Conceptual role and truth-conditions: comments on Harman's paper: ``Conceptual role semantics''.
Brian Loar · Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic · 1982
Conceptual role semantics, as Gilbert Harman has called it, consists in taking the meaning of a linguistic expression to be a matter of the content of thoughts or concepts it can be used to express, the content of a concept or thought consisting in its functional role in a person's psychology.On the face of it, this is quite different from a truth-conditional approach to meaning, but Harman supposes that whatever is intuitive about the latter can be explained within conceptual role semantics.Harman's various illuminating treatments of this subject ([4]-[7]) constitute one of the main reasons for the current importance of conceptual role semantics; they lucidly elaborate its various connections with other key issues in the philosophy of language.I believe that Harman's general thesis and many of his principal points are essentially correct, except for this: his account of the relation between conceptual role and truthconditions seems to me to be underspecified, and perhaps to suggest a wrong assessment of the dependence of truth-conditions on conceptual role.In this paper I shall lay out how it seems to me that conceptual role and truthconditions are related in the theory of meaning. Use theories of meaningConceptual role semantics can be classified as a "use" theory of meaning.In a sense, any theory that attempts to say what it is for an individual or a population to use a language could count as such, for each sentence's meaning would then be a matter of that use or potential use of it.But virtually any theory of meaning will attempt that, and there is a somewhat narrower, more convenient, sense of "use theory".On some accounts, the ascription of truth-conditions, reference-conditions, and references (relative to the actual world or to all possible worlds) constitutes the foundational level of semantic description, whether of sentences, utterances, sentential attitudes, or thoughts. 1But others invoke rules, practices, conditionings, verification procedures, and patterns of inferential dispositions, whose specification does not overtly involve truth-conditions, reference-conditions, or propositions. 2