Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

I will take the oportunity to present at the LOGOS seminar to talk about not one topic but two: I will present two specific ideas in two different topics

(1) Functional role semantics (FRS): FRS can be viewed as a semantic theory that claims that the meaning of an expression is certain role, or it can be viewed as a metaphysical theory that claims that what makes it the case that a certain expression has the meaning it has is that the expression has such-and-such kind of role.

Viewed in this second way FRS would provide an answer to the question "what makes it the case that symbols in a language mean what they mean?" even for the case where the language in question is the language of thought (in the case of the language of thought it is not open to us to give an account of meaning along Gricean lines since the Gricean account makes recourse to the content of speakers' intentions).

What is the functional role of an expression?

There are different possible answers to this question. One particularly clear and precise way of explaining what functional role is is to claim that it is logical inferential role.

There are some serious and well known difficulties for FRS. Still, it is usually assumed (e.g., Fodor & Lepore, Holism: A shopper's guide) that even if FRS might not be able to provide a general explanation of what endows sentences or mental states with meaning, it can successfully account for what determines the meaning of logical expressions.

In this paper we will show that there are serious difficulties for FRS even in the case of logical expressions. Logical inferential role places fewer constrains on the meaning of the logical expression than what has so far been acknowledged.

(2) Expressive meaning: The following examples exhibit a contrast in so called “expressive meaning”:

1.        a. John came into the room       b. That bastard John came into the room

2.        a. The police wear gas masks     b. The pigs wear gas masks  (Kaplan 2001)

3.        a. Yao is Chinese                       b. Yao is a chink (Hom 2008)

Trying to provide an adequate account of the expressive dimension of meaning and, more generally, of non truth-conditional aspects of meaning, hepls to raise and address interesting questions regarding the very nature of Semantics.

I contend that we can account for the expressive dimension of meaning in terms of presuppositions. I will discuss one widespread objection against this view: the projection behavior of “expressive meaning” is unlike that of standard cases of presupposition.