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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The content of what a speaker says is not always determined by the speaker's beliefs, even when those beliefs are shared by everyone in the conversation.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.On a Gricean cooperative framework, what a speaker 'says' is fixed by conventional linguistic meaning plus reference assignment, not belief.
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    • 2.In the Elwood case, the shared false belief fails to reassign the referent of 'John Searle' away from Searle himself, since proper names are rigid designators.
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    • 3.Therefore the case shows only that beliefs cannot override rigid designation, not that beliefs never partially constitute propositional content.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.On contextualist accounts (Stanley, Recanati), the context that determines content is the objective context of utterance, not the psychological states of participants.
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    • 2.The Elwood scenario conflates the epistemic situation of hearers with the semantic context, but even shared false beliefs remain outside the context that fixes reference.
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    • 3.Thus the argument's premise that 'if shared beliefs determined content, the utterance would be true' misidentifies which beliefs are theoretically relevant to content determination.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Elwood believes he is John Searle, and everyone in the conversation shares this belief.
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    • 2.Yet what Elwood says when he introduces himself as John Searle is the falsehood that Elwood is John Searle, not a truth.
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    • 3.If shared beliefs determined content, what Elwood said would be true (since everyone believes he is Searle), but it is false.
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