![]() Is the view of meaning qua ICG on offer supposed to cover words like 'hello' and 'I' as well, or is Richard actually primarily interested in concept-words or even concepts themselves? It is not totally clear. This is not to mention further problems raised by context-sensitive and polysemous words and their complex relations to concepts. And there are some words like 'I' which have a single meaning in English, but which plausibly express a different concept in each of our mouths. But aren't there important differences between the notions of linguistic meaning qua the anchor of competence and the notion of concept, however construed? There are some words such as 'hello' and 'ouch' which clearly have meanings, but which nobody takes to express concepts. In saying this, he must primarily be thinking of concept-words like 'cousin' and 'pasta'. Richard takes a word's meaning to be equivalent to the concept it expresses (50, 53-54). In any case, as we saw above, a word's meaning qua the anchor of competence is supposed to be its ICG. On the other hand, the relevant notion of competence is left entirely intuitive in a way that is potentially problematic. But what is meant by 'meaning'? Richard is commendably explicit in making clear that he's interested in meaning in the sense of what competent speakers grasp, "the anchor of linguistic competence" (3, 49). Below is my best attempt, together with some questions that arose. Partly because the exposition of its tenets is spread out between the chapters, and partly because of the conversational style, readers have to do quite a bit of work themselves to piece together something that can be compared to alternatives and critically assessed. The downside of the breadth is that the view of meanings qua ICGs and of meaning change is left at a somewhat impressionistic level and is hard to pin down precisely. 6).Īs should be evident from the above overview, the discussion is wide-ranging, moves criss-cross in different directions, and contains many digressions. 5), and Haslanger on conceptual engineering (Ch. 4), Dorr and Hawthorne on speech reports (Ch. ![]() 1), Chalmers on conceptual continuity (Ch. Many of the chapters contain further brief, relatively self-sufficient discussions of specific philosophers' recent arguments that are more or less loosely related to the central thread: Russell on analyticity (Ch. ![]() Finally, chapter 6 continues the discussion of meaning change, looking at concrete cases and how they could be explained, starting with the simpler examples of 'skyline' and 'gay' and ending with the staple contested cases of 'rape' and 'marry'. As he himself puts it, this chapter is again somewhat of a digression from the main thread. In chapter 5, Richard discusses how meanings qua ICGs are related to propositional attitude ascriptions. In the second, he starts discussing meaning change and how it relates to questions of sameness of reference and extension over time. In the first, he sets out the basics while simultaneously defending the traditional view of philosophy as conceptual analysis. In chapters 3-4, Richard starts developing the view of meanings qua ICGs. These two chapters form more something like the background to the view to be offered, rather than being part of the view itself. Chapter 2 dismantles internalist attempts to resuscitate an epistemologically interesting notion of analyticity. In chapter 1, Richard frames the overall project as growing out of a desire to reconcile Quine's view that any meaning-related, supposedly analytic claim like 'cats are animals' can be given up without changing the meaning 'cat', with the common-sense view that the notion of meaning is perfectly acceptable. ![]() The ICG of 'cousin' in the English of the residents of Boston is the set of presuppositions about the term they normally make and are expected to make: "that cousins are relatives, that cousins are the children of your folks' sisters and brothers, that people have cousins but dogs and bumblebees do not, etc." (49) Meanings qua ICGs are like species in being historical, process-like entities that can gradually change over time. On Mark Richard's view, the meaning of a word in a group's language is what he calls its interpretive common ground or ICG. ![]() This book explores the idea that the meanings of words are like biological species. ![]()
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