Two years ago, I ran a survey of semantic intuitions concerning empty names, that is, names that appear to be without a referent (e.g., ‘Santa Claus’, ‘Superman’). Some of those who kindly participated in the survey asked me to post the results of the survey. (Thanks again for your help, folks.) …
The following is slightly revised set of questions I posted over at Words and Other Things. Since dipping my toe into Brandom’s inferential-role semantics about ten years ago, these are the questions that still linger. Most of them stem from the fact that (at least in the bits I’ve read) …
Stephen Wolfram, of New Kind of Science and Mathematica fame, is scheduled to make public a new tool next May. Wolfram Alpha is supposed to answer a vast number of questions in natural language by computing the answers from a large set of algorithms and databases. Sounds impressive. (Thanks to …
I just re-read Lexical Competence, by Diego Marconi (MIT Press, 1997), a book that deserves to be read more widely than it has been. Here is my spin on it:Lexical competence is competence in understanding words, a component of general semantic competence (competence in understanding language). Marconi reviews arguments to the …
Which, if any, semantic properties would the utterances of a community of language users have, even if we assumed that the language users had no internal semantic states? My answer will come in multiple posts. Note that by ‘semantic properties’ I mean things like reference, truth, aboutness, and usability-in-an-inference. I will ultimately argue, with a couple of caveats, that their expressions would have a full suite of semantic properties.
In this, the first post in the series, I summarize, defend, and clarify the Standard View of the relationship between the semantic properties of internal states and public linguistic expressions. I’d be interested in comments, as these are ideas I’m slowly developing, and injections of criticism at this early juncture would be most welcome.
Anna-Mari Rusanen told me about this story. Kati Lepisto is a Finnish former model who is now almost completely paralized. She communicates by spelling words with her eye movements, and the best reader of her eye movements (and guesser of what she is trying to say) is her mother. Some …
By Brit Brogaard. It’s called Lemmings (the term was coined by Weatherson: Language-Epistemology-Metaphysics-Mind-ings). Knowing Brit, I expect her blog to be good.
