Phil 562: Language, Thought, and Meaning Multiplicity

USC graduate seminar (co-taught with Jeremy Goodman) (Spring 2021) This course has two interwoven themes. The first is how to make sense of talk about the meaning of a word, as both philosophers of language and semanticists often do. We explore views that reject this assumption (or modify what is meant by “meaning”), based on consideration of polysemy, vagueness, the semantic paradoxes, and/or puzzles about propositional attitude ascriptions that appear to show that a single word can have many meanings (and not just because of ambiguity and familiar kinds of context-sensitivity). The second theme is the representational theory of mind. We will approach it from two directions: via the philosophy of language and propositional attitude ascriptions, and via the cognitive revolution in psychology, in particular the Chomskyan revolution in generative linguistics. We will consider both how mental representations provide a framework for theorizing about meaning multiplicity in language and whether there is meaning multiplicity not just for words but for mental representations themselves. The first part of the course lays the groundwork by reviewing classic papers on these topics. The middle part of the course focuses on recent projects on meaning multiplicity by Cian Dorr and Paul Pietroski, each of which highlights connections between linguistic meaning and thought. In the last part of the course we connect these themes to some of our own work on propositional attitudes and quantifiers.