The basic view on reference expressed in this dissertation agrees with the spirit of Peter Strawson's famous dictum that "referring is not something an expression does; it is something that someone can use an expression to do." The dissertation attempts to validate the letter of the remark by exploiting the resources of a particular pragmatic framework, Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
