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    Belief content and sentence meaning must be defined joint... — Carmelics
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    Home/Philosophy of Language
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    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

    Philosophy of LanguageTruth & Knowledge
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Belief content and sentence meaning cannot be defined independently of one another
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    • 2.A third independent fact is needed to ground the joint definition of belief and meaning
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    • 3.The fact that beliefs and meanings must maximize the truth of an agent's beliefs and utterances is available as such an independent third fact
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Radical charity produces systematic distortion: agents in radically different conceptual schemes may hold mostly false beliefs by design (Stich 1990).
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    • 2.If a belief system is massively false, maximizing truth assignments misidentifies content rather than revealing it, inverting the explanatory order.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Kripke and Putnam show that reference is fixed by causal-historical chains, not by truth-maximizing interpretation of the agent's total belief set.
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    • 2.Since meaning is partly constituted by mind-external factors independent of belief truth-values, charity cannot serve as the joint definitional ground Davidson requires.
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    Philosophy of LanguageTruth & Knowledge

    Related

    A third independent fact is needed to ground the joint definition of belief and ...Belief content and sentence meaning cannot be defined independently of one anoth...If a belief system is massively false, maximizing truth assignments misidentifie...Kripke and Putnam show that reference is fixed by causal-historical chains, not ...
    +3 moreShow less
    Radical charity produces systematic distortion: agents in radically different co...Since meaning is partly constituted by mind-external factors independent of beli...The fact that beliefs and meanings must maximize the truth of an agent's beliefs...

    Similar

    The principle of charity plays a constitutive role in determining mean...80%The principle of charity governs the formulation of a theory of anothe...78%Applying the principle of charity requires ongoing adjustment of prior...77%The fact that beliefs and meanings must maximize the truth of an agent...76%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    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
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit