The meaning of meaning-fallibilism

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dc.contributor.authorLegg, Catherine
dc.date.accessioned2008-05-12T04:58:16Z
dc.date.available2008-05-12T04:58:16Z
dc.date.issued2005-06
dc.description.abstractMuch discussion of meaning by philosophers over the last 300 years has been predicated on a Cartesian first-person authority (i.e. ‘infallibilism’) with respect to what one’s terms mean. However this has problems making sense of the way the meanings of scientific terms develop, an increase in scientific knowledge over and above scientists’ ability to quantify over new entities. Although a recent conspicuous embrace of rigid designation has broken up traditional meaning-infallibilism to some extent, this new dimension to the meaning of terms such as ‘water’ is yet to receive a principled epistemological undergirding (beyond the deliverances of ‘intuition’ with respect to certain somewhat unusual possible worlds). Charles Peirce’s distinctive, naturalistic philosophy of language is mined to provide a more thoroughly fallibilist, and thus more realist, approach to meaning, with the requisite epistemology. Both his pragmatism and his triadic account of representation, it is argued, produce an original approach to meaning, analysing it in processual rather than objectual terms, and opening a distinction between ‘meaning for us’, the meaning a term has at any given time for any given community and ‘meaning simpliciter’, the way use of a given term develops over time (often due to a posteriori input from the world which is unable to be anticipated in advance). This account provocatively undermines a certain distinction between ‘semantics’ and ‘ontology’ which is often taken for granted in discussions of realism.en_US
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.citationLegg, C. (2005). The meaning of meaning-fallibilism. Axiomathes, 15(2), 293-318.en_US
dc.identifier.doi10.1007/s10516-004-6681-xen_US
dc.identifier.issn1572-8390
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10289/777
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherSpringer-Verlag Dordrechten_NZ
dc.relation.isPartOfAxiomathes (Online Edition): an international journal in ontology and cognitive systemsen_NZ
dc.rightsThis is an author’s postprint version of an article published in the journal, Axiomathes. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comen_US
dc.subjectfallibilismen_US
dc.subjectmeaningen_US
dc.subjectnaturalismen_US
dc.subjectPeirceen_US
dc.subjectpragmatismen_US
dc.subjectrealismen_US
dc.subjectsemioticsen_US
dc.titleThe meaning of meaning-fallibilismen_US
dc.typeJournal Articleen_US
pubs.begin-page293en_NZ
pubs.editionJuneen_NZ
pubs.elements-id30594
pubs.end-page318en_NZ
pubs.issue2en_NZ
pubs.volume15en_NZ
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