Some response-dependence accounts of linguistic meaning
摘要
Language utterances are meaningful because they mean something to someone. This truism motivates regarding linguistic meaning as a response-dependent property of language utterances. But the properties called ‘response-dependent’ in the literature differ substantially. This paper discusses three kinds with respect to their metaphysics, calling them by their more precise bynames ‘judgment-dependent’, ‘response-dispositional’, and (genuinely) ‘response-dependent’. Looking at what it takes for something to have such a property, we can devise a test to determine which of the three kinds of property we are dealing with.
This test is then used to corroborate Goldberg’s (