Download or read book Philosophical Semantics and Term Meaning written by Charles Schlee and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the author presents a meanings-as-entities view of term meaning utilizing set theory. In doing so the author discusses limitations of customary formal semantic theories, argues for the primacy of term meaning, provides an account of analyticity based on synonymy, discusses possible-worlds semantics, provides a defense of our traditionaland common-senseview of meanings as entities, and sketches an approach to bridging the gap between formal semantics and natural language. The author discusses the views of many philosophers, including Carnap, Donnellan, Hintikka, Kripke, Linsky, Quine, Russell, and Searle.
Download or read book The Meaning of Meaning written by Charles Kay Ogden and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Philosophical Semantics written by Claudio Costa and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an innovative systematic approach to the problems of meaning, reference and related issues, unifying in promising ways some of the best insights, not only of exponential philosophers like Wittgenstein and Frege, but also of some influential later theorists like Michael Dummett, Ernst Tugendhat, John Searle and Donald Williams. Moreover, it exposes some main errors popularized by clever formalist-oriented philosophers, from Willard Van Orman Quine to Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam. In this way, it shows how some older major approaches could regain their central importance and how the cartography of philosophy of language could be once more redrawn. The book is clearly written, and will be of interest to anyone with basic training in analytic philosophy.
Download or read book Semantics and the Philosophy of Language written by Leonard Linsky and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1952 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Meaning Reference and Necessity written by Simon Blackburn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1975 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A volume of studies in philosophical logic by a group of younger philosophers in the UK. There is a core of problems in the theory of meaning which have been accorded a central importance by philosophers, logicians and theoretical linguists, and which have stimulated some of the most powerful and original work in these subjects. The contributors to the volume have a common interest in these topics, insist on their continuing and fundamental importance, and offer here a distinctive and original contribution to them.
Download or read book Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference written by Wayne A. Davis and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2005-07-14 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference extends Wayne Davis's groundbreaking work on the foundations of semantics. Davis revives the classical doctrine that meaning consists in the expression of ideas, and advances the expression theory by showing how it can account for standard proper names, and the distinctive way their meaning determines their reference. He also shows how the theory can handle interjections, syncategorematic terms, conventional implicatures, and other cases long seen as difficult for both ideational and referential theories. The expression theory is founded on the fact that thoughts are event types with a constituent structure, and that thinking is a fundamental propositional attitude, distinct from belief and desire. Thought parts ('ideas' or 'concepts') are distinguished from both sensory images and conceptions. Word meaning is defined recursively: sentences and other complex expressions mean what they do in virtue of what thought parts their component words express and what thought structure the linguistic structure expresses; and unstructured words mean what they do in living languages in virtue of evolving conventions to use them to express ideas. The difficulties of descriptivism show that the ideas expressed by names are atomic or basic. The reference of a name is the extension of the idea it expresses, which is determined not by causal relations, but by its identity or content together with the nature of objects in the world. Hence a name's reference is dependent on, but not identical to, its meaning. A name is directly and rigidly referential because the extension of the idea it expresses is not determined by the extensions of component ideas. The expression theory thus has the strength of Fregeanism without its descriptivist bias, and of Millianism without its referentialist or causalist shortcomings. The referential properties of ideas can be set out recursively by providing a generative theory of ideas, assigning extensions to atomic ideas, and formulating rules whereby the semantic value of a complex idea is determined by the semantic values of its components. Davis also shows how referential properties can be treated using situation semantics and possible worlds semantics. The key is to drop the assumption that the values of intension functions are the referents of the words whose meaning they represent, and to abandon the necessity of identity for logical modalities. Many other pillars of contemporary philosophical semantics, such as the twin earth arguments, are shown to be unfounded.
Download or read book Ways of Meaning written by Mark de Bretton Platts and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophy of language is not an isolated philosophical discipline of merely technical interest to other philosophers. Rather, as Mark Platts shows, the philosophy of language can help to solve traditional problems in other areas of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Ways of Meaning provides a clear, comprehensive introduction to such issues at the forefront of philosophy. Assuming only minimum knowledge of elementary formal logic, the book shows how taking truth as the central notion in the theory of meaning can clarify the relations between language, reality, and knowledge, and thus illuminate the nature of each. This second edition of the book contains a new chapter on the notions of natural-kind words and natural kinds. Unlike other discussions of the subject, this one places the semantic issues involved in the context of questions about the relations between knowing subjects and known objects. The author has also added a bibliography of further readings published since the first edition appeared in 1979.
Download or read book Metasemantics written by Alexis Burgess and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metasemantics presents new work on the philosophical foundations of linguistic semantics. Experts in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the theory of content provide new perspectives on old problems about linguistic meaning, pose questions that suggest novel research projects, and sharpen our understanding of linguistic representation.
