The nature of language

David Kaplan and Robert Stalnaker articulated an important distinction between semantics and metasemantics or foundational semantics, ascribing complementary roles to each. To the former category belong theories that assign meanings to their bearers, prominent among them linguistic expressions. To the latter belong theories that provide “the basis” for ascribing such meanings (Kaplan, 1989b: 573-4) or state “what the facts are” that give these meanings to their bearers (Stalnaker, 1997: 535). This is a metaphysical undertaking – one concerning the grounding of meaning-facts, i.e., what determines, fixes or constitutes them, and it depends on views on what languages are, i.e., on what their ontological nature is.

The terminology in which we have cashed out this undertaking is recent, but the concern itself has a long history, as long as the philosophy of language. Grice (1957) offers a metasemantics on which the meaning relation is at its heart psychologically determined by a particular kind of reflexive intentions. Davidson argued both for a Tarskian truth-conditional format for semantic theories, and an interpretativist metasemantics to decide which one better characterize languages in use. A Chomskian alternative psychological view appeals instead to “subpersonal” states; a “Platonist” view understands languages as abstract entities; and a Wittgensteinian normative approach developed by Alston (1964), Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) takes the meaning-facts about natural languages to be determined by social norms and social conventions. Lewis (1979) is a deservedly influential forerunner of current versions. With his “scorekeeping” analogy, Lewis showed how to model some of the normative facts that play crucial metasemantic roles in them.

Our goal in this course is to present recent debates on the metasemantic undertaking and the nature of language. The recent discussion has mostly addressed a specific case, the metasemantics of context-dependent expressions in general and indexicals/demonstratives in particular. While keeping an eye on the debates about indexicals, we will focus instead on the metasemantics of force-indicators such as the declarative, interrogative and imperative moods, presuppositions triggers understood as speech-act indicators, slurs also taken as speech-act indicators. Instead of discussing these proposals in the abstract, in this course we will explore the debates by focusing on a particular topic, namely, the nature of assertion – the speech act that we express by default when uttering declarative sentences. There has been a continuous discussion of the nature of assertion in contemporary philosophy. Grice and Strawson proposed in the 1960s an account in terms of communicative intentions, classically presented in polished form in Bach & Harnish’s (1979). Austin and Dummett propounded a contrasting normative account, while Davidson made influential sceptical remarks. Also at the end of the 1970s, Stalnaker influentially suggested to understand assertions as proposals to update a context set of information commonly taken for granted by conversationists. Recently, Tim Williamson’s (1996/2000) already classic paper on the topic has initiated a whole new industry: many papers have been published in recent years on the topic, mostly discussing the pros and cons of the account that Williamson proposed, according to which assertions can be individuated as propositional acts subject to the normative requirement that the assertor knows the proposition put forward.