Niklas Dahl

In this paper I explore how we can conceive of communication without recourse to the notion of meaning. The first step is to decouple linguistic understanding from its usual characterization as knowledge of meaning. Instead, I argue that we should think about understanding as a kind of skill or knowledge-how with both a practical and cognitive component. Further, we need to account for the different roles which an expression can play. Essentially, one expression can be understood in different ways with respect to different communicational functions it can fulfill. With the notion of understanding of expressions—competence—in hand, I explain how it relates to the understanding of utterances—comprehension. Since the former is a skill, the latter can be explained as the deployment of that skill to a particular conversational context. Finally, I give an account of communication and discuss the advantages which come from adopting this perspective.

This paper sets out to extend the epistemic semantics presented in Dahl (2023) to modal and conditional logics. To do so, I extend the notion of belief expansion systems, inspired by the AGM-model of belief change, to include belief revision, and uses the resulting structures as models for both conditional and modal logic. In the first case, this applies the well-known approach to conditionals initiated by Gärdenfors (1978), but in a weaker setting which doesn't assume an underlying logic. As such, it results in semantics for both classical conditional logic as well as the intuitionistic conditionals studied by Weiss (2019). For modal logics, it uses the condition that □φ is accepted if and only if φ is accepted under every belief revision. As a result of this system of semantics, we get soundness and completeness theorems for both classical and non-classical systems of modal and conditional logic on the basis of a single type of structure. Finally, I briefly discuss how models based on belief change can still be thought to explain the semantics of objective modal claims.

In this paper I’m concerned with the functional role of singular terms and how it can be used to construct a pragmatist theory of what it takes to understand reference. I argue that there are, at least, two distinct functions which singular terms fulfil, what I will call the talking-about and picking-out functions respectively. Both are, in one sense, ways that a term aids our understanding by specifying who or what a sentence is about, but they come with different requirements for being understood. To illustrate the distinction, I draw on examples from the literature on reference which give rise to very different intuitions about what it takes to understand a singular term. Finally, I argue that this leads to a parallel distinction between two kinds of knowledge-who, depending on which function we are said to know-who with respect to. For the talking-about case, a version of the standard account is sufficient. But to understand an utterance of a singular term with respect to the picking-out function, we need knowledge-who in the sense of knowing how to find what’s referred to sufficiently well to perform a contextually specified action.

We discuss the striking similarities between Friedrich Nietzsche's and Wilfrid Sellars's respective philosophies of mind. Drawing especially on recent Nietzsche scholarship by Riccardi and Katsafanas, we argue that the Nietzschean picture of consciousness is essentially the same as Sellars's view of conceptually structured thought. In particular, we argue that both consider structured thinking to be a linguistic phenomenon whose structure, in turn, arises contingently from social interactions within a community. Further, both views provide for a special role to be played by specifically mentalistic vocabulary, making it possible to engage with the mental states of others in a reflective way. We also discuss how this parallel extends to their respective views on perception. Drawing on O'Shea and Riccardi, we argue for interpretations on which there still is a clear connection between their respective views. Finally, we end the article by discussing some reasons why this similarity should not be as unexpected as it initially seems.

In this paper I argue that it’s impossible for there to be a single universal theory of meaning for a language. First, I will consider some minimal expressiveness requirements a language must meet to be able to express semantic claims. Then I will argue that in order to have a single unified theory of meaning, these expressiveness requirements must be satisfied by a language which the semantic theory itself applies to. That is, we would need a language which can express its own meaning. It has been well-known since Tarski that theories of meaning whose central notion is truth can’t be expressed in a language which they apply to. Here, I develop Quine’s formulation of the Liar Paradox in grammatical terms and use this to extend Tarski’s result to all theories of meaning. This general version of the paradox can be formalised as a special case of the Lawvere Fixed-Point Theorem applied to a categorial grammar. Taken together with the initial arguments, I infer that a universal theory of meaning is impossible and conclude the paper with a brief discussion on what alternatives are available.

In this paper I construct a system of semantics for classical and intuitionistic propositional logic based on epistemic norms governing belief expansion. Working in the AGM-framework of belief change, I give a generalisation of Gärdenfors’ notion of belief systems which can be defined without reference to a logical consequence operator by using a version of the Ramsey Test. These belief expansion systems can then be used to define epistemic models which are sound and complete for either classical or intuitionistic propositional logic depending on which of the two notions of epistemic validity, identified by Levi and Arló-Costa, is used. Finally, I offer a discussion on how these results can be understood as providing a model theory within the framework of logical expressivism.