It has become a commonplace to regard Grice’s project in “Meaning” as plagued by circularity and almost as prevalent to dismiss such charges as unfounded. Much of the controversy surrounding Grice’s presumed circularity revolves around the question whether Grice is committed to a reductionist project of meaning, or whether it is merely meant to elucidate the nature of meaning without pretending to reduce it to something meaningless. Rarely, however, are these views developed as part of a systematic analysis of Grice's original paper, as this paper seeks to do. The author ś paper consists of two parts. In the first part, he tries to show how Grice can be defended from John Searle’s criticism relating to the famous American soldier example and argue that Searle’s suggested amendments run counter to Grice’s ambitions. In the second part of his paper, he illustrates – drawing on the first part –why “Meaning” both makes it necessary and seem impossible that the timeless meaning of utterances be fully reducible to individual utterances and thus to individual speakers’ intentions. The author argues that this seriously challenges the view that Grice is putting forward a theory of intention-based semantics in “Meaning” which would present a viable alternative to later developments of his theory.
There is no unique idea regarding the form of the (Intentional) content part of visual experience in the specification. The philosophers’ approaches diverge as to whether the content of visual experience is equivalent to a sentence expressing proposition or not. Some of them (mainly philosophers from the phenomenological tradition) consider that one must use a proposition for the specification of the content only when the subject, while having a visual experience, exercise a concept or judge. For the other cases, which can be called simple seeing, a noun phrase is preferable. The author argues that holding that specification of Intentional content of the visual experience should be in the form of the proposition. John Searle gives up the first-person Intentionality and therefore bypasses the first-person important distinction between simple seeing and judgmental seeing. The specification of the content only in the form of the proposition does not allow making such a distinction on the level of description. Then the author argues that the feature of the causal self-referentiality of the visual experience belongs to its psychological mode but not, as Searle holds, to the Intentional content of the visual experience.
Using ideas from John Searle, Roy Harris, Michael Reddy, and Nelson Goodman, the author argues that texts, such as they are commonly conceived, lack brute existence. The common idea of texts is a conceptual construction which is useful in practical everyday contexts but not in serious theorizing, where it creates illusions and contradictions. One of these illusions is the idea of an objective textual meaning, a meaning which is “in the text”: what we actually have in the way of textual meaning are the ideas of various persons – authors, readers, and commentators - about the meaning of the text. When applied to fictional characters, this way of viewing things explains why it makes sense to regard fictional characters as being created and as lacking brute existence.
The paper examines the nature of the social fact in social knowledge on the background of the differences between sciences and social sciences. The applied approach is historical (E. Durkheim, M. Weber, M. Mauss, J. Searle), as well as one based on differentiation between Humean conception of fact and the conceptions, in which facts are seen as determining the truth values of our propositions. Intentionality and the structure of social facts in terms of Searle's construction of the social are underlined as well as the weakness of his conception. In conclusion it is asserted that the construction of facts in social sciences is impossible without psychological vocabulary and concepts, which contents are conceived - contrary to Searle's internalism - in terms of externalism.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.