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The variation problem

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Abstract

It is often assumed that two linguistic agents can come to understand one another in part because they use the same words. That is, many philosophical theories of communication posit an intersubjective same-word relation. However, giving an account of this relation is complicated by what I call “The Variation Problem”—a problem resulting from the fact that the same word can be pronounced differently. In this paper, I first argue that previous models of the same-word relation, including Kaplanian and Chomskyan models, fail to escape The Variation Problem. I then propose a new model on which the same-word relation is grounded in a particular kind of social relation that holds between the speaker and the audience. On this model, using the same word requires not that agents make the same sounds, but that they coordinate their internal linguistic representations.

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Notes

  1. Metaphysical questions about words have been taken up by Kaplan (1990, 2011), Hawthorne and Lepore (2011), and Cappelen (1999). Many of their contributions will be discussed in depth throughout this paper.

  2. Since the account I will propose seeks to reconcile linguistic science with philosophical theories of communication, this paper focuses extensively on phonological variation, setting aside orthographic variation. This is because generative linguistics focuses on the properties and acquisition of an I-Language, and since orthography (unlike phonology) is not acquired but must be learned through explicit instruction, it isn’t often included in the target explanandum of generative linguistic theory. Furthermore, while orthographic variation exists, it doesn’t map onto phonological variation in a one to one manner.

  3. See Buchanan (2010, 2014) for a discussion of information transfer as content matching and arguments against this idea. Notably, even views that do not conceive of information transfer as matching content still require a reliable mechanism for mapping sender states onto appropriate receiver states.

  4. Versions of this view can be found in Bromberger (1992), Quine (1951), Katz (1981), Davidson (1979), and Wetzel (1993), and receive detailed discussions in Hawthorne and Lepore (2011) and Kaplan (1990).

  5. Public words will be referred to by their standard English spellings enclosed in single quotes and the pronunciation or phonetic form of utterances will often be referred to using their International Phonetic Alphabet transcriptions enclosed in square brackets.

  6. This alternation is often called “tapping” or “flapping”. See Hayes (2008, p. 32).

  7. This alternation is called “t-glottalization”. See Bergmann et al. (2007, pp. 102–103) and Chapter 3.2.

  8. This variation is known as The Pen-Pin Merger. See Bergmann et al (2007, p. 432).

  9. This alternation is called h-deletion. See Bergmann et al. (2007, p. 114).

  10. See Armstrong (2013) for an in-depth discussion of these points.

  11. Additional examples of historical views can be found in Millikan (1984) and Richard (1990).

  12. Kaplan (1990, p. 112) highlights that these interactions are not simply causal; they must also be of the right intentional kind.

  13. See Kaplan (1990, pp. 102–105) for the complete example.

  14. Seeds of this view can be found in Kaplan (1990, 2011) and in personal communication.

  15. See Hawthorne and Lepore (2011) for a thorough discussion of this point.

  16. Indeed, Kaplan (1990, pp. 101–105) suggests that such constraints would be misplaced. Kaplan (2011, pp. 518–519) also makes exceptions for cases in which an agent fails to make a speech act altogether.

  17. Historical models are also in danger of blending cognates into one large word, resulting in far fewer words in English than we might expect and erasing distinctions that matter for communication.

  18. The phonological component of a lexical item is often called the underlying form and can be thought of as representing the strings of basic sounds associated with a lexical item. I will represent these forms between slashes. Output forms, or phonetic forms, are represented here between square brackets.

  19. Constraints include markedness constraints, which preserve forms preferred by the perceptual and articulatory systems, and faithfulness constraints, which preserve similarity of input and output. See Kager (1999, Chapter 1).

  20. Specifically, it violates multiple faithfulness constraints without a decrease in markedness.

  21. See Noisy Harmonic Grammar and Knob Theory (Hayes 2017; Coetzee and Kawahara 2013).

  22. While Kaplan’s account does appeal to historical communicative chains, it doesn’t appeal to facts about one’s current audience as constitutive of the metaphysical properties of an utterance.

  23. For another notion of competence that extends beyond an agent’s linguistic competence, see Lepore and Stone’s notion of a social competence in Lepore and Stone (2015, Chapter 14).

  24. Subscripts index lexical items to agents, and l is indicates S’s i-th lexical entry in her lexicon.

  25. Cumming (2013a) uses the notion of a communicative policy in connecting different agents’ private concepts to develop a notion of intersubjective content. In a similar spirit, I am using communicative policies between different agents’ private lexical items to establish a notion of an intersubjective syntax.

  26. These conditions are akin to the notion of alignment in Cumming (2013b).

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Acknowledgements

I owe special thanks to Sam Cumming for many helpful discussions of and comments on drafts of this paper and the development of its ideas. I’d also like to thank David Kaplan and Josh Armstrong for discussions of previous drafts and presentations. Thanks to audiences at the UCLA Language Workshop and The Canadian Philosophical Association, an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies, and my colleagues at USD and UCLA, including Tyler Burge, Bruce Hayes, Pamela Hieronymi, Eliot Michaelson, and Jessica Rett.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Ashley Feinsinger

  2. Department of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Ashley Feinsinger

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Feinsinger, A. The variation problem. Philos Stud 178, 317–338 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01433-y

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