Description du projet
Une approche innovante pour étudier le langage dans la communication
Dans la philosophie du langage, le domaine de la métasémantique pose comme principe qu’une population utilise le langage comme communication basée plutôt sur le son dans une convention particulière de syntaxe et de la grammaire que sur la signification réelle des mots. Le projet Language Use s’éloignera de cette approche pour étudier la relation du langage dans les actions et l’état mental de ses utilisateurs, en apportant une recherche empirique émanant de la linguistique et de la psychologie évolutive, de la métaphysique et de la philosophie de l’esprit. Ce projet fera avancer la jeune carrière de la chercheuse, qui fournira également dans le cadre de sa recherche une ontologie innovante du langage et des expressions.
Objectif
The ER (Jessica Keiser) is an early career researcher. The focus of her research to this point has been the philosophy of language, specifically metasemantics. The research goal of the project is to develop an account of the nature of language and language use (explained below) which reduces these phenomena to facts about the actions and mental states of language users. This project builds on the ER’s existing research expertise, but with the support of the host institution (University of Leeds) and the supervisor (Professor Robert Williams), the project will broaden the purview of her research by integrating it with empirical research in linguistics and evolutionary psychology, as well as core areas of philosophy such as metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. It will advance her career at a crucial early stage by making a mark with a large scale project which offers offering novel and viable solutions to recalcitrant problems, and position her at the cutting edge of contemporary discussion.
The project has two main objectives: (1) to provide a novel metasemantic proposal, i.e. an account of what makes it the case that a community of speakers share a given language and (2) to provide a novel ontology of linguistic entities such as languages and expressions. The metasemantic proposal claims that populations speak the languages they do in virtue of conventions of locutionary action (using an utterance to direct attention). This proposal departs from the traditional conception of language as grounded in illocutionary action (using an utterance to elicit a propositional attitude), and overcomes problems concerning indeterminacy and nonliteral speech that were problematic for traditional accounts. The metaphysical proposal uses the tools and framework from metasemantic account to provide an ontology of the linguistic entities it is committed to. It moves away from standard approaches by using communicative actions (rather than the products of those actions e.g. sound
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinateur
LS2 9JT Leeds
Royaume-Uni