thought reference and experience themes from the philosophy of gareth evans sep 2005

[...]... contributions of Gareth Evans, who died in 1980 at the age of 34 In the papers gathered together in the posthumously published Collected Papers (CP) and in The Varieties of Reference (VR) (prepared for publication from drafts and lecture notes by John McDowell after Evans s death) Evans made a number of important contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of thought, and philosophical... of linguistic act.2 Like Dummett, Evans held that the most problematic notion in the theory of meaning is the notion of sense, and also like Dummett, Evans was troubled by Frege’s lack of concern with the crucial notion of what it is to grasp a sense Evans s most systematic and substantial work, The Varieties of Reference, is, among other things, an essay on the relation between a theory of sense and. .. regimented version of natural language in terms of a broadly Tarskian theory of truth— the so-called Davidsonian program in semantics Evans shared Dummett’s powerfully developed conviction that the best approach to the philosophy of language is broadly Fregean, incorporating a truth theory at the level of reference and a theory of understanding at the level of sense, supplemented by a theory of force that... contemporary analytical philosophy, and the first part gives an overview of his thinking The second part of the introduction summarizes the papers and provides any necessary background EVANS: INFLUENCES AND OVERVIEW Evans s philosophical work is best viewed against the backdrop of four powerful and in many ways competing currents in the philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s Two of these currents were firmly... meaning Evans s guiding thought is that a theory of meaning must be a theory of understanding One implication of this is that we must be able to explain speakers’ understanding of a language (and in particular their ability to understand novel sentences of that language) in terms of their knowledge of a theory of meaning This is not something that can be achieved merely by spelling out the form that the theory... question to the initial occasion or process when the name was bestowed A reference- preserving link is one where a speaker intends to use the name to pick out the same object as the person from whom she learnt the name This type of account is deeply antithetical to Evans s understanding of thought and language In his first publication, The causal theory of names” (1973), Evans offers a nuanced critique of Kripke’s... structure and logical form” (1976) and “Semantic theory and tacit knowledge” (1981a) and in VR §1.8 In the Introduction to Truth and Meaning Evans and McDowell strongly align themselves with one aspect of Davidson’s conception of the form a theory of meaning should take This is its divergence from what they term translational semantics Translational semantic theories offer mappings between sentences of the. .. think that thoughts are the senses of sentences, and hence that to explore what is distinctive of, say, “I”-thoughts is to explore the sense of the first person pronoun But Evans, unlike Dummett, holds that we can investigate “I”-thoughts without proceeding via the sentences that express them Evans s understanding of the category of singular thoughts marks a further significant divergence from Dummett... though the interpreter typically uses such an axiom in deriving the T-theorem, the interpretation will exploit the theorem regardless of how it is derived The problem is that the distinction between Russellian and non-Russellian names cannot be captured at the level of the T-theorems in a free logical framework In the case of (5) the righthand side of the biconditional is a simple sentence, and hence... sense, and hence that there can be thoughts with non-denoting senses, Evans maintains that a proper understanding of Frege’s notion of sense shows this to be impossible The best way to understand Frege’s notion of sense, Evans maintains, is through the metaphor of a mode of presentation, and, he argues, there cannot be a mode of presentation of something that does not exist This way of understanding . class="bi x0 y0 w0 h1" alt="" THOUGHT, REFERENCE, AND EXPERIENCE This page intentionally left blank Thought, Reference, and Experience THEMES FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF GARETH EVANS  Edited by JOSÉ LUIS. Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Past, Space and Self (1994), and Reference and Consciousness (2002). Quassim Cassam is Professor of Philosophy. conviction that the best approach to the philosophy of language is broadly Fregean, incorporating a truth theory at the level of reference and a theory of understanding at the level of sense, supplemented