Download or read book Existence and Logic written by Milton Karl Munitz and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake And Other Essays written by Howard K. Wettstein and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature of reference, or the relation of a word to the object to which it refers, has been perhaps the dominant concern of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Extremely influential arguments by Gottlob Frege around the turn of the century convinced the large majority of philosophers that the meaning of a word must be distinguished from its referent, the former only providing some kind of direction for reaching the latter. In the last twenty years, this Fregean orthodoxy has been vigorously challenged by those who argue that certain important kinds of words, at least, refer directly without need of an intermediate meaning or sense. The essays in this volume record how a long-term study of Frege has persuaded the author that Frege's pivotal distinction between sense and reference, and his attendant philosophical views about language and thought, are unsatisfactory. Frege's perspective, he argues, imposes a distinctive way of thinking about semantics, specifically about the centrality of cognitive significance puzzles for semantics. Freed from Frege's perspective, we will no longer find it natural to think about semantics in this way.
Download or read book Meaning Diminished written by Kenneth A. Taylor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-11 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meaning Diminished examines the complex relationship between semantic analysis and metaphysical inquiry. Kenneth A. Taylor argues that we should expect linguistic and conceptual analysis of natural language to yield far less metaphysical insight into what there is - and the nature of what there is - than many philosophers have imagined. Taking a strong stand against the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy, Taylor contends that philosophers as diverse as Kant, with his Transcendental Idealism, Frege, with his aspirational Platonism, Carnap with his distinction between internal and external questions, and Strawson, with his descriptive metaphysics, have placed too much confidence in the ability of linguistic and conceptual analysis to achieve deep insight into matters of ultimate metaphysics. He urges philosophers who seek such insight to turn away from the interrogation of language and concepts and back to the more direct interrogation of reality itself. In doing so, he maps out the way forward toward a metaphysically modest semantics, in which semantics carries less weighty metaphysical burdens, and toward a revisionary and naturalistic metaphysics, untethered to the a priori analysis of ordinary language.
Download or read book Philosophical Semantics written by Claudio Ferreira Costa and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an innovative systematic approach to the problems of meaning, reference and related issues, unifying in promising ways some of the best insights, not only of exponential philosophers like Wittgenstein and Frege, but also of some influential later theorists like Michael Dummett, Ernst Tugendhat, John Searle and Donald Williams. Moreover, it exposes some main errors popularized by clever formalist-oriented philosophers, from Willard Van Orman Quine to Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam. In this way, it shows how some older major approaches could regain their central importance and how the cartography of philosophy of language could be once more redrawn. The book is clearly written, and will be of interest to anyone with basic training in analytic philosophy.
Download or read book Meaning and Truth written by Joseph Keim Campbell and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents essays on topics of philosophy of language. The text is organized around themes such as the nature of truth and meaning, the semantic nature of quantifiers, and the distinction between semantics and pragmatics.
Download or read book Philosophy of Language Semantics written by Aloysius Martinich and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Conjoining Meanings written by Paul M. Pietroski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul M. Pietroski presents an ambitious new account of human languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. He argues that meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions; meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort.
Download or read book Treatise on Basic Philosophy written by M. Bunge and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this Introduction we shall sketch a profile of our field of inquiry. This is necessary because semantics is too often mistaken for lexicography and therefore dismissed as trivial, while at other times it is disparaged for being concerned with reputedly shady characters such as meaning and allegedly defunct ones like truth. Moreover our special concern, the semantics of science, is a newcomer - at least as a systematic body - and therefore in need of an introduction. l. GOAL Semantics is the field of inquiry centrally concerned with meaning and truth. It can be empirical or nonempirical. When brought to bear on concrete objects, such as a community of speakers, semantics seeks to answer problems concerning certain linguistic facts - such as disclosing the interpretation code inherent in the language or explaning the speakers' ability or inability to utter and understand new sentences ofthe language. This kind of semantics will then be both theoretical and experimental: it will be a branch of what used to be called 'behavioral science'.
Download or read book Word Meaning and Montague Grammar written by D. R. Dowty and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most general goal of this book is to propose and illustrate a program of research in word semantics that combines some of the methodology and results in linguistic semantics, primarily that of the generative semantics school, with the rigorously formalized syntactic and semantic framework for the analysis of natural languages developed by Richard Montague and his associates, a framework in which truth and denotation with respect to a model are taken as the fundamental semantic notions. I hope to show, both from the linguist's and the philosopher's point of view, not only why this synthesis can be undertaken but also why it will be useful to pursue it. On the one hand, the linguists' decompositions of word meanings into more primitive parts are by themselves inherently incomplete, in that they deal only in distinctions in meaning without providing an account of what mean ings really are. Not only can these analyses be made complete by a model theoretic semantics, but also such an account of these analyses renders them more exact and more readily testable than they could ever be otherwise.
