An externalist and contextualist account of copredication

• Daniel Molto ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Sussex

     University of Sussex

     Reino Unido

     
• Localización: Crítica: revista hispanoamericana de filosofía, ISSN 0011-1503, Vol. 57, Nº. 171, 2025, págs. 163-180
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.22201/iifs.18704905e.2025.1755
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen
  • español

    Sostengo que la polisemia es un fenómeno contextual, pero que lanaturaleza de la dependencia contextual de la polisemia ha sido malinterpretada,algo que se pone de manifiesto en el caso especialmente difícil de la copredicación.En este artículo, ofrezco una semántica veri-condicional que puede dar cuenta de lasoraciones copredicativas, en las cuales los términos polisémicos se utilizan en másde un sentido y, por tanto, poseen más de una extensión simultáneamente. Además,argumento que mi propuesta es compatible con el externismo, lo cual es significativoporque la existencia de la polisemia suele considerarse un problema para dichaposición. El contexto debe desempeñar un papel importante en esta semántica que,como mostraré, difiere sustancialmente de las propuestas actualmente disponibles.

  • English

    I maintain that polysemy is a contextual phenomenon, but that the nature of the context-dependence of polysemy has been misunderstood, a fact which is brought out by the especially difficult case of copredication. In this paper, I offer a truth-conditional semantics that can accommodate copredicative sentences, in which polysemous terms are being used in more than one sense, and thus have more than one extension simultaneously. I argue, further, that my account is compatible with externalism, which is significant because the existence of polysemy is often thought to pose a problem for externalism. Context is required to play an important role in this semantics, which, as I will show, is substantially different from accounts currently on the market.

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