Stephen Schiffer

I. Vague Properties and the Problem of Vagueness The philosophical problem of vagueness is to say what vagueness is in a way that helps to resolve the sorites paradox. Saying what vagueness is requires saying what kinds of things can be vague and in what the vagueness of each kind consists. Philosophers dispute whether things of this, that, or the other kind can be vague, but no one disputes that there are vague linguistic expressions. Among vague expressions, predicates hold a special place in the problem of vagueness, for it’s their vagueness that is soritesgenerating. That puts the vagueness of predicates at the hub of the problem of vagueness, and there can be little doubt that we’ll be a short step from home if we can account for it. Any account of vagueness will of course require commitment to theses that are themselves foci of philosophical debate, but one can’t expect to get anywhere without taking on some as working hypotheses and then striving to say something that will be plausible if those hypotheses are plausible. One of the working hypotheses of this paper is that propositional attitudes and propositional speech acts are relations to propositions of some stripe or other, in the generic sense in which a proposition is an abstract, mind- and language-independent entity that has a truth condition, and has that truth condition both essentially and absolutely (i.e. without relativization to anything).1 The existence of propositions requires the existence of properties, in the generic sense in which a property is an abstract, mind- and language-independent entity that has an instantiation condition, and has that instantiation condition both essentially and absolutely. For present purposes it will be harmless to pretend that the propositions we believe and assert are Russellian propositions---structured entities whose basic constituents are the objects and properties our beliefs and speech acts are about. When a propositionalist speaks in loosey-goosey mode, she is apt to say that a sentence token is true just in case the proposition expressed in its utterance is true.

When I was invited to participate in this symposium, I welcomed what I thought would be the opportunity to apply my views about the semantics and logic of vague language to the real-life problems of vagueness legal theorists worry about. I confess to having formed my ambition without a very clear sense of what jurisprudential problems might be illuminated by general theories of vagueness. To be sure, I was able to guess that a symposium on Vagueness and Law must have something to do with the dilemmas courts face when it is indeterminate how a legal dispute should be resolved. What I had not thought through was how philosophers like myself might help to illuminate those dilemmas by bringing to bear on them their own logico-semantical theories of vagueness. This was unfortunate because, having done a bit of homework, I have reached the conclusion that philosophical theories of vagueness, even if true, have nothing to offer jurisprudential concerns about vagueness. Once she is reminded of certain platitudes about vagueness, the legal theorist needs no further help from philosophers of language and logic. Let’s see why this is so

David’s epistemic understanding of two-dimensional semantics has these two features. First, although he considers at least two construals of epistemically possible worlds, on one of them they are centered metaphysically possible worlds. Second, David intends epistemic two-dimensional semantics to yield a theory of propositional-attitude content, as well as having application to the semantics of natural language expressions. These two features come together in David’s “The Components of Content,” where he deploys the apparatus of epistemic two-dimensional semantics to provide an account of propositional-attitude content, and where, for reasons of simplicity and familiarity, epistemically possible worlds are taken to be centered metaphysically possible worlds. My talk is about this account of content.

A single argument template---the EPH template---can be used to generate versions of the best known and most challenging skeptical problems. In his brilliantly groundbreaking book Knowledge and Its Limits, Timothy Williamson presents a theory of knowledge and evidence which he clearly intends to provide a response to skepticism in its most important forms. After laying out EPH skepticism and reviewing possible ways of responding to it, I show how elements of Williamson’s theory motivate a hitherto unexplored way of responding to EPH-generated skeptical arguments. Then I offer reasons to doubt the correctness of Williamson’s response

In this foundational work on the theory of linguistic and mental representation, Stephen Schiffer surveys all the leading theories of meaning and content in the philosophy of language and finds them lacking. He concludes that there can be no correct, positive philosophical theory or linguistic or mental representation and, accordingly advocates the deflationary "no-theory theory of meaning and content." Along the way he takes up functionalism, the nature of propositions and their suitability as contents, the language of thought and other sententialist theories of belief, intention based semantics, and related issues in ontology. Stephen Schiffer is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A Bradford Book.

Stephen Schiffer presents a groundbreaking account of meaning and belief, and shows how it can illuminate a range of crucial problems regarding language, mind, knowledge, and ontology. He introduces the new doctrine of 'pleonastic propositions' to explain what the things we mean and believe are. He discusses the relation between semantic and psychological facts, on the one hand, and physical facts, on the other; vagueness and indeterminacy; moral truth; conditionals; and the role of propositional content in information acquisition and explanation. This radical new treatment of meaning will command the attention of everyone who works on fundamental questions about language, and will attract much interest from other areas of philosophy.

S produces the sounds “It’s snowing” in the presence of A, and A instantaneously comes to know that it’s snowing. S has communicated to, or told, A that it’s snowing, and, as a result of S’s speech act, A came to know that it was snowing. Philosophical interest in communication turns on four inter-related questions. The first is about the logical structure of communication, or, more specifically, about whether communication is a relation that holds among three things just in case the first communicated the second to the third. The second is about the explication, or analysis, of communication. The third is about the role of communication in the explication of linguistic meaning. And the fourth is about how knowledge is acquired by communication. The questions are interrelated in that answers to any one question may constrain answers to one or more of the others.

A generative grammar for a language L generates one or more syntactic structures for each sentence of L and interprets those structures both phonologically and semantically. A widely accepted assumption in generative linguistics dating from the mid-60s, the Generative Grammar Hypothesis , is that the ability of a speaker to understand sentences of her language requires her to have tacit knowledge of a generative grammar of it, and the task of linguistic semantics in those early days was taken to be that of specifying the form that the semantic component of a generative grammar must take. Then in the 70s linguistic semantics took a curious turn. Without rejecting GGH, linguists turned away from the task of characterizing the semantic component of a generative grammar to pursue instead the Montague-inspired project of providing for natural languages the same kind of model-theoretic semantics that logicians devise for the artificial languages of formal systems of logic, and “formal semantics” continues to dominate semantics in linguistics. This essay argues that the sort of compositional meaning theory that would verify GGH would not only be quite different from the theories formal semanticists construct, but would be a more fundamental theory that supersedes those theories in that it would explain why they are true when they are true, but their truth wouldn’t explain its truth. Formal semantics has undoubtedly made important contributions to our understanding of such phenomena as anaphora and quantification, but semantics in linguistics is supposed to be the study of meaning. This means that the formal semanticist can’t be unconcerned that the kind of semantic theory for a natural language that interests her has no place in a theory of linguistic competence; for if GGH is correct, then the more fundamental semantic theory is the compositional meaning theory that is the semantic component of the internally represented generative grammar, and if that is so, then linguistic semantics has so far ignored what really ought to be its primary concern.

The proper statement and assessment of Russell's theory depends on one's semantic presuppositions. A semantic framework is provided, and Russell's theory formulated in terms of it. Referential uses of descriptions raise familiar problems for the theory, to which there are, at the most general level of abstraction, two possible Russellian responses. Both are considered, and both found wanting. The paper ends with a brief consideration of what the correct positive theory of definite descriptions might be, if it is not the Russellian theory.