Amr Salih will lead the discussion on Sarah Sawyer’s “Thought and Talk”.

As usual, the seminar will take place in Edgecliffe, room G03, 12-2pm.

Abstract:

In her forthcoming paper, Thought and Talk, Sara Sawyer made a distinction between “meaning” and “concept” where she attacked the widespread philosophical practice of Identifying them. Sawyer thinks that the contribution of the society to a representation and the contribution of the real world might pull, and they often do, in different directions. She claims that the contribution of the society to representation should be understood as a contribution to language, whereas the contribution of the real world to representation should be understood as a contribution to thought.  In this respect, she holds that this distinction serve us indispensable theoretical role in explaining different philosophical issues such as contested meanings, conceptual engineering, verbal disputes,  and analyticity. I will try to expose her arguments for the distinction, and lead a discussion on whether the distinction succeeds in explaining the philosophical issues above.