Michael Pelczar

Words without Meaning is part of an ongoing effort by Christopher Gauker to give discursive norms pride of place over traditional relations of intentionality, representation, and meaning. In this book, he has a negative goal and a positive one. Negatively, he aims “to instill a sense of despair concerning the prospects” for making sense of the idea that brain states have propositional content. “The received view” is his collective term for theories that do treat beliefs as something like brain states with propositional content. Positively, Gauker’s goal is to provide a theory that dispenses with received intentional relations and does all the work that the received view is supposed to do.

Wittgenstein emphasizes two points concerning his notion of family resemblance. One is that the use of a family resemblance expression resists characterization by certain kinds of rules; the other is that due to the prevalence of family resemblance in the philosophical lexicon, philosophical inquiry must in many cases proceed differently from how it traditionally has. This paper develops an interpretation of family resemblance that seeks to do justice to these claims. I argue that what is characteristic about family resemblance expressions is not that they exhibit a basic semantic feature unique to themselves, but that they combine a number of semantic properties that happen not to be coinstantiated elsewhere. These features include (1) content variability (also a property of ambiguous expressions, polysemes, and standard indexicals), (2) a feature I call "topicality" (which is also a characteristic of polysemes), and (3) "semantic openness" (a feature of many ordinary indexicals). The notions of topicality and semantic openness are explained, and certain terms of natural language are shown to be family resemblance expressions. I conclude by indicating some of the potential philosophical ramifications of these results

It is argued that a subject who has an experience as of succession can have this experience at a time, or over a period of time, during which there occurs in him no succession of conscious mental states at all. Various metaphysical implications of this conclusion are explored. One premise of the main argument is that every experience is an experience as of succession. This implies that we cannot understand phenomenal temporality as a relation among experiences, but only as a primitive feature of experience, or else as something analyzable into wholly non-phenomenal terms.