Graduate Seminar Series on Pragmatics - Emma Borg

Truth, Meaning and Polysemy
Abstract: There is a long tradition in philosophy of assuming a connection between linguistic meaning and truth: words are held to refer to or to describe things in the world, sentences are held to be bearers of truth-conditions or to express propositions which are true just in case the world is as represented. This intuitive philosophical leaning is well-captured in Lewis’ famous slogan that “semantics with no treatment of truth-conditions is not semantics”. But is this move to connect linguistic meaning and truth just an ungrounded prejudice? Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in internalist approaches to content (most obviously in work by Noam Chomsky and Paul Pietroski), where the explanatory work of meaning is exhausted by capturing certain language-internal features (such as compositionality and entailment), rather than forging word-world relations. On this model, questions of truth are orthogonal to issues of meaning.
In this talk, I ask what is involved in adopting a truth-conditional approach to linguistic meaning, and investigate the arguments both for and against such an approach. In particular, I explore the extent to which polysemy poses a problem for a truth-conditional approach and critically assess the extent to which internalism provides a better answer.

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  borg-chapt5-internalism-words.doc