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SUMMARY:THE SEMANTIC MYTH OF TEXT AND CONTEXT - Professor Stephen Neale\, 
 City University New York
DTSTART:20101018T160000Z
DTEND:20101018T173000Z
UID:TALK26623@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr. Luna Filipovic
DESCRIPTION:The dominant views about meaning and "propositional content" i
 n philosophy and\nlinguistics are founded upon two mistakes that have wrou
 ght havoc as a pair\nwhile sometimes obscuring one another. The first mani
 fests itself in\nconflations of constitutive-metaphysical questions about 
 the factors that\ndetermine meaning and evidential-epistemic questions abo
 ut the factors involved\nin identifying it. The second manifests itself in
  versions of a seductive myth\nabout the relation between text\, context\,
  and content\, a myth fuelled by a\nconflation of conceptually distinct no
 tions of semantics—one from the study of\nnatural language\, the other f
 rom mathematical logic—and by an erroneous picture\nof what can be accom
 plished using model-theory in general and indexical\ngeneralizations of in
 tensional logics in particular. Interestingly\, even\npragmatists such as 
 Sperber and Wilson\, who explicitly reject the myth\,\nconflate the releva
 nt constitutive-metaphysical and evidential-epistemic\nissues\, and in so 
 doing get drawn into confused debates about the determinants\nof propositi
 onal content with those semanticists over whom the myth exerts most\ncontr
 ol. Unless the myth is comprehensively debunked and the metaphysics of\nme
 aning and the epistemics of interpretation cleanly separated\, breaking fr
 ee\nof the confused debates about content that figure so prominently in\nc
 ontemporary research on the semantics of natural language will be impossib
 le.\n
LOCATION:GR5\, English Faculty\, 9 West Road (Sidgwick Site)
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