Högre seminariet i filosofi bjuder in till ett seminarium med Indrek Reiland, Universität Wien och Helsingfors universitet. Seminariet ges på engelska och har den engelska titeln "What is it to Use a Word?"
Abstract (på engelska)
What is it, in producing a sound (mark, bodily movement), to use a word? Relatedly, what is it for a produced sound to count as an articulation of a word? The most common suggestion is that this has something to do with the speaker’s articulatory intentions: the intention to repeat a previous use (Kaplan 1990) or simply the intention to use a word (Hawthorne & Lepore 2011). On some versions of the view, intention isn’t wholly constitutive - the product (sound etc.) also has to satisfy conventional standards specifying the canonical articulation, within limits of toleration (Hawthorne & Lepore 2011). Recent alternatives appeal instead to psychological processes like lexical selection (Munroe 2022, Stojnic 2022) or utterance scores (Gasparri 2026).
In this talk I will first offer two ways of working out the common suggestion and defend one of them over the other. On the offered view, to use a word is to intend, in making a sound, to put a rule in force that requires the sound to match a canonical articulation. I'll then pit the view against the recent alternatives and discuss their pros and cons."
