Filipe Martone

University of Campinas / FAPESP

Against Sentential and Propositional Priority in Metasemantics

17 November 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: In virtue of what do our words have meaning? It is nearly a truism that words have meaning because they are connected with human actions: we endow them with significance in virtue of using them to engage with the world. Sentence Priority is the thesis that the fundamental language-world engagement occurs at the level of whole sentences. It follows that sentences, not words, are the fundamental bearers of meaning. The motivation behind Sentence Priority is what I call Propositional Priority, the idea that propositional speech acts (things like asserting and commanding) are the most fundamental linguistic actions out of which meaning emerges. In this talk I argue that those theses cannot be right. I show that, if we accept Propositional Priority, we must accept Sentence Priority. However, Sentence Priority leads to the indeterminacy of word meaning, and this makes it impossible to explain how unused sentences have the meanings that they do. In short, Propositional and Sentence Priority are incompatible with compositionality, or so I claim. I argue that there must be at least some fundamental language-world connections at the subsentential level that explain how word meaning can directly emerge. I conclude by sketching a broadly Russellian account.