Cesare Cozzo: Reflective Meaning: the Immediate Role of Expressions in Arguments

Organized by the Department of Logic

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Cesare Cozzo (Sapienza University of Rome):
Reflective meaning: the immediate role of expressions in arguments

Abstract
One of the many ways in which the word "meaning" is used consists in equating "meaning" with something whose apprehension is constitutive of linguistic understanding. Meaning in this sense has different levels. The first level is pre-reflective meaning. A speaker’s grasp of pre-reflective meaning is only an implicit, indeterminate awareness. In epistemic contexts, epistemically virtuous speakers try to make the senses of words explicit. Part of their common inquiry is a reflection on the meanings of their linguistic expressions, which I term the epistemic reflection on meaning. I shall expound a non-holistic, fallibilist, inferentialist theory of meaning aimed at representing the general form of an epistemic reflection on meaning. The exposition will be a revisitation of the theory centred on immediate argumental role presented in Meaning and Argument (Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm, 1994), viewed as a description of a second level of meaning: reflective meaning.