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Humanities Institute Presents: Sebastian Röedl

SR
September 14, 2018
All Day
347 University Hall

It is customary to represent contents of acts of speech and thought in terms of their truth at a context: what is thought or said resides in what it is for it to be true, not simpliciter, but at a context. A context may provide values of all manner of parameters. It is traditional to take it to determine a world, a time, a speaker. So the content of an assertion or a judgment is to reside in what it is for it to be true relative to a world, a time, a speaker. Recently, there has been a lively discussion of the question whether we may add to the familiar parameters further ones, such as standards of taste or states of information. The concern of the present essay is not these extensions. They suggest themselves only insofar as what they extend is taken to be sound. The present essay argues that it is not: the nature of linguistic meaning, the nature of the content of thought, is obscured by the conception of it in terms of a relative concept of truth. For a conception of content in terms of relative truth is incapable of capturing the comprehension of her speech that guides her who speaks, and the comprehension of her thought by her who thinks.