Download or read book Simple Sentences Substitution and Intuitions written by Jennifer M. Saul and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenon of substitution failure is a longstanding focus of discussion for philosophers of language. Substitution failure occurs when a change from one co-referential name to another (e.g. from 'Superman' to 'Clark Kent') affects the truth-value of a sentence. Jennifer Saul has shown that this can occur even in the simplest of sentences. She presents the first full-length treatment of this puzzling feature of language, and explores its implications for the theory of reference and names, and for the methodology of semantics.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Reference written by Stephen Biggs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-24 with total page 789 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook offers students and more advanced readers a valuable resource for understanding linguistic reference; the relation between an expression (word, phrase, sentence) and what that expression is about. The volume’s forty-one original chapters, written by many of today’s leading philosophers of language, are organized into ten parts: I Early Descriptive Theories II Causal Theories of Reference III Causal Theories and Cognitive Significance IV Alternate Theories V Two-Dimensional Semantics VI Natural Kind Terms and Rigidity VII The Empty Case VIII Singular (De Re) Thoughts IX Indexicals X Epistemology of Reference Contributions consider what kinds of expressions actually refer (names, general terms, indexicals, empty terms, sentences), what referring expressions refer to, what makes an expression refer to whatever it does, connections between meaning and reference, and how we know facts about reference. Many contributions also develop connections between linguistic reference and issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.

Download or read book Philosophy of Language and Webs of Information written by Heimir Geirsson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature of propositions and the cognitive value of names have been the focal point of philosophy of language for the last few decades. The advocates of the causal reference theory have favored the view that the semantic contents of proper names are their referents. However, Frege’s puzzle about the different cognitive value of coreferential names has made this identification seem impossible. Geirsson provides a detailed overview of the debate to date, and then develops a novel account that explains our reluctance, even when we know about the relevant identity, to substitute coreferential names in both simple sentences and belief contexts while nevertheless accepting the view that the semantic content of names is their referents. The account focuses on subjects organizing information in webs; a name can then access and elicit information from a given web. Geirsson proceeds to extend the account of information to non-referring names, but they have long provided a serious challenge to the causal reference theorist.

Download or read book Attitude Reports written by Thomas Grano and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-03 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Propositional attitude reports are sentences built around clause-embedding psychological verbs, like Kim believes that it's raining or Kim wants it to rain. These interact in many intricate ways with a wide variety of semantically relevant grammatical phenomena, and represent one of the most important topics at the interface of linguistics and philosophy, as their study provides insight into foundational questions about meaning. This book provides a bird's-eye overview of the grammar of propositional attitude reports, synthesizing the key facts, theories, and open problems in their analysis. Couched in the theoretical framework of generative grammar and compositional truth-conditional semantics, it places emphasis on points of intersection between propositional attitude reports and other important topics in semantic and syntactic theory. With discussion points, suggestions for further reading and a useful guide to symbols and conventions, it will be welcomed by students and researchers wishing to explore this fertile area of study.

Download or read book Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy written by Alessandro Capone and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more empirically based or of a more applicative nature and that deal with the pragmatics of discourse, argumentation, pragmatics and law, and context. The book presents perspectives which, generally, make most of the Gricean idea of the centrality of a speaker’s intention in attribution of meaning to utterances, whether one is interested in the level of sentence-like units or larger chunks of discourse.

Download or read book New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence written by Mihoko Otake and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-09 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the JSAI-isAI 2015 Workshops LENLS 12, JURISIN 9, AAA 2015, HAT-MASH 2015, TSDAA 2015, ASD-HR 2015, and SKL 2015, held in Kanagawa, Japan, in November 2015. The 39 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 114 submissions. LENLS 12 (Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics) is an annual international workshop on formal semantics and pragmatics and focused on discourse particles; disjunction; truth; copredication; expressive content; categorial grammar; dependent type semantics; sequent calculus; and various aspects of formal pragmatics. JURISIN 9 (Juris-Informatics) is the 9th event in the series. The purpose of this workshop is to discuss fundamental and practical issues such as law, social science, information and intelligent technology, logic and philosophy, including the conventional “AI and law” area. AAA 2015 (Argument for Agreement and Assurance) has the goal of deepening a mutual understanding and exploring a new research field involving researchers/practitioners in formal and informal logic, artificial intelligence, and safety engineering working on agreement and assurance through argument. HAT-MASH 2015 (Healthy Aging Tech Mashup Service, Data and People) provides a forum to discuss important research questions and practical challenges in healthy aging and elderly care support to promote transdisciplinary approaches. TSDAA 2015 (Workshop on Time Series Data Analysis and its Applications) aimes at providing an interdisciplinary forum for discussion of different approaches and techniques of time series data analysis and their implementation in various real life applications. ASD-HR 2015 (Autism Spectrum Disorders Using a Humanoid Robot) presents the studies in the interdisciplinary field of research including both engineering and medical sides. SKL 2015 (Skill Science) discusses the theoretical foundations of skill science as well as practical and engineering issues.

Download or read book The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports written by Alessandro Capone and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph on indirect reports offers insights on the semantics/pragmatics interface and a refinement of the notion of explicature. The volume is written in an engaging style and guides the reader through the theoretical problems and their ramifications. The thorniest problem in the study of indirect reports is their polyphonic nature, and how the listener distinguishes between the reporter’s voice and the original speaker’s voice, either by contextual clues or, in the absence of such clues, by resorting to pragmatic principles. The introductory chapter discusses the main issues that will be addressed in the volume. The next chapters focus on the various aspects of indirect reports, covering both theory and practical applications.

Download or read book Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language written by Gillian Russell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 941 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of meaning, the relationship of language to reality, and the ways in which we use, learn, and understand language. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field, charting its key ideas and movements, and addressing contemporary research and enduring questions in the philosophy of language. Unique to this Companion is clear coverage of research from the related disciplines of formal logic and linguistics, and discussion of the applications in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and philosophy of mind. Organized thematically, the Companion is divided into seven sections: Core Topics; Foundations of Semantics; Parts of Speech; Methodology; Logic for Philosophers of Language; Philosophy of Language for the Rest of Philosophy; and Historical Perspectives. Comprised of 70 never-before-published essays from leading scholars--including Sally Haslanger, Jeffrey King, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Rae Langton, Kit Fine, John MacFarlane, Jeff Pelletier, Scott Soames, Jason Stanley, Stephen Stich and Zoltan Gendler Szabo--the Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language promises to be the most comprehensive and authoritative resource for students and scholars alike.

Download or read book And written by Barry Schein and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-07-21 with total page 1035 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold argument that “and” always means “&,” the truth-functional sentential connective. In this book, Barry Schein argues that “and” is always the sentential logical connective with the same, one, meaning. “And” always means “&,” across the varied constructions in which it is tokened in natural language. Schein examines the constructions that challenge his thesis, and shows that the objections disappear when these constructions are translated into Eventish, a neo-Davidsonian event semantics, and, enlarged with Cinerama Semantics, a vocabulary for spatial orientation and navigation. Besides rescuing “and” from ambiguity, Eventish and Cinerama Semantics solve general puzzles of grammar and meaning unrelated to conjunction, revealing the book's central thesis in the process: aspects of meaning mistakenly attributed to “and” are discovered to reflect neighboring structures previously unseen and unacknowledged. Schein argues that Eventish and Cinerama Semantics offer a fundamental revision to clause structure and what aspects of meaning are represented therein. Eventish is distinguished by four features: supermonadicity, which enlarges verbal decomposition so that every argument relates to its own event; descriptive event anaphora, which replaces simple event variables with silent descriptive pronouns; adverbialization, which interposes adverbials derived from the descriptive content of every DP; and AdrPs, which replace all NPs with Address Phrases that locate what nominals denote within scenes or frames of reference. With 'And,' Schein rehabilitates an old rule of transformational, generative grammar, answering the challenges to it exhaustively and meticulously.

Download or read book Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy Part 2 Theories and Applications written by Alessandro Capone and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-13 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two sections of this volume present theoretical developments and practical applicative papers respectively. Theoretical papers cover topics such as intercultural pragmatics, evolutionism, argumentation theory, pragmatics and law, the semantics/pragmatics debate, slurs, and more. The applied papers focus on topics such as pragmatic disorders, mapping places of origin, stance-taking, societal pragmatics, and cultural linguistics. This is the second volume of invited papers that were presented at the inaugural Pragmasofia conference in Palermo in 2016, and like its predecessor presents papers by well-known philosophers, linguists, and a semiotician. The papers present a wide variety of perspectives independent from any one school of thought.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology written by Herman Cappelen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology (including logical empiricism, phenomenology, and ordinary language philosophy). The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience.

Download or read book Casta eda and his Guises written by Adriano Palma and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-08-25 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume responds to and reassesses the work of Hector-Neri Castañeda (1924-1991). The essays collected here, written by his students, followers, and opponents, examine Castañeda’s seminal views on deontic logic, metaethics, indedicality, praticitions, fictions, and metaphysics, utilizing the critical viewpoint afforded by time, as well as new data, to offer insights on his theories and methodology.

Download or read book Mental Files written by François Recanati and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: François Recanati presents his theory of mental files, a new way of understanding reference in language and thought. He aims to recast the 'nondescriptivist' approach to reference that has dominated the philosophy of language and mind in the late twentieth century. According to Recanati, we refer through mental files, which play the role of so-called 'modes of presentation'. The reference of linguistic expressions is inherited from that of the files we associate with them. The reference of a file is determined relationally, not satisfactionally: so a file is not to be equated to the body of (mis)information it contains. Files are like singular terms in the language of thought, with a nondescriptivist semantics. In contrast to other philosophers, Recanati offers an indexical model according to which files are typed by their function, which is to store information derived through certain types of relation to objects in the environment. The type of the file corresponds to the type of contextual relation it exploits. Even detached files or 'encyclopedia entries' are based on epistemically rewarding relations to their referent, on Recanati's account. Among the topics discussed in this wide-ranging book are: acquaintance relations and singular thought; cognitive significance; the vehicle/content distinction; the nature of indexical concepts; co-reference de jure and judgments of identity; cognitive dynamics; recognitional and perceptual concepts; confused thought and the transparency requirement on modes of presentation; descriptive names and 'acquaintanceless' singular thought; the communication of indexical thoughts; two-dimensional defences of Descriptivism; the Generality Constraint; attitude ascriptions and the 'vicarious' use of mental files; first-person thinking; token-reflexivity in language and thought.

Download or read book This Sentence is False written by Peter Cave and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-07-12 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entertaining introduction to logic and reasoning, packed with puzzles and thought experiments for the reader to try "Peter Cave takes us on an edifying tour through the world of paradoxes, and there is much to be learned, as well as much enjoyment to be had, in the process." -Adrian W. Moore, University of Oxford, UK "'This sentence is false' is a sentence printed on the cover of this book. A sentence is not a name. So what is the name of the book? This book (whatever its name) is full of intriguing philosophical puzzles ... Paradoxes may seem trivial at first glance, but further thought reveals them to be challenges to some of our most fundamental beliefs and preconceptions. Peter Cave entertainingly escorts the reader through a great variety of these fascinating puzzles, shining light that is fresh and bright." -Laurence Goldstein, University of Kent, UK "This is a truly wonderful book. The topic is tough, but Peter Cave brings it to life. He manages to give new insights on old topics, which is itself remarkable, and he also brings in plenty of less familiar topics ... All in all, it is a joy to see such cleverness and clarity of thought coexisting with such an easy (and light and amusing) writing style." -Professor Imre Leader, Cambridge University, UK Put your neurons through their paces with this lively and engaging introduction to paradoxes. From "Buridan's Ass" and the "Surprise Examination" to "The Liar" and "Sleeping Beauty," This Sentence is False introduces all the key philosophical paradoxes. This fascinating guide to logic and reasoning is packed with puzzles and thought experiments to actively engage the reader in critical thinking. As well as paradoxes that occur in our everyday lives, topics also include God, ethics, political philosophy, space, and time. This Sentence is False will put your mind to the test, challenge what you think you know, and lead you on a fascinating journey through logical reasoning.

Download or read book The Semantics Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy written by Maite Ezcurdia and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The boundary between semantics and pragmatics has been important since the early twentieth century, but in the last twenty-five years it has become the central issue in the philosophy of language. This anthology collects classic philosophical papers on the topic, along with recent key contributions. It stresses not only the nature of the boundary, but also its importance for philosophy generally.

Download or read book Modes of Representation written by Richard Kimberly Heck and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-19 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modes of Presentation analyses a collection of problems, known as 'Frege's puzzle', resulting from how thinkers and speakers have a limited perspective on reference in thought and language. Heck argues that these puzzles have much to teach us both about the foundations of cognition and the nature of linguistic communication.

Download or read book Enriched Meanings written by Ash Asudeh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a theory of enriched meanings for natural language interpretation that uses the concept of monads and related ideas from category theory, a branch of mathematics that has been influential in theoretical computer science and elsewhere. Certain expressions that exhibit complex effects at the semantics/pragmatics boundary live in an enriched meaning space, while others live in a more basic meaning space. These basic meanings are mapped to enriched meanings only when required compositionally, which avoids generalizing meanings to the worst case. Ash Asudeh and Gianluca Giorgolo show that the monadic theory of enriched meanings offers a formally and computationally well-defined way to tackle important challenges at the semantics/pragmatics boundary. In particular, they develop innovative monadic analyses of three phenomena - conventional implicature, substitution puzzles, and conjunction fallacies - and demonstrate that the compositional properties of monads model linguistic intuitions about these cases particularly well. The analyses are accompanied by exercises to aid understanding, and the computational tools used are available on the book's companion website. The book also contains background chapters on enriched meanings and category theory. The volume is interdisciplinary in nature, with insights from semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, and computer science, and will appeal to graduate students and researchers from a wide range of disciplines with an interest in natural language understanding and representation.