Pragmatist Semantics: A Use-Based Approach to Linguistic Representation

by Josï L. Zalabardo

Overview

José L. Zalabardo defends a pragmatist account of what grounds the meaning of central semantic discourses—ascriptions of truth, of propositional attitudes, and of meanings. He argues that it is the procedures that regulate acceptance and rejection that give the sentences of these discourses their meanings, and explores the application of the pragmatist template to ethical discourse.

The pragmatist approach is presented as an alternative to representationalist accounts of the meaning grounds of declarative sentences, according to which a sentence has the meaning it has as a result of links with the bits of the world that it purports to represent. Zalabardo develops a version of the open-question argument to support the claim that the meaning grounds of the discourses he focuses on cannot receive representationalist accounts. It is generally assumed that a declarative sentence cannot perform the function of representing the world unless it has a representationalist meaning ground. Zalabardo rejects this assumption, arguing that sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds can represent the world in exactly the same sense that sentences with representationalist meaning grounds do. This requires that there are states of affairs that the target sentences represent as obtaining, and Zalabardo develops an account of the nature of the states of affairs that can play this role for sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds.

Pragmatist Semantics concludes by developing the suggestion that the meaning grounds of all our representational discourses might be ultimately pragmatist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192874757
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/04/2023
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	9.54(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.77(d)

About the Author

José L. Zalabardo, Professor of Philosophy, University College London

José L. Zalabardo is Professor at the Philosophy Department at University College London. He was born in Madrid, and educated at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the University of St. Andrews, and the University of Michigan, where he obtained a PhD in 1994. He was a lecturer at the University of Birmingham from 1994 to 2000, when he joined UCL. He has published numerous articles in academic journals and collective volumes. He is also the author of Introduction to the Theory of Logic (Westview Press, 2000), Scepticism and Reliable Belief (OUP, 2012), and Representation and Reality in Wittgenstein's Tractatus (OUP, 2015), and the editor of Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy (OUP, 2012).

Table of Contents

Preface1. Representational discourse2. The open-question argument in ethics3. The open-question argument in semantics4. Some reactions5. Pragmatist meaning grounds6. Belief and desire7. Meaning and truth8. Harmony and abstraction9. The primacy of practiceEpilogue: The meaning grounds of meaning-ground specifications