Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake? And Other Essays - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake? And Other Essays write by Howard K. Wettstein. This book was released on 1991. Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake? And Other Essays available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake? And Other Essays
Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake? And Other Essays - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake? And Other Essays write by Howard Wettstein. This book was released on 2022. Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake? And Other Essays available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference
Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference write by Wayne A. Davis. This book was released on 2005-07-14. Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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 caseslong 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 linguisticstructure 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 causalistshortcomings.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 whosemeaning 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.
Meaning, Expression and Thought
Meaning, Expression and Thought - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Meaning, Expression and Thought write by Wayne A. Davis. This book was released on 2002-11-11. Meaning, Expression and Thought available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This philosophical treatise on the foundations of semantics is a systematic effort to clarify, deepen and defend the classical doctrine that words are conventional signs of mental states, principally thoughts and ideas, and that meaning consists in their expression. This expression theory of meaning is developed by carrying out the Gricean programme, explaining what it is for words to have meaning in terms of speaker meaning, and what it is for a speaker to mean something in terms of intention. But Grice's own formulations are rejected and alternatives developed. The foundations of the expression theory are explored at length, and the author develops the theory of thought as a fundamental cognitive phenomenon distinct from belief and desire, argues for the thesis that thoughts have parts, and identifies ideas or concepts with parts of thoughts. This book will appeal to students and professionals interested in the philosophy of language.
Essays on Frege's Conception of Truth
Essays on Frege's Conception of Truth - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Essays on Frege's Conception of Truth write by Dirk Greimann. This book was released on 2007. Essays on Frege's Conception of Truth available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In his writings on the foundations of logic, Gottlob Frege, the father of modern logic, sketched a conception of truth that focuses on the following questions: What is the sense of the word "true"? Is truth a definable concept or a primitive one? What are the kinds of things of which truth is predicated? What is the role of the concept of truth in judgment, assertion and recognition? What is the logical category of truth? What is the significance of the concept of truth for science in general and for logic in particular? The present volume is dedicated to the interpretation, reconstruction and critical assessment of Frege's conception of truth. It is of interest to all those working on Frege, the history of logic and semantics, or theories of truth. The volume brings together nine original papers whose authors are all widely known to Frege scholars. The main topics are: the role of the concept of truth in Frege's system, the nature of the truth-values, the logical category of truth, the relationship between truth and judgment, and the conception of the truth-bearers.
