Download or read book Meaning Quantification Necessity written by Martin Davies and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-30 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1981. This is a book for the final year undergraduate or first year graduate who intends to proceed with serious research in philosophical logic. It will be welcomed by both lecturers and students for its careful consideration of main themes ranging from Gricean accounts of meaning to two dimensional modal logic. The first part of the book is concerned with the nature of the semantic theorist’s project, and particularly with the crucial concepts of meaning, truth, and semantic structure. The second and third parts deal with various constructions that are found in natural languages: names, quantifiers, definite descriptions, and modal operators. Throughout, while assuming some familiarity with philosophical logic and elementary formal logic, the text provides a clear exposition. It brings together related ideas, and in some places refines and improves upon existing accounts.
Download or read book Meaning and Necessity A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic written by Rudolf Carnap and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main purpose of this book is the development of a new method for the semantical analysis of meaning, that is, a new method for analyzing and describing the meanings of linguistic expressions. This method, called the method of extension and intension, is developed by modifying and extending certain customary concepts, especially those of class and property. The method will be contrasted with various other semantical methods used in traditional philosophy or by contemporary authors. These other methods have one characteristic in common. They all regard an expression in a language as a name of a concrete or abstract entity. In contradistinction, the method here proposed takes an expression, not as naming anything, but as possessing an intension and an extension. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Download or read book Meaning and Necessity written by Rudolf Carnap and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1988-02-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is valuable as expounding in full a theory of meaning that has its roots in the work of Frege and has been of the widest influence. . . . The chief virtue of the book is its systematic character. From Frege to Quine most philosophical logicians have restricted themselves by piecemeal and local assaults on the problems involved. The book is marked by a genial tolerance. Carnap sees himself as proposing conventions rather than asserting truths. However he provides plenty of matter for argument."—Anthony Quinton, Hibbert Journal
Download or read book Meaning Truth and the Limits of Analysis written by David Wiggins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume draws together work by David Wiggins on topics to do with language, meaning, truth, and the limit of semantic analysis, from 1980 to 2020. Each chapter draws upon previously published material, but that material has been revised, sometimes significantly, for republication here. Opening with a selective account of a century's work in the philosophy of meaning, from Frege and Wittgenstein to the late twentieth century, the book engages first with the nuts and bolts of sentence-construction: predicates and the copula, quantifiers, names, existence treated as a second-level predicate, and adverbial modification. The following five chapters then treat of definition and (as dreamt of by Leibniz and others) the terminus of semantic analysis; the idea of natural languages as real things with a history; the idea of truth conceived as correlative with inquiry (C. S. Peirce) and, finally, the properties we look for in truth itself—the marks, as Frege or Leibniz might have said, of the concept true.
Download or read book The World Time Parallel written by A. A. Rini and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is what could have happened but never did as real as what did happen? What did happen, but isn't happening now, happened at another time. Analogously, one can say that what could have happened happens in another possible world. Whatever their views about the reality of such things as possible worlds, philosophers need to take this analogy seriously. Adriane Rini and Max Cresswell exhibit, in an easy step-by-step manner, the logical structure of temporal and modal discourse, and show that every temporal construction has an exact parallel that requires a language that can refer to worlds, and vice versa. They make precise, in a way which can be articulated and tested, the claim that the parallel is at work behind even ordinary talk about time and modality. The book gives metaphysicians a sturdy framework for the investigation of time and modality - one that does not presuppose any particular metaphysical view.
Download or read book Meaning written by Paul Horwich and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is meaning? Paul Horwich presents an original philosophical theory, demonstrates its richness, and reconciles his theory with a rational view of meaning derived from its use, thereby vindicating his standpoint.
Download or read book Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity written by Tristan Grøtvedt Haze and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the idea that some true statements would have been true no matter how the world had turned out, while others could have been false. It develops and defends a version of the idea that we tell the difference between these two types of truths in part by reflecting on the meanings of words. It has often been thought that modal issues—issues about possibility and necessity—are related to issues about meaning. In this book, the author defends the view that the analysis of meaning is not just a preliminary to answering modal questions in philosophy; it is not merely that before we can find out whether something is possible, we need to get clear on what we are talking about. Rather, clarity about meaning often brings with it answers to modal questions. In service of this view, the author analyzes the notion of necessity and develops ideas about linguistic meaning, applying them to several puzzles and problems in philosophy of language. Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic.
