What is the lexical meaning of polemical terms?

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (7):917-941 (2022)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

ABSTRACT Polemical terms constitute a special category of polysemous terms. Like all polysemous terms, their use evidences a plurality of conventionalised senses that are felt to be related to one another and, possibly, to a highly abstract core meaning. However, in contrast with ordinary polysemous terms such as rubbish or mouth, polemical terms have something ‘polemical’ about what counts as their primary sense, i.e. the one which is the most faithful to the ‘concept’ they express and to the ‘topic’ they pick out. This poses a challenge for theories that take speakers’ monosemic intuitions seriously and endorse the externalist thesis that it is speakers’ external environment that anchors word meaning in a univocal way. I consider Schroeter and Schroeter’s ‘connectedness model’, which offers an externalist dissociation between ‘concepts’ and the possibly diverging criteria used by speakers. I argue that the model can be adapted to tackle the problem of polemical terms, but only insofar as the assumption of alignment between externalistic concepts and lexical meanings is dropped. I submit that polemical terms do have an abstract core meaning, but of a more impressionistic than conceptual nature.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

    This entry is not archived by us. If you are the author and have permission from the publisher, we recommend that you archive it. Many publishers automatically grant permission to authors to archive pre-prints. By uploading a copy of your work, you will enable us to better index it, making it easier to find.

    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 104,706

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2022-08-01

Downloads
28 (#883,531)

6 months
14 (#233,595)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Antonin Thuns
Université Libre de Bruxelles

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

The meaning of 'meaning'.Hilary Putnam - 1975 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7:131-193.
Individualism and the mental.Tyler Burge - 1979 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1):73-122.
Verbal Disputes.David J. Chalmers - 2011 - Philosophical Review 120 (4):515-566.

View all 23 references / Add more references