Youichi Matsusaka (Tokyo Metropolitan University): Further Words on Words: A Naturalistic Approach to the Ontology of Linguistic Entities

When:
4 November, 2022 @ 11:30 am – 1:30 pm
2022-11-04T11:30:00+01:00
2022-11-04T13:30:00+01:00

In his much discussed paper “Words”, David Kaplan initiated a naturalistic study of the ontology of words. Although his attack on the shape-theoretic conception of words appears to be widely accepted, one of his main claims —differences in sound or shape between tokens of the same word can be “just about as great as you would like“— has been universally rejected by his critics. By taking seriously Kaplan’s suggestion that words are evolving entities, I will try to defend this claim. In doing so, however, I will try to explain the role of resemblance of tokens in evolution, which is simply missing in Kaplan’s  picture.