Download or read book Possible Worlds written by John Divers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-01-16 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Up-to-date and comprehensive study of a major topic in philosophy The first critical account of forty years of literature on possible worlds A huge topic in analytic philosophy especially in the past twenty-five yeasr and one of the major problems in philosophy as a whole This is the only book available that will introduce the topic to students in philosophy John Divers has taught possible worlds for many years
Download or read book Metarepresentations written by Dan Sperber and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume concerns metarepresentation: the construction and use of representations that represent other representations. It collects studies on the subject by an interdisciplinary group of contributors.
Download or read book International Encyclopedia of Linguistics written by William Frawley and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2003-05 with total page 2198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated edition contains over 900 articles, which provide a detailed overview of theory and research in all branches of linguistics. Every known language is covered and each article is followed by a detailed bibliography.
Download or read book The Unity of the Proposition written by Richard Gaskin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-10-30 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Gaskin presents a work in the philosophy of language. He analyses what is distinctive about sentences and the propositions they express—what marks them off from mere lists of words and mere aggregates of word-meanings respectively. Since he identifies the world with all the true and false propositions, his account of the unity of the proposition has significant implications for our understanding of the nature of reality. He argues that the unity of the proposition is constituted by a certain infinitistic structure known in the tradition as 'Bradley's regress'. Usually, Bradley's regress has been regarded as vicious, but Gaskin argues that it is the metaphysical ground of the propositional unity, and gives us an important insight into the fundamental make-up of the world.
Download or read book Donald Davidson s Truth Theoretic Semantics written by Ernest Lepore and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-11 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book The A to Z of Logic written by Harry J. Gensler and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The A to Z of Logic introduces the central concepts of the field in a series of brief, non-technical, cross-referenced dictionary entries. The 352 alphabetically arranged entries give a clear, basic introduction to a very broad range of logical topics. Entries can be found on deductive systems, such as propositional logic, modal logic, deontic logic, temporal logic, set theory, many-valued logic, mereology, and paraconsistent logic. Similarly, there are entries on topics relating to those previously mentioned such as negation, conditionals, truth tables, and proofs. Historical periods and figures are also covered, including ancient logic, medieval logic, Buddhist logic, Aristotle, Ockham, Boole, Frege, Russell, Gödel, and Quine. There are even entries relating logic to other areas and topics, like biology, computers, ethics, gender, God, psychology, metaphysics, abstract entities, algorithms, the ad hominem fallacy, inductive logic, informal logic, the liar paradox, metalogic, philosophy of logic, and software for learning logic. In addition to the dictionary, there is a substantial chronology listing the main events in the history of logic, an introduction that sketches the central ideas of logic and how it has evolved into what it is today, and an extensive bibliography of related readings. This book is not only useful for specialists but also understandable to students and other beginners in the field.
Download or read book Facing Facts written by Neale and published by . This book was released on 2001-11 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Facing Facts is a powerful, original examination of attempts to dislodge a cornerstone of modern philosophy: the idea that our thoughts and utterances are representations of slices of reality. Representations that are accurate are usually said to be true, to correspond to the facts - this is the foundation of correspondence theories of truth. A number of prominent philosophers have tried to undermine the idea that propositions, facts and correspondence can play any usefulrole in philosophy, and formal argumentshave been advanced to demonstrate that, under seemingly uncontroversial conditions, such entities collapse into an undifferentiated unity. The demise of individual facts is meant to herald the dawn of a new era inphilosophy, in which debates about scepticism, realism, subjectivity, representational and computational theories of mind, possible worlds, and divergent conceptual schemes that represent reality in different ways todifferent persons, periods, or cultures evaporate through lack of subject matter.By carefully untangling a host of intersecting metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and logical issues, and providing rich and original analyses of key aspects of the work of Frege, Russell, Gödel, andDavidson, Stephen Neale demonstrates that arguments for the collapse of facts are considerably more complex and interesting than either friend or foe ever imagined. A number of deep semantic facts emerge along with apowerful proof: while it is technically possible to avoid the collapse of facts, rescue the idea of representations of reality, and thereby face anew the problems raised by the sceptic or the relativist, doing so requiresmaking some tough semantic decisions about predicates and descriptions. It is simply impossible, Neale shows, to invoke representations, facts, states, or propositions without making hard choices - choices that may send manyphilosophers scurrying back to the drawing board. Facing Facts will be crucial to future work in metaphysics, the philosophy of language and mind, and logic, and will have profound implications far beyond.
