Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This article is a critical review of Stephen Schiffer’s monograph The Things We Mean. The text discusses some novel contributions made by Schiffer to the philosophy of meaning, in particular, Schiffer’s proposal for the reification of certain abstract entities and the application of his argument to the philosophical problem of vagueness in natural language. Special attention is paid both to Schiffer’s ingenious use of the notion of conservative extension, here employed as a criterion for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate reifications and to Schiffer’s notion of vague partial belief and its relation to standard partial belief. Schiffer’s particular understanding of vagueness and its relation to the sorites paradox is also considered, with some remarks made concerning the relationship between these related philosophical problems and human perception.

Keywords

meaning vagueness sorites perception conservative extension fictional entities

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Schiffer makes clear at various points that he is aware of the potential, here, for a lack of broad application, indicating that the investigation of problems and the formulation of theories in the philosophy of meaning are often conducted within laboratory-like conditions provided by simplifying assumptions, for example, that the initial concern is with “a homophonic meaning theory for non-indexical, indicative English” (Schiffer 175). x is a wishdate = _df x is a person whose existence supervenes on someone’s wishing for a date, every such wish bringing into existence a person to date. (p. 53)

We might quibble about the legitimacy of moving from the assertion “Tom is bald” to the assertion “The proposition that Tom is bald is true”; there may be a significant gap between asserting something, which implies acceptance of it, and taking that something to be true. We can gloss over this worry by substituting “is asserted” for “is true”; the substitution will not harm the fundamentals of Schiffer’s argument. However, for ease of use, we shall stick with Schiffer’s formulation.

Schiffer distinguishes securing from reifying; existence of a pleonastic entity is secured by something-from-nothing transformations because its existence supervenes on the premises of something-from-nothing transformations.

It is possible to object that the word “things,” which appears in both sentences, is here illegitimately employed with respect to the restrictions Schiffer has explicitly imposed on the use of conservative extension, since it appears that the reference of “things” encompasses the “previously recognized ontology of concepts, objects, and functions, etc.,” which we are denied license for making fresh commitments about. However, just as the use of the new existential quantifier introduced with T’ allows the creation of fresh commitments not expressible in T, the use of the word “things” in T’, having a reference that differs from the reference of the word “things” as it occurs in T, also allows the creation of (or contribution to) fresh commitments not expressible in T.

T’ may yet have more quantifiers; there may be, for example, one that ranges over fictional entities alone. Further conservative extensions of T’, which may introduce other pleonastic entities such as properties or propositions, might be expected to have additional quantifiers with appropriate ranges.

The existential quantifier to which this note attaches also needs to be understood as a quantifier of T, not T’.

Timothy Williams is, in particular, singled out for proposing an account of vagueness that requires “incredible” presuppositions; cf. Schiffer, 184.

For it to be truly analog, there would be only one channel, which could be occupied by a continuum of values of rates of flow; imagine a classic analog computer constructed from water-pipes whose gateways consist of spring-loaded valves. The concept of baldness could be instantiated by a particular valve, whose degree of openness (= inclination to application or degree of applicability) would be determined by the volume of water rushing down the pipe. The water would, of course, be standing in for the partially processed perceptual experience, in this case, each molecule itself standing in for each perceptual registration of an individual case of hair-absence. This metaphor applies as well as the multichannel variant above, but its exposition is less tidy.

Schiffer, Stephen . 2003. The Things We Mean. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Unwrinkling the Carpet of Meaning

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References