Semantic deference versus semantic coordination

Abstract

It's widely accepted that social facts about an individual's linguistic community can affect both the reference of her words and the concepts (or idiolect meanings) those words express. Theorists sympathetic to the internalist tradition have sought to accommodate these social dependence phenomena without altering their core theoretical commitments by positing deferential reference-fixing criteria. In this paper, we sketch a different explanation of social dependence phenomena, according to which all concepts are individuated in part by causal-historical relations linking token elements of thought.