Reviving Searle's philosophy of language from a new point of view in epistemic logic

• Grant number: 13/18266-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Effective date (Start): March 01, 2014
• Effective date (End): February 28, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Logic
• Principal Investigator: Luiz Henrique Lopes dos Santos
• Grantee: André Bazzoni Bueno
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 14/05482-6 - Reviving Searle's philosophy of language from a new point of view in epistemic logic, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

The present project aims at revisiting a number of central notions and debates in the philosophy of language which have occupied the mainstream philosophical scene during the last century.More specifically, I shall reassess the internalism/externalism debate about meaning and reference, starting from a new point of view on epistemic logic inspired and derived from (and also semantically equivalent with) Hintikka's classic epistemic system.As a consequence of such technical background, one naturally comes up with a general non-standard modal framework slightly (and therefore scarcely problematic) but in a crucial way deviant from the traditional Kripke-style models.It will then be investigated how varying this initial epistemic condition leads to a consistent and intuitive defense of the internalist thesis about meaning (and specifically to one of its versions proposed by Searle), analogously to what happened in the case of externalism, whose foundation arose directly from Kripke semantics for modal logic (all the more so when it is recalled that one of the most notorious proponents of externalism was Kripke himself).Many of the central issues in the philosophy of language will be in point, such as the so-called "Frege's Puzzle", the semantics of propositional attitudes, epistemic/doxastic logic, the semantics of proper names (descriptivism vs. rigid designation), as well as quite general philosophical notions such as those of metaphysical necessity, of material world (as opposed to the logical Real World of modal logics), and of individual (its construction and its recognition).My research proposes to gather all these several pieces of notions and arguments in a general, structured and coherent theory in accordance with Searle's main theses about language.