Download or read book Necessity and Language written by Morris Lazerowitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problem of necessity remains one of the central issues in modern philosophy. The authors of this volume, originally published in 1985, developed a new approach to the problem, which focusses on the logical grammar of necessary propositions. This volume gathers their seminal essays on the problem of necessity, together with new material at the original time publication.
Download or read book Reference without Referents written by R. M. Sainsbury and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2005-05-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reference is a central topic in philosophy of language, and has been the main focus of discussion about how language relates to the world. R. M. Sainsbury sets out a new approach to the concept, which promises to bring to an end some long-standing debates in semantic theory. There is a single category of referring expressions, all of which deserve essentially the same kind of semantic treatment. Included in this category are both singular and plural referring expressions ('Aristotle', 'The Pleiades'), complex and non-complex referring expressions ('The President of the USA in 1970', 'Nixon'), and empty and non-empty referring expressions ('Vulcan', 'Neptune'). Referring expressions are to be described semantically by a reference condition, rather than by being associated with a referent. In arguing for these theses, Sainsbury's book promises to end the fruitless oscillation between Millian and descriptivist views. Millian views insist that every name has a referent, and find it hard to give a good account of names which appear not to have referents, or at least are not known to do so, like ones introduced through error ('Vulcan'), ones where it is disputed whether they have a bearer ('Patanjali') and ones used in fiction. Descriptivist theories require that each name be associated with some body of information. These theories fly in the face of the fact names are useful precisely because there is often no overlap of information among speakers and hearers. The alternative position for which the book argues is firmly non-descriptivist, though it also does not require a referent. A much broader view can be taken of which expressions are referring expressions: not just names and pronouns used demonstratively, but also some complex expressions and some anaphoric uses of pronouns. Sainsbury's approach brings reference into line with truth: no one would think that a semantic theory should associate a sentence with a truth value, but it is commonly held that a semantic theory should associate a sentence with a truth condition, a condition which an arbitrary state of the world would have to satisfy in order to make the sentence true. The right analogy is that a semantic theory should associate a referring expression with a reference condition, a condition which an arbitrary object would have to satisfy in order to be the expression's referent. Lucid and accessible, and written with a minimum of technicality, Sainsbury's book also includes a useful historical survey. It will be of interest to those working in logic, mind, and metaphysics as well as essential reading for philosophers of language.
Download or read book Plurals and Events written by Barry Schein and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barry Schein proposes combining a second-order treatment of plurals with Donald Davidson's suggestion that there are positions for reference to events in ordinary predicates in order to account for several of the more puzzling features of plurals without invoking plural objects, with its attendant metaphysics, and also provide an absolute truth-theoretic characterization of the semantics of sentences with plurals in them. How do we make sense of sentences with plural noun phrases in them? In Plurals and Events, Barry Schein proposes combining a second-order treatment of plurals with Donald Davidson's suggestion that there are positions for reference to events in ordinary predicates in order to account for several of the more puzzling features of plurals without invoking plural objects, with its attendant metaphysics, and also provide an absolute truth-theoretic characterization of the semantics of sentences with plurals in them. Schein's highly original argument should have significant impact on how natural-language semantics is done, with repercussions for philosophy and logic. The book opens with foundational arguments that the logical language should have four major features: reduction to singular predication via a Davidsonian logical form, amereology of events, a logical syntax that allows the constituents of a Davidsonian analysis to be predicated of distinct events and separated from one another by other logical elements, and descriptive anaphors that cross-refer to the events described by antecedent clauses. A semantics for plurality and quantification is developed in the remaining chapters, which address some of the empirical and formal questions raised by the variety of interpretations in which plurals and quantifiers participate.
