Under what conditions are two utterances peformances of the same word?

Kaplan;words;anti-individualism;Kripke puzzle;self-knowledge

Morasch, Nathalie

关键词: Kaplan;    words;    anti-individualism;    Kripke puzzle;    self-knowledge;   

Others  :  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/24398/Morasch_Nathalie.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Starting from the fact that people sometimes use the “same” words to talk about a given topic, I want to clarify what word-sameness comes to in those uses.I will adopt an epistemic framework, in which words are primarily instruments that render the inter-subjective transfer of knowledge possible. In the course of my dissertation I refine Kaplan’s notion of words to propose an account that occupies the middle ground between (social) anti-individualism and the kind of individualism that individuates a speaker’s words without input from the speaker’s linguistic community.I make the case that speakers keep track of the various performances of a given word w via a mental register.According to my proposal, the conceptions the speaker comes to associate with her mental register over time may play a role in whether we ought to identify her idiolectal word w with the public word w’.I will argue that in the end we must leave it up to the speaker’s own (informed) judgment whether she interprets her word w as repeating a particular public word w’. According to Kaplan the individual speaker’s word w is referentially bound to the public word w’ through her intentions to repeat w’.I stress that the intention to repeat her own words w trumps the intention to repeat the word w’ produced by some other speaker.I attempt to solve Kripke’s Paderewski puzzle and problems of self-knowledge by arguing that the speaker cannot be wrong about how she keeps track of her own words.