Humanities and Social Sciences

Dr. Mayank Bora
Department of Philosophy, University of North Bengal

Different people can express or grasp the same meaning by the use of same (or, different) linguistic expressions. Such common expression or grasp of meaning – which we shall call samesaying – is the basis of communication. It is thus important to provide an account of samesaying if we are to have any hope of understanding communication. Some authors have independently argued that at core of samesaying there is an epistemic condition such as the knowledge of coreference which we may generally call mutual epistemic access to the sameness of content. I argue that there is no way of specifying this general notion which can yield an acceptable account of samesaying. Any such epistemic account is either going to undergenerate, overgenerate, or beg the question. I propose that samesaying is instead grounded in the relation of semantic deference – the relation between utterances of two expressions or two utterances of the same expression where one utterance is made with the intention to mean the same as another utterance.   

Dr. Mayank BOra is a philosopher who works in the intersection of Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, and Philosophical Logic. Though an Information Technology engineer by undergraduate training he has received further education in Philosophy and Logic at the University of Delhi, University of Amsterdam, and the University of Connecticut where he received his PhD in Philosophy in 2017. Mayank is particularly interested in how we cognitively grasp individuals and how that affects our semantic and metaphysical intuitions, our ontological presumptions, and the nature and content of our thought and language more generally. He also has interests in Ethics where he likes to think about how we can theoretically grasp the coherence between our intuitive ethical evaluations across distinct modalities such as actions, motives, etc. His work has been published in journals such as Acta Analytica and Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research. He is currently employed as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Bengal.