Valen Simpson

The correct account of communication, it is widely held, must accommodate the kind of case presented by Brian Loar (Philos Stud 30(6): 353-377, 1976) in which subjects misunderstand each other despite referring to the same entity. Epistemic Russellianism (ER) has emerged as a strong new candidate to accomplish this task. Claiming that the significance of Loar’s puzzle is due to an element of luck, as in Gettier’s (Analysis 23(6): 121-123, 1963) cases, ER concludes that communication requires knowledge of co-reference, and not a match in Fregean sense or mode of presentation. My aim is twofold. Firstly, I deploy some defensive moves against recent ER-based attacks on a Fregean approach to communication. Secondly, as an offensive manoeuvre, I argue that ER’s knowledge-based view faces the problem posed by cases of lucky communication. These cases show that drawing a knowledge-of-co-reference condition on communication is unwarranted. The upshot of my discussion is that the Fregean approach is still the stronger contender of the two.

Communication seems to happen in the face of people’s (extremely) varying perspectives or understandings of subject matter. As many have noted, the presence of this communicative mismatch—what we may call ‘the mismatch problem’—puts a lot of pressure on a naïve model of communication. According to this model, communicative success is a matter of content match or sharing. Here I focus on the kind of non-naïve response that a theory of ‘triangulation’ makes available. I shall discuss several features of triangulation theory and critically examine a recent articulation based on the notion of ‘aboutness’ (Sandgren [2019, 2021, 2023]). This articulation proposes content-free triangulation conditions in our explanations of communicative success. By contrast, I will suggest that we can use triangulation theory to address the mismatch problem without neglecting content by appealing to a meta-representational notion of content similarity. This notion, I argue, allows us to capture the necessary coordination between subjects, as well as the differences in their understandings.