The Polysemy Approach to Philosophical Debates

null, Michelle Liu (Oxford University)

Abstract: In philosophical debates, theorists often make a case for the polysemy of a particular philosophically interesting term ‘x’, arguing that ‘x’ has multiple distinct but related senses, and then proceed to draw metaphysical implications with respect to the domain of x. Call this ‘the polysemy approach’. Such an approach can be found in contemporary debates about know-how, pain, causation, explanation, part-whole relations, and many others. In this talk, I take a closer look at the polysemy approach. The goal here is two-fold. The first is a descriptive one – the talk ties together different philosophical contributions from various areas into a single framework and provides a clear articulation of the polysemy approach. The second is a programmatic one – it aims to shed light on how to deploy the approach. To that end, I draw on recent philosophical, linguistic and psycholinguistic literature on polysemy.