Occasion-Sensitivity: Selected Essays
Charles Travis presents a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive view of the relation of thought to language. The key idea is "occasion-sensitivity": what it is for words to express a given concept is for them to be apt for contributing to any of many different conditions of correctness (notably truth conditions). Since words mean what they do by expressing a given concept, it follows that meaning does not determine truth conditions. This view ties thoughts less tightly to...
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Charles Travis presents a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive view of the relation of thought to language. The key idea is "occasion-sensitivity": what it is for words to express a given concept is for them to be apt for contributing to any of many different conditions of correctness (notably truth conditions). Since words mean what they do by expressing a given concept, it follows that meaning does not determine truth conditions. This view ties thoughts less tightly to the linguistic forms which express them than traditional views of the matter, and in two directions: a given linguistic form, meaning fixed, may express an indefinite variety of thoughts; one thought can be expressed in an indefinite number of syntactically and semantically distinct ways. Travis highlights the importance of this view for linguistic theory, and shows how it gives new form to a variety of traditional philosophical problems.
Acknowledgements viiIntroduction 1Occasion-SensitivityOn What Is Strictly Speaking True 19Annals of Analysis 65Meaning's Role in Truth 94Pragmatics 109Sublunary Intuitionism 130Insensitive Semantics 150Aristotle's Condition 161ApplicationsAre Belief Ascriptions Opaque? 185Vagueness, Observation, and Sorites 206Attitudes As States 227On Concepts of Objects 253On Constraints of Generality 271A Sense of Occasion 290References 316Index 319
