Course Descriptions

Seminar in Philosophy of Language: Approaches to Theory of Meaning

There’s a lot of literature theorizing about meaning, and it’s super not obvious that everybody’s got the same ideas about what a theory of meaning is supposed to be a theory of. It seems pretty clear that not everybody who talks about “meaning” is theorizing about the same thing, or trying to explain the same explananda. We’ll survey some work illustrating a bunch of different approaches, with the aim of (a) trying to get a grip on the theoretical landscape, and (b) getting clear enough on the different approaches to be able to constructively engage with that chunk of the literature. One of the things I want to do with this seminar is to make it accessible for people who haven’t really done philosophy of language before, and provide an on-ramp to some otherwise potentially intimidating literature. Another thing I want to do, which I’m hoping will also be of interest to people who are already philosophy of language nerds, is make some progress getting clear on some higher-level, “what’s everybody doing here, why are they doing it, and how are the different projects related?” issues, and to get us all (including myself) reasonably up to speed on some literature I’m not yet up to speed on (Brandomia and rational speech act theory, potentially among others).