The Metaphysics and the Epistemology of Meaning - Pfister, Jonas (De Gruyter, 2007)
Acknowledgements; Introduction; I. The metaphysics of meaning; 1. What is meant; 2. What is said; 2.1. Utterance-type meaning; 2.2. Different notions of what is said; 2.3. Grice's definition; 2.3.1. A first attempt; 2.3.2. Conventional implicatures; 2.3.3. Central meaning; 2.4. A different definition; 2.4.1. The myth of conventional implicatures; 2.4.2. What is primarily said; 2.4.3. One more improvement; 2.5. The full identification of what is said; 2.5.1. Ambiguities; 2.5.2. Indexicals; 2.5.3. The time of utterance; 2.5.4. Inexplicit references; 2.5.5. Definite descriptions
2.5.6. Quantifiers2.5.7. Comparative adjectives; 2.6. The problem of semantic underdetermination; 2.6.1. Semantic underdetermination; 2.6.2. Against universal underdetermination; 2.6.3. Against semantic minimalism; 2.7. The solution: An extended notion of what is said; 2.7.1. Definition; 2.7.2. What is said and what is implicated; 2.7.3. What is said and semantics; 2.7.4. Against restricting the notion of what is said; 3. What is implicated; 3.1. Grice's definition of implicature; 3.2. Grice's theory of conversational implicature; 3.3. What is implicated and what is meant
3.4. What is implicated and what is saidII. The epistemology of meaning; 1. Understanding what is meant; 2. How we understand what is meant; 2.1. The code theory; 2.2. A Gricean theory; 2.2.1. Rationality; 2.2.2. Grice's theory of implicature derivation; 2.2.3. A Gricean theory of understanding; 2.2.4. The differentiation problem; 2.3. Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory; 2.3.1. The theory; 2.3.2. The differentiation problem; 2.3.3. Magic and ungrounded immunization; 2.4. The game-theoretic theory; 2.4.1. Game theory; 2.4.2. Signaling games; 2.4.3. Games of partial information
2.4.4. A new definition of speaker meaning?2.4.5. How we understand what is meant; Conclusion; References; Index of names
The book develops the metaphysics of meaning along the lines set up by Paul Grice, defining the three central notions of what is meant, said and implicated. The Gricean notion of what is said is threatened by semantic underdetermination: If the sentence underdetermines the thought it is used to express, what is said cannot be the proposition expressed by the sentence and meant by the speaker. This leads to a number of questions: How far does semantic underdetermination reach? Do we have to extend or restrict the Gricean notion? Is what is said semantic or pragmatic? Keeping these metaphysical