How can sentences still represent the world if their meanings are grounded not in reference but in the practical rules that govern how we use and accept them?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
José Zalabardo is a Spanish-British philosopher who works on epistemology, metaphysics, and related areas. He is a professor of philosophy at University College London.
Check out his book, "Pragmatist Semantics!"
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/pragmatist-semantics-9780192874757
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1W1BTLF
2. Book Summary
In Pragmatist Semantics: A Use-Based Approach to Linguistic Representation, José Zalabardo starts from the intuitive idea that many declarative sentences represent the world, and asks what grounds their meanings—what facts make it the case that a sentence has the meaning it does. He frames the central dispute as a contest between representationalism (meanings are grounded in language–world relations like reference) and pragmatism (meanings are grounded in patterns of use). A key target is what he calls the RR assumption: that any sentence that represents things as being a certain way must have a representationalist meaning ground. He then develops “open-question” style arguments—first in ethics and then (more centrally for his project) in semantic discourse about truth, meaning, and propositional attitudes—to motivate the claim that attempts to give representationalist meaning grounds for these discourses run into serious trouble (e.g., by undermining the idea that their core predicates have referents).
Zalabardo’s positive proposal is that we can reject RR: a sentence can still be genuinely representational even if its meaning ground is pragmatist. The general template is to explain meaning in terms of acceptance procedures—roughly, the actual rules/practices by which speakers regulate when to accept or reject sentences of a discourse. He illustrates the template across the “problem” discourses: for belief/desire ascriptions, he starts from Daniel Dennett’s Intentional Stance and treats its behaviour-prediction role as central to how we regulate acceptance of attitude ascriptions. He also argues that we should drop (as meaning-grounding) appeals to what an agent ought to believe/desire, and instead characterize our predictive practice in a way that explains our bias toward attributing true belief (via a “default” predictive strategy and a more sophisticated fallback). For meaning and truth ascriptions, he develops a pragmatist account that draws on W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson on radical interpretation, and he treats disquotation as central to how we regulate truth ascriptions.
A major remaining challenge is what he calls the problem of harmony: if a sentence represents a determinate state of affairs (or a predicate a determinate property), how can a use-based meaning ground be sufficient to secure that representational target rather than some deviant alternative? His strategy is to use abstraction principles: identify the referents of pragmatist-grounded predicates (and the states of affairs associated with pragmatist-grounded sentences) via equivalence/synonymy conditions generated by the relevant acceptance/ascription procedures. With that in hand, he broadens the picture in the final chapter (“The Primacy of Practice”), arguing that pragmatist resources aren’t just a patch for a few troublesome discourses but point toward a more general account of linguistic representation—one on which our access to reference and representational contents is systematically mediated by practice.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:53 - Overview of book
03:36 - Open question arguments
11:17 - Moorean shift
13:10 - Vagueness
17:25 - Other representationalist approaches
20:25 - Motivating pragmatic position
25:20 - Open questions?
28:47 - Contrasting with representationalism
31:15 - Comparison with Wittgenstein
35:20 - Messiness of natural language
43:40 - Other areas of discourse?
49:53 - Sharp distinction?
55:01 - Disagreement
1:04:01 - Non-propositional?
1:06:43 - Other parts of speech
1:09:51 - Belief and desire
1:19:25 - Belief without expectation of manifestation
1:22:09 - Akrasia
1:26:06 - Gerrymandered attributions
1:28:56 - Example
1:33:50 - Hybrid model
1:36:45 - Familiarity
1:44:31 - Projection
1:49:20 - Is ascription relative?
1:51:25 - Meaning vs. meaning ascription
1:57:33 - Other interpretive procedures
1:59:11 - Generalizations
2:01:11 - Coextensive terms
2:05:15 - Truth ascriptions
2:09:13 - Theories of truth
2:12:35 - Properties
2:17:13 - General meaning grounds
2:19:02 - Complexity of theory
2:23:44 - Harmony
2:29:24 - Remaning difficulties
2:33:07 - Value of philosophy
2:35:23 - Conclusion
