The Meanings and Meaninglessness of Buzzwords

The ArgLab Open Seminar heartily invites everyone to a talk by Pedro Abreu (IFILNOVA).

Abstract

This presentation examines the recent career of the term “diversity” as a way of rethinking meaning and, especially, meaninglessness. It begins from a familiar but striking phenomenon: “diversity”, like many buzzwords, can seem at once semantically depleted and yet highly consequential in use, a contrast made especially vivid by the recent shift in its evaluative valence. I argue that this tension arises from a conflation of distinct dimensions of meaning.
My proposal starts from a pluralist picture of our ordinary notion of meaning. Rather than assuming that meaning is exhausted by a single, privileged form of linguistic content, I suggest that philosophy of language can be seen as engaged in a long and complex project of explicating a richer pre-theoretical notion of meaning, one that contains not only stable community meaning, but also locally coordinated meaning, speaker meaning, fragment meaning, function, and lexical effects. On this view, different accounts of meaning introduce selective cuts into a richer, more layered phenomenon, bringing some dimensions into focus while leaving others aside.
This broader framework has consequences for the notion of meaninglessness. Meaninglessness should not be treated as an all-or-nothing status, nor reduced to semantic failure alone. It is better conceived as aspect-relative: a term may lose stability, determinacy, or grip in one dimension while remaining meaningful in others. This helps make sense of “diversity”: what can appear to be meaninglessness may instead be the erosion of one dimension of meaning alongside the persistence of others.
The final part of the presentation considers in particular detail whether lexical effects should be counted as a bona fide dimension of meaning alongside the others, and what difference this makes to how we think about meaninglessness.

Everybody is welcome!

This event is organized by Pedro Abreu. The purpose of this seminar series is to give researchers a platform to discuss ongoing work and problems in the philosophy of language, epistemology, argumentation, metaethics, and related areas. For administrative inquiries, please contact Pedro Abreu at pedroabreu@fcsh.unl.pt.