On Travis cases

Linguist and Philos (2012) 35:319 DOI 10.1007/s10988-012-9109-x

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Agustin Vicente

Published online: 8 May 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract Charles Travis has been forcefully arguing that meaning does not determine truth-conditions for more than two decades now. To this end, he has devised ingenious examples whereby different utterances of the same prima facie non-ambiguous and non-indexical expression type have different truth-conditions depending on the occasion on which they are delivered. However, Travis does not argue that meaning varies with circumstances; only that truth-conditions do. He assumes that meaning is a stable feature of both words and sentences. After surveying some of the explanations that semanticists and pragmaticians have produced in order to account for Travis cases, I propose a view which differs substantially from all of them. I argue that the variability in the truth-conditions that an utterance type can have is due to meaning facts alone. To support my argument, I suggest that we think about the meanings of words (in particular, the meanings of nouns) as rich conceptual structures; so rich that the way in which a property concept applies to an object concept is not determined.

Keywords Meaning Truth-conditions Occasion-sensitivity

Conceptual semantics Semantic knowledge World knowledge

1 Introduction

Charles Travis has been forcefully arguing that meaning does not determine truth-conditions for more than two decades now. To this end, he has devised ingenious

A. Vicente (&)

Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Avda. Tolosa, 20080 San Sebastin, Spaine-mail: [email protected]

A. Vicente

Ikerbasque: Basque Foundation for Science, Alameda Urquijo, 36-5, Plaza Bizkaia, 48011 Bilbao, Spain

On Travis cases

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examples where different utterances of the same prima facie non-ambiguous and (in the given context) indexically non-problematic expression type have different truth-conditions depending on contextual factors, or as he would have it, depending on the occasion on which they are uttered.1 This has led him to argue that truth-conditions are occasion sensitive. Traviss ingenuous examples can be found almost everywhere in recent debates in the philosophy of language, or at least in those debates that focus on what kind of content (if any) is carried by sentences in context. Here I want to formulate a rough taxonomy of the responses given...