Download or read book The Referential Mechanism of Proper Names written by Jincai Li and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-30 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each of us bears a unique name given to us at birth. When people use your name, they typically refer to you. But what is the linkage that ties a name to a person and hence allows it to refer? Li’s book approaches this question of reference empirically through the medium of referential intuitions. Building on the literature on philosophical and linguistic intuitions, she proposes a linguistic-competence-based account of referential intuitions. Subsequently, using a series of novel experiments, she investigates the variation of referential intuitions across different cultures, as well as the developmental trajectory and the underlying causes of the observed cultural differences. What she finds is that the cultural patterns of referential intuitions are already in place around age seven, and the differences are largely attributable to the distinct perspective-taking strategies favoured by easterners and westerners, rather than the moral valence of actions involved in the experimental materials. These results are taken to better support referential pluralism (in particular, the ambiguous view) than referential monism. By undertaking this fascinating research, Li’s book provides new insights into the cognitive mechanism underlying people’s referential usage of names. It will be valuable to students and scholars of linguistics, philosophy of language and experimental philosophy, and in particular, to those who research into semantic intuitions and theories of reference.

Download or read book How Do Proper Names Really Work written by Claudio Ferreira-Costa and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-09-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fifty years the philosophy of language has been experiencing a stalemating conflict between the old descriptive and internalist orthodoxy (advocated by philosophers such as Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Strawson, and Searle) and the new causal-referential and externalist orthodoxy (mainly endorsed by Kripke, Putnam, and Kaplan). Although the latter is dominant among specialists, the former retains a discomforting intuitive plausibility. The ultimate goal of this book is to overcome the stalemate by means of a non-naïve return to the old descriptivist-internalist orthodoxy. Concerning proper names, this means introducing second-order description-rules capable of systemizing descriptions of the proper name’s cluster to provide us with the right changeable conditions of satisfaction for its application. Such rules can explain how a proper name can become a rigid designator while remaining descriptive, disarming Kripke's and Donnellan’s main objections. In the last chapter, this new perspective is extended to indexicals in a discussion of David Kaplan’s and John Perry’s views, and of general terms, in a discussion of Hilary Putnam’s externalism.

Download or read book Knowledge and Reference in Empirical Science written by Jody Azzouni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge and Reference in Empirical Science is a fascinating study of the bounds between science and language: in what sense, and of what, does science provide knowledge? Is science an instrument only distantly related to what's real? Can the language of science be used to adequately describe the truth? In this book, Jody Azziouni investigates the technology of science - the actual forging and exploiting of causal links, between ourselves and what we endeavor to know and understand.

Download or read book Philosophy of Language and Linguistics written by Piotr Stalmaszczyk and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers gathered in the two volumes investigate the complex relations between philosophy of language and linguistics, viewed as independent, but mutually influencing one another, disciplines. They concentrate on the ‘formal’ and ‘philosophical’ turns in the philosophy of language, initiated by Gottlob Frege, with further developments associated with the work of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, W.O.V. Quine, Richard Montague, Pavel Tichý, Richard Rorty. The volumes bring together contributions by philosophers, logicians and linguists, representing different theoretical orientations but united in outlining the common ground, necessary for further research in philosophy of language and linguistics. The papers were submitted and, in most cases, presented at the first International Conference on Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, PhiLang2009, organized by the Chair of English and General Linguistics at the University of Lódz.

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 Reference and Representation in Thought and Language written by María de Ponte and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers novel views on the precise relation between reference to an object by means of a linguistic expression and our mental representation of that object, long a source of debate in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and cognitive science. Chapters in this volume deal with our devices for singular reference and singular representation, with most focusing on linguistic expressions that are used to refer to particular objects, persons, or places. These expressions include proper names such as Mary and John; indexicals such as I and tomorrow; demonstrative pronouns such as this and that; and some definite and indefinite descriptions such as The Queen of England or a medical doctor. Other chapters examine the ways we represent objects in thought, particularly the first-person perspective and the self, and one explores a notion common to reference and representation: salience. The volume includes the latest views on these complex topics from some of the most prominent authors in the field and will be of interest to anyone working on issues of reference and representation in thought and language.

Download or read book Thinking and the Structure of the World Das Denken und die Struktur der Welt written by Klaus Jacobi and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-08-02 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Thinking Language and Experience written by and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book On Reference written by Andrea Bianchi and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the times we open our mouth to communicate, we talk about things. This can happen because (some of) the linguistic expressions we use have semantic properties that connect them to extra-linguistic entities. Thanks to these properties, they may be used by us to refer to things. Or, as we may also say, they themselves refer to things, though in certain cases they do so only relative to a context of use. But how can we characterize the semantic properties in question? What exactly is reference? Philosophers have been trying to answer these questions at least since Plato's Cratylus, but not until the last century, when language occupied center-stage in philosophy, did the problem come to be felt as really pressing. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Gottlob Frege produced an account of reference that set the stage for the contemporary discussion. Nevertheless, around 1970 a number of powerful arguments against it were produced by Saul Kripke and others. As a result, many philosophers began to look at reference from a new perspective, which highlighted the crucial role played by wordly historical facts that may be unknown to the speakers. This semantic revolution, however, left us with a number of open problems. The eighteen original essays collected in this volume deal with many of these problems, thus contributing to our understanding of the nature of reference, its role in cognition, and the place it should be given in semantic theory.

Download or read book Referential Mechanics written by Joseph Almog and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is focused on understanding a key idea in modern semantics-direct reference-and its integration into a general semantics for natural language. In the first three chapters, foundational analyses from three philosophers -Saul Kripke, David Kaplan and Keith Donnellan-are dissected in detail. The differences between their respective ideas lead to varying consequences in the philosophy of mind, the metaphysics of necessity, and the epistemological idea of a priori knowledge. In the last chapter, two central puzzles said to threaten direct reference are raised. One is Frege's puzzle about judgments of cognitive significance and informativeness. This puzzle is analyzed and is shown to be the opposite of a threat; informative identities are, in effect, a consequence of the new cognitive insights behind direct reference. The second puzzle, the Partee-Kaplan, is a threat: how to unify the referential semantics of nouns with the seemingly non referential semantics of denoting phrases? The volume criticizes the concept of a unifying methodology-assimilating the referential nouns to the complex denoting phrases by way of (set theoretic) "ontological sublimation"--as proposed by Montague--and launches an orthogonal unification methodology generalizing direct reference to the common nouns anchoring the denoting phrases.

Download or read book Knowledge and Reality written by Colin McGinn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together a selection of Colin McGinn's philosophical essays from the 1970s to the 1990s, whose unifying theme is the relation between the mind and the world. The essays range over a set of prominent topics in contemporary philosophy, including the analysis of knowledge, the a priori, necessity, possible worlds, realism, mental representation, appearance and reality, and color.

Download or read book Formalizing Medieval Logical Theories written by Catarina Dutilh Novaes and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-04-05 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents formalizations of three important medieval logical theories: supposition, consequence and obligations. These are based on innovative vantage points: supposition theories as algorithmic hermeneutics, theories of consequence analyzed with tools borrowed from model-theory and two-dimensional semantics, and obligations as logical games. The analysis of medieval logic is relevant for the modern philosopher and logician. This is the first book to render medieval logical theories accessible to the modern philosopher.

Download or read book Reference and Referring written by William P. Kabasenche and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-12-21 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Original essays on reference and referring by leading scholars that combine breadth of coverage with thematic unity. These fifteen original essays address the core semantic concepts of reference and referring from both philosophical and linguistic perspectives. After an introductory essay that casts current trends in reference and referring in terms of an ongoing dialogue between Fregean and Russellian approaches, the book addresses specific topics, balancing breadth of coverage with thematic unity. The contributors, all leading or emerging scholars, address trenchant neo-Fregean challenges to the direct reference position; consider what positive claims can be made about the mechanism of reference; address the role of a theory of reference within broader theoretical context; and investigate other kinds of linguistic expressions used in referring activities that may themselves be referring expressions. The topical unity and accessibility of the essays, the stage-setting introductory essay, and the comprehensive index combine to make Reference and Referring, along with the other books in the Topics in Contemporary Philosophy series, appropriate for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses.

Download or read book Relativism and Realism in Science written by R. Nola and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The institutionalization of History and Philosophy of Science as a distinct field of scholarly endeavour began comparatively earl- though not always under that name - in the Australasian region. An initial lecturing appointment was made at the University of Melbourne immediately after the Second World War, in 1946, and other appoint ments followed as the subject underwent an expansion during the 1950s and 1960s similar to that which took place in other parts of the world. Today there are major Departments at the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales and the University of Wollongong, and smaller groups active in many other parts of Australia and in New Zealand. "Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science" aims to provide a distinctive publication outlet for Australian and New Zealand scholars working in the general area of history, philosophy and social studies of science. Each volume comprises a group of essays on a connected theme, edited by an Australian or a New Zealander with special expertise in that particular area. Papers address general issues, however, rather than local ones; parochial topics are avoided. Further more, though in each volume a majority of the contributors is from Australia or New Zealand, contributions from elsewhere are by no means ruled out. Quite the reverse, in fact - they are actively encour aged wherever appropriate to the balance of the volume in question.

Download or read book The Selected Writings of Eva Picardi written by Eva Picardi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eva Picardi has been one of the most influential Italian analytic philosophers of her generation. She taught for forty years at the University of Bologna, raising three generations of students. This collection of selected writings honors her work, confirming Picardi's status as one of the most important Frege scholars of her generation and a leading authority on the philosophy of Donald Davidson. Bringing together Picardi's contributions to the history of analytic philosophy, it includes her papers on major 20th-century figures such as Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Rorty, and Brandom. She examines their work in comparison with the philosopher Michael Dummett's, illuminating contrasts between American Neo-pragmatism and Continental philosophy. By considering key contributions made by Gadamer and Adorno and contrasting them with Davidson and Rorty's proposals, Picardi is able to bridge the Analytic and Continental divide. Featuring an introduction by Annalisa Coliva and new translations of previously unpublished papers, this collection emphasizes the significance of Picardi's work for a new generation of readers.

Download or read book Mental Files written by François Recanati and published by Oxford University Press. 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. Linguistic expressions inherit their reference from the files that we associate with them, which are classified according to their function, which is to store information derived through certain types of relation to objects.

Download or read book The Language of Fiction written by Emar Maier and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together new research on fiction from the fields of philosophy and linguistics. Fiction has long been a topic of interest in philosophy, but recent years have also seen a surge in work on fictional discourse at the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. In particular, there has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective that is informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. Following a detailed introduction by the editors, The Language of Fiction contains 14 chapters by leading scholars in linguistics and philosophy, organized into three parts. Part I, 'Truth, Reference, and Imagination', offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, 'Storytelling', deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, 'Perspective Shift', focuses on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, namely how we get access to the fictional characters' inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see. The volume will be of interest to scholars from graduate level upwards in the fields of discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, cognitive science, and literary studies.