PhilPeople

University of Sheffield
Department of Philosophy

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

University of Texas at Austin

Department of Philosophy

PhD, 2021

APA Central Division

CV

Sheffield, South Yorkshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Areas of Specialization

Philosophy of Language

Philosophy of Mind

Areas of Interest

Decision Theory

Social Epistemology

Pragmatic Particularism
Ray Buchanan and Henry Ian Schiller

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (1): 62-78. 2021.

For the Intentionalist, utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker’s meaning-intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience’s recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists, holding that the only “principles” of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; “principles” that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable. We discuss some ways in which some theorists have …Read more
For the Intentionalist, utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker’s meaning-intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience’s recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists, holding that the only “principles” of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; “principles” that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable. We discuss some ways in which some theorists have erred in trying to tame the “wild west” of pragmatics and context-sensitivity -- including recent work that makes essential appeal to the information structure of a discourse -- and in so doing, offer a general recipe for defending the Particularist picture of utterance content and its recovery that we favor.