The Seminars of Philosophy of Perception, Mind, and Language
The Seminars of Perception, Mind, and Language (former Seminars of Philosophy of Language and Mind) take place every year since 2001 at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Milan. The meetings aim at being an opportunity for people working in analytic philosophy to debate the latest directions of research.
The meetings are structured as a 45-50 minutes presentation, followed by an extensive discussion time. They are open to anyone interested in the topic, especially undergraduate and Ph.D. students. The language of the talks is either Italian or English.
Marco Santambrogio (University of Parma)
March 21 FRI — 13.00-15.00
PLACE: Aula Crociera Alta
Words, Pencils, and Artworks
Abstract: The semantics of a referential expression is externalist if it is not the case that its reference is determined by some uniquely identifying marks, some unique properties satisfied by the referent and known or believed to be true of that referent by the speaker. I claim that the semantics of artifactual words, like table and pencil, is externalist. Here is my strategy. First, the words of all languages, even though they are unlikely to occur to anyone as primary instances of artifacts, are in fact prototypical artefacts. Second, a Principle of Common Ancestry is in the nature of words: Two utterances or inscriptions belong to the same word only if they have some common ancestor. The same principle obviously holds for biological species and is sufficient for Twin Earth thought experiments to go through. In order to complete my defense of externalism concerning artifactual words in general, I only have to show that the metaphysics of all artifacts obeys the Principle of Common Ancestry. I will draw on the works by Paul Bloom and Jerrold Levinson, who have defended some version of the Principle, albeit using different terminology.
(The talk will be in English)