FWF-funded research project
This project was funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF under its Hertha Firnberg programme (project No. T-1103), and hosted by the Department of Philosophy of the University of Vienna. It started on 1st January 2020 and ran until 30 June 2023. In Hilary and Trinity term 2023, the PI was a visiting academic at the Faculty of Philosophy of Oxford University.
The project investigated a metaphysical aspect of the meaning of language utterances. It started from the assumption that meaning is a property language expressions possess. But there are many sorts of property; we must therefore investigate which of them ‘meaning’ is. A good place to look is a group of properties called ‘response-dependent’ because whether a thing has them depends on someone or something else’s response. Examples are ‘being funny’ or ‘tasting sweet’: something is only funny if it causes someone’s mirth, and for something to be sweet, it must taste sweet to someone. These responses (mirth, the sensation of sweetness) are therefore an essential factor determining whether an object possesses the relevant property. But this seems to be the case for words, too: they can only possess meaning if they mean something to someone. So considering meaning to be a response-dependent property seems an obvious choice.
However, this is not enough to resolve the issue. It turns out that there is not just one, but several, ontologically different sorts of response-dependent properties. So, one of the tasks of this project was to define these differences. A distinction must be drawn between properties depending entirely, and those depending only partly on a response. But the project also investigated whether it is possible to distinguish between different response-dependent properties with respect to the nature of the response. Because surely, a response involving a judgment according to established criteria, for instance for the property of ‘being acceptable’, is of a very different nature than, say, a physical response as in the property of ‘being corrosive’.
Once these distinctions have been defined, we can investigate exactly which sort of response-dependent property the meaning of language expressions actually is.
The project therefore breaks new ground in two areas: it establishes a new distinction for properties, and it thereby enables the philosophy of language to take a new perspective.