Volume 2021, Issue 240 - “Use and meaning”: Special Issue devoted to Jerzy Pelc; Guest Editor: Tadeusz Ciecierski

In the first part of my paper I briefly present Jerzy Pelc’s functional approach to logical semiotics of natural language. This approach focuses on the use of natural language expressions and on its dependence on context and conversational situation. One of the important goals of this analysis is to appreciate the role of sentences in natural language and stress that it is by means of sentences that language fulfills its main roles. However, for Pelc almost any expression can be used as a sentence, despite not being a grammatical sentence. In the second part I try to place Pelc’s standpoint within the framework of contemporary semantic minimalism – contextualism debate. I pay special attention to his treatment of subsentential expressions used to express propositions and argue that his view belongs to pragmatics-oriented approaches to subsentential speech acts.

The functional approach to natural language (FANL) emerged in the late 1960s. It focused on the use and the sub-use of language expressions, taking into account role of the language context and the extra-linguistic situation of a given statements. This approach referred, both conceptually and methodologically, to the tradition of British analytical philosophy of language on the one hand, and to the achievements of the Lvov-Warsaw School on the other. It seems that despite the passage of more than half a century since its inception, this approach has lost nothing of its relevance and its cognitive value, and may even provide inspiration for the exploration new research areas concerning the formulation of language utterances. The aim of this article is to show the potential applications of the FANL as a specific semiotic concept in the field of the philosophy of social sciences. The paper points out how the functional conception can be successfully used in methodological analyses of the logical methodology of social sciences. The case studies presented in the article refer to the research practice of social sciences. Examples of the use and sub-uses of terms are discussed in the light of the polyparadigmatic structure of social sciences and the differences in research patterns accepted by given scientific collectives.

At the turn of 1960s and 1970s, Stanisław Lem devoted some of his non-fiction writing to a discussion and considerations of semiotics. Most of them were expressions of a critical approach mainly directed against structuralism. However, Lem also formulated some positive statements although they were not developed systematically. The article offers an analysis of Lem’s semiotic ideas from the perspective of semiotic functionalism of Jerzy Pelc, mainly considering its two main components: contextualism and typological approach. Special attention is paid to the latter because both Pelc and Lem proposed some original solutions in this respect. What is meant here is the multidimensional typology of symbolic uses of signs developed by Pelc and Lem’s multidimensional typology of the situations of the reception of texts. Although they are independent form each other, these proposals show some convergence both in their ways of construction and roles they are supposed to perform. Henceforth, one can say that Lem was a crypto-functionalist.

The paper begins with an account of the emergence of analytic philosophy of language in the twentieth century in the context of the development of logic and the linguistic turn. Subsequently, it describes two examples of analytic philosophy of language in its heyday when the discipline was conceived as first philosophy. Finally, it provides, by way of conclusion, a succinct outline of the current state of philosophy of language, marked by modesty and fragmentation. It is claimed that even if one retains optimism about the prospects of philosophy of language in the first century of the new millennium, it would be unreasonable to disagree with the opinion that the present-day philosophy of language is a highly specialized and diversified discipline and no longer so central for philosophical enterprise as it used to be.

In §8 of his Begriffsschrift (1879), Gottlob Frege discusses issues related to identity. Frege begins his most famous essay, “On Sense and Denotation” (1892), published 13 years later, by criticizing the view advocated in §8. He returns to these issues in the concluding paragraph. Controversies continue over these important passages. We offer an interpretation and discuss some alternatives. We defend that in the Begriffsschrift, Frege does not hold that identity is a relation between signs. §8 of the Begriffsschrift is motivated by the conflict between two different criteria for sameness of conceptual content of sentences. To resolve that conflict, Frege introduces ‘≡’ in §8 and, thus, circumstances with names as constituents. To the same end, in “On Sense and Denotation,” Frege introduces senses and Thoughts and abandons both ‘≡’ and circumstances. He solves what we call the Co-instantiation problem , and disregards, but does not solve, the Name problem .

Semanticists often restrict their theories by imposing constraints on the parameters that can be employed for interpreting the expressions of a language. Such constraints are based on non-logical features of actual contexts of utterance, but they often have important effects on issues that do pertain to logic, like analyticity or entailment. For example, Kaplan’s restriction to so-called “proper contexts” was required in order to count “I am here now” as valid. In this paper I argue that constraints of this kind are often posited in an arbitrary and non-consistent way, and that they yield the intended results only at the price of imposing ad hoc principles whose justification could in turn justify further, often undesirable restrictions into the theory. I also introduce a criterion for telling whether such constraints are imposed in a legitimate manner.

Jan Łukasiewicz is known primarily as the founder of the three-valued system of logic. It is also generally renowned that his reason for introducing many-valued systems of logic was an attempt to refute determinism. When he developed the three-valued and n -valued logic, he employed these systems in his arguments against determinism. On the contrary, Łukasiewicz preferred the four-valued system of logic that is not suitable for a refutation of determinism in his latest period. It seems, however, that determinism still interested Łukasiewicz, as he discussed its denial in his last work, the second edition of the book Aristotle’s syllogistic from the standpoint of modern formal logic . The aim of my paper is to introduce the issue and describe the relation of these two topics primarily in the latest period of Łukasiewicz’s work. There are several possible solutions to the issue. However, Łukasiewicz never addressed the issue clearly in his published works. Therefore, the solutions might be supported or contradicted by his unpublished works in the future.

Three-valued logics are standardly used to formalize gappy languages, i.e., interpreted languages in which sentences can be true, false or neither. A three-valued logic that assigns the same truth value to all gappy sentences is, in our view, insufficient to capture important semantic differences between them. In this paper we will argue that there are two different kinds of pathologies that should be treated separately and we defend the usefulness of a four-valued logic to represent adequately these two types of gappy sentences. Our purpose is to begin the formal exploration of the four-valued logics that could be used to represent the phenomena in question and to show that these phenomena are present in natural language, at least according to some semantic theories of natural language.

The aim of the paper is to defend the view according to which all simple fictional sentences are meaningless. If their assertions seem to convey some truth evaluable information, and fictional sentences themselves seem to be true or false, it is because some pragmatic mechanisms are operative, enabling the expression of propositions not encoded in the semantic content of these sentences. According to some theorists, the mechanisms responsible for that process are the same as those responsible for generating conversational implicatures. I argue against that claim and maintain that to comprehend the information conveyed by a fictional assertion, one must determine what kind of fictional assertion it is and only then apply the relevant interpretative rule adjusted to the fictional sentence used in that act.

The thesis advanced in this paper is that the proper names of cities or countries inherit the linguistic types of the nouns which denote the basic category of the objects the names refer to. As a result, in the case of the proper names of cities or countries, a reference by those names may select particular aspects of those objects, in the same way that book or newspaper selects the physical or informational aspects of objects in the extension of the nouns. This view is based on Asher’s and Pustejovsky’s conception of dot type semantics.

The use-mention distinction is elaborated into a four-way distinction between use, formal mention, material mention and pragmatic mention. The notion of pragmatic mention is motivated through the problem of monsters in Kaplanian indexical semantics. It is then formalized and applied in an account of schemata in formalized languages.

Token-reflexive theories of indexicals – words like ‘I,’ ‘here,’ and ‘today’ – are widely thought to face a problem in account for intuitively valid arguments involving indexicals. Yet all discussions of the problem with which I am familiar focus on particular examples or on particular rules of inference. In this paper, I first state the problem in its full generality, and then argue that two recent attempts to reject the problem fail. Finally, I consider the proposal by García-Carpintero that demonstratives – ‘this’ and ‘that’ – raise the same problem. I argue that while there are important similarities between the logic problem for token-reflexives and the role of demonstratives in logic, recent work on the logic of demonstratives can offer insights into logic that token-reflexive theories cannot.

In this paper, I discuss some of Maximilian de Gaynesford’s arguments regarding indexicals. Although I agree with his treatment of the first singular personal pronoun as a prototype of demonstrative expressions, I challenge his refusal to treat indexicals as complex demonstratives. To offer an alternative to this refusal I try to develop a common ground from different theories that consider indexicals as linguistic constructions that embed a nonlinguistic element, following an original idea in Frege’s latest writings. These views form the backdrop on which we can put forward the claim of treating all indexicals as complex demonstratives. In the central part of the paper, I criticize each of de Gaynesford’s arguments against the reduction of indexicals to complex demonstratives. Besides, I propose a new definition of the concept of “demonstration” as a nonlinguistic feature of all indexicals in their referential uses, to contrast de Gaynesford’s rejection of the idea that demonstrations are an essential feature of indexicals. Eventually, I strengthen my claim by distinguishing indexicals from proper names and definite descriptions on the ground that only perceptual indexicals necessarily require an accompanying demonstration. However, the main point of the paper is a negative one, that is the rejection of de Gaynesford’s arguments against the reduction of indexicals to complex demonstratives. More work is needed to reach a positive conclusion on this topic.

This paper is about the pragmatic inferences in play as conversational implicatures (Grice, P. 1989. Studies in the way of words . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) occur. First, it constructs the deductivism versus abductivism debate that transpires from the extant literature but is rarely elaborated. Against deductivism, the paper argues that implicating inferences in conversational implicatures can instantiate an abductive logical form, as abductivism suggests. Against abductivism, however, it grants to deductivism that implicating inferences can have a deductive form provided the latter is of a defeasible type. In sum, it thus argues for pluralist defeasibilism . Second, it turns to the issue of the ontological nature of implicating inferences and advocates normative inferentialism , on which these inferences are not primarily real psychological processes but rules of the practice of implicating. While this allows for the possibility of their psychological instantiation, to be sure, the paper also insists that psychological inferring processes in implicatures are neither necessarily isomorphic to the aforementioned rules nor even necessarily occur as an implicature occurs.

In this paper I investigate the nature of the relation between meaning-interdependence and analyticity. The theory within which meaning-interdependence reaches its peak and becomes omnipresent is meaning holism, according to which every two expressions are meaning-interdependent. A lot of people reject holism partially due to the impression that the theory leads to the picture in which language is self-sufficient in the sense that it is nothing but a game of meanings which is detached from reality. What stands behind that impression is probably something along the lines: analyticity stems from meaning-interdependence, so if all expressions are meaning-interdependent, then everything appears analytic. I defend holism from this kind of objection. I start with showing that analyticity traditionally understood cannot pour over language within holism, because it is not applicable to the theory at all. Then, I argue that adopting some weaker notion of analyticity leads to the ubiquity of analyticity indeed, but analyticity so understood is too weak to actually endanger holism. Finally, I demonstrate that the problems with analyticity appear only when meaning-interdependence is treated in extremely superficial way. I also propose a very simple hierarchy of meaning-interdependence, based on Pagin’s total-pair holism, which immediately repeal the ‘ubiquitous analyticity’ problem.

In the paper I present an application of Jerzy Pelc’s functional semiotics to contemporary cognitive science. I argue that, even though the original theory addressed only linguistic representations, it can be fruitfully applied to mental representations. I show how Pelc’s distinction between use and usage helps us clarify the notion of mental representations and how it makes it immune to skeptical challenges presented in contemporary cognitive science literature.

The article seeks a rapprochement between pragmatic and semantic theories of language by returning to a breaking point in the history of philosophy, the middle of the twentieth century, when these theoretical models began to evolve into distinct schools of thought. Philosophical accounts of this period explore various and intertwined dependencies between semantics and context; however, they only implicitly examine the potential of sounds and bodily gestures in bringing descriptive clarity to the modes and limits of such dependencies. The article first investigates the way W. V. Quine conceptualized linguistic reference by combining behavioral models of language acquisition with more systematic explorations of syntax. It then turns to P. F. Strawson’s revisionary accounts of Kantian philosophy which reassess the silent strains of empiricism in Kant’s framework in order to identify possible grounds of reconciliation between pragmatic and semantic theories of language. Sound and gesture, two aspects that supplement language and give it an embodied feeling, are suggested as possible devices for formalizing intersections between context and semantic-oriented approaches. Poems by Wallace Stevens are used to think about the endurance of reference and how this endurance can find more compelling demonstration through an investigation of language as an embodied phenomenon.