Abstract
I argue that a two-dimensional model of social objects is uniquely positioned to deliver explanations for some of the puzzling metaphysical features of words. I consider how a type-token model offers explanations for the metaphysical features of words, but I give reasons to find the model wanting. In its place, I employ an alternative model from social ontology to explain the puzzling data and questions that are generated from the metaphysical features of words. In the end I chart a new path that foregrounds the agent-dependence and social conditions for word kinds.
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Notes
There is some debate over whether there is enough difference between the grounding relation and the anchoring relation to warrant a distinction between the two relations. Schaffer (2019), Hawley (2017), and Mikkola (2017) argue against the distinction, while Epstein (2019) prefers to keep it. It is not essential to my argument whether I side with one or the other. What is important for the argument is distinguishing two different sets of relata as the two dimensions: (1) facts about an object and facts about an object’s kind membership, and (2) facts about social agents who set up kind membership conditions and facts about those kind membership conditions. Whether that amounts to two different kinds of relations can remain an open question.
There is some discussion in Cappelen (1999), Hawthorne and Lepore (2011), and elsewhere over exactly how intentions function within Kaplan’s view. Kaplan addresses this issue in Kaplan (2011), but whatever Kaplan’s actual view, let the above description of Kaplan’s view represent the view where proper intentions (wholly or partially) determine kind membership for a word.
Thanks to Linda Wetzel via personal correspondence for alerting me to this term. See pp. 58-71 for her helpful discussion. Although it is called a lexicographic word, I assume that 1) the term comes from the inscriptive property of the dictionary entries, 2) such a word can be spoken as well, and 3) that it is a pragmatic, contingent matter that they are expressed as inscriptions in dictionaries and lexicons, and that the audiobook versions produce lexicophonic equivalences.
Some of those facts about social agents will involve the intentions of social agents, but facts about the intentions of social agents will not exhaust the social facts, as I explain in this section. So intentions are of course included in the model through facts about the intentions of social agents, but unlike Kaplan’s view (or, let’s say, a view similar to Kaplan’s) there is more needed to explain the metaphysical features of words than the intentions of social agents, as I outline below. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for drawing attention to this.
Types and kinds will be functionally equivalent here. I see no difference between the two that should alter the argument. Further, I remain neutral on other questions related to object theory that have to do with substance theory and bundle theory; the two-dimensional model commits to neither. See Miller (2019) for a way in which a word might be a bundle of properties under a one-category bundle theory.
Cappellen (1999, p. 99), Wetzel (2009, p. 61), and Epstein (2009, p. 57), for example. As one anonymous reviewer pointed out, there may be different senses of ‘word’ that each correspond to a particular object type. One sense of ‘word’, for example, could correspond to inscriptions, another to utterances, and so forth. If that’s the case, there are anchoring conditions for ‘word’ that we could explore and are worth developing, but would sidetrack us too much from the more general metaphysical picture here.
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Thanks to Christopher Menzel and Nathan Howard for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this work.
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Oliphint, J.S. Using a two-dimensional model from social ontology to explain the puzzling metaphysical features of words. Synthese 200, 227 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03716-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03716-9