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    Belief content and sentence meaning cannot be defined ind... — Carmelics
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    Supports→Belief content and sentence meaning must be defined jointly in terms of a principle of charity — whatever assignment maximizes the truth of an agent's beliefs and utterances

    Belief content and sentence meaning cannot be defined independently of one another

    Philosophy of LanguageTruth & Knowledge
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.An independent account of belief content would allow derivation of sentence meaning, but no such independent account is available
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    • 2.An independent account of sentence meaning would allow derivation of belief content, but no such independent account is available
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    • 3.Many distinct assignments of beliefs and meanings are consistent with the same linguistic behavior
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Causal-informational theories (Dretske, Fodor) ground belief content in reliable causal covariations with external states, independent of linguistic meaning.
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    • 2.If belief content is fixed by mind-world causal relations rather than linguistic behavior, sentence meaning can then be derived from independently grounded mental content.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Grice's program derives sentence meaning from speaker intentions and belief states that are characterizable without prior appeal to conventional linguistic meaning.
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    • 2.If non-natural meaning reduces to complex arrangements of pre-linguistic propositional attitudes, then belief content is conceptually prior to and independent of sentence meaning.
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    Philosophy of LanguageTruth & Knowledge

    Related

    A third independent fact is needed to ground the joint definition of belief and ...An independent account of belief content would allow derivation of sentence mean...An independent account of sentence meaning would allow derivation of belief cont...Belief content and sentence meaning must be defined jointly in terms of a princi...
    +6 moreShow less
    Causal-informational theories (Dretske, Fodor) ground belief content in reliable...Grice's program derives sentence meaning from speaker intentions and belief stat...If belief content is fixed by mind-world causal relations rather than linguistic...If non-natural meaning reduces to complex arrangements of pre-linguistic proposi...Many distinct assignments of beliefs and meanings are consistent with the same l...The fact that beliefs and meanings must maximize the truth of an agent's beliefs...

    Similar

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    SEP: meaning
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    Davidson’s idea was that attempts to state the facts in virtue of which expressions have a certain meaning for a subject face a kind of dilemma: if we had an independent account of what it is for an agent to have a belief with a certain content, we could ascend from there to an account of what it is for a sentence to have a meaning; if we had an independent account of what it is for a sentence to have a meaning, we could ascend from there to an account of what it is for an agent to have a belief

    Details

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    premise
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit