Switch to: References

Citations of:

Theories of meaning and learnable languages

In Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (ed.), Proceedings of the International Congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. North-Holland. pp. 383-394 (1965)

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Wittgenstein and Formal Semantics: A Case Study on the Tractarian Notions of Truth-Conditions and Compositionality.Nicoletta Bartunek - 2022 - History and Philosophy of Logic 43 (1):80-95.
    This paper argues that there are three reasons why we should regard Wittgenstein's Tractatus as a forerunner of formal semantics: Wittgenstein is convinced that we can apply formal notions to natur...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • How to (Blind)Spot the Truth: an investigation on actual epistemic value.Danilo Fraga Dantas - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (2):693-720.
    This paper is about the alethic aspect of epistemic rationality. The most common approaches to this aspect are either normative (what a reasoner ought to/may believe?) or evaluative (how rational is a reasoner?), where the evaluative approaches are usually comparative (one reasoner is assessed compared to another). These approaches often present problems with blindspots. For example, ought a reasoner to believe a currently true blindspot? Is she permitted to? Consequently, these approaches often fail in describing a situation of alethic maximality, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The History and Prehistory of Natural-Language Semantics.Daniel W. Harris - 2017 - In Sandra Lapointe & Christopher Pincock (eds.), Innovations in the History of Analytical Philosophy. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 149--194.
    Contemporary natural-language semantics began with the assumption that the meaning of a sentence could be modeled by a single truth condition, or by an entity with a truth-condition. But with the recent explosion of dynamic semantics and pragmatics and of work on non- truth-conditional dimensions of linguistic meaning, we are now in the midst of a shift away from a truth-condition-centric view and toward the idea that a sentence’s meaning must be spelled out in terms of its various roles in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Compositionality, Computability, and Complexity.Peter Pagin - 2021 - Review of Symbolic Logic 14 (3):551-591.
    This paper starts from the observation that the standard arguments for compositionality are really arguments for the computability of semantics. Since computability does not entail compositionality, the question of what justifies compositionality recurs. The paper then elaborates on the idea of recursive semantics as corresponding to computable semantics. It is then shown by means of time complexity theory and with the use of term rewriting as systems of semantic computation, that syntactically unrestricted, noncompositional recursive semantics leads to computational explosion (factorial (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Davidson’s Wittgenstein.Ali Hossein Khani - 2020 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 8 (5):1-26.
    Although the later Wittgenstein appears as one of the most influential figures in Davidson’s later works on meaning, it is not, for the most part, clear how Davidson interprets and employs Wittgenstein’s ideas. In this paper, I will argue that Davidson’s later works on meaning can be seen as mainly a manifestation of his attempt to accommodate the later Wittgenstein’s basic ideas about meaning and understanding, especially the requirement of drawing the seems right/is right distinction and the way this requirement (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • An Observation about Truth.David Kashtan - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Jerusalem
    Tarski's analysis of the concept of truth gives rise to a hierarchy of languages. Does this fragment the concept all the way to philosophical unacceptability? I argue it doesn't, drawing on a modification of Kaplan's theory of indexicals.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Informal Logic: A 'Canadian' Approach to Argument.Federico Puppo (ed.) - 2019 - Windsor, Canada: Windsor Studies in Argumentation.
    The informal logic movement began as an attempt to develop – and teach – an alternative logic which can account for the real life arguing that surrounds us in our daily lives – in newspapers and the popular media, political and social commentary, advertising, and interpersonal exchange. The movement was rooted in research and discussion in Canada and especially at the University of Windsor, and has become a branch of argumentation theory which intersects with related traditions and approaches (notably formal (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • (1 other version)Epistemologia Analítica, Vol .1: debates contemporâneos.Tiegue Vieira Rodrigues (ed.) - 2019 - Editora Fi.
    O presente volume se trata de uma coletânea de artigos que reúne alguns dos trabalhos propostos para o evento “III International Colloquium of Analytic Epistemology and VII Conference of Social Epistemology”, realizado entre os dias 27 e 30 de Novembro de 2018, na Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. O “III International Colloquium of Analytic Epistemology and VII Conference of Social Epistemology” é um dos principais eventos de Epistemologia analítica da América Latina e reúne especialistas do Brasil e do exterior para (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Formal Semantics and Applied Mathematics: An Inferential Account.Ryan M. Nefdt - 2020 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 29 (2):221-253.
    In this paper, I utilise the growing literature on scientific modelling to investigate the nature of formal semantics from the perspective of the philosophy of science. Specifically, I incorporate the inferential framework proposed by Bueno and Colyvan : 345–374, 2011) in the philosophy of applied mathematics to offer an account of how formal semantics explains and models its data. This view produces a picture of formal semantic models as involving an embedded process of inference and representation applying indirectly to linguistic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Impossible Worlds.Franz Berto & Mark Jago - 2013 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    We need to understand the impossible. Francesco Berto and Mark Jago start by considering what the concepts of meaning, information, knowledge, belief, fiction, conditionality, and counterfactual supposition have in common. They are all concepts which divide the world up more finely than logic does. Logically equivalent sentences may carry different meanings and information and may differ in how they're believed. Fictions can be inconsistent yet meaningful. We can suppose impossible things without collapsing into total incoherence. Yet for the leading philosophical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   52 citations  
  • Expression-Meaning and Vagueness.Stephen Schiffer - 2019 - In Arthur Sullivan (ed.), Sensations, Thoughts, and Language: Essays in Honor of Brian Loar. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Brian Loar attempted to provide the Gricean program of intention-based semantics with an account of expression-meaning. But the theory he presented, like virtually every other foundational semantic or meta-semantical theory, was an idealization that ignored vagueness. What would happen if we tried to devise theories that accommodated the vagueness of vague expressions? I offer arguments based on well-known features of vagueness that, if sound, show that neither Brian’s nor any other extant theory could successfully make that adjustment, and this because, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Basic Action and Practical Knowledge.Will Small - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    It is a commonplace in philosophy of action that there is and must be teleologically basic action: something done on an occasion without doing it by means of doing anything else. It is widely believed that basic actions are exercises of skill. As the source of the need for basic action is the structure of practical reasoning, this yields a conception of skill and practical reasoning as complementary but mutually exclusive. On this view, practical reasoning and complex intentional action depend (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Davidson on Reference.Robert Williams - 2013 - In Ernie Lepore & Kurt Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson. Blackwell.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The inscrutability of reference.Robert Williams - 2005 - Dissertation, University of St Andrews
    The metaphysics of representation poses questions such as: in virtue of what does a sentence, picture, or mental state represent that the world is a certain way? In the first instance, I have focused on the semantic properties of language: for example, what is it for a name such as ‘London’ to refer to something? Interpretationism concerning what it is for linguistic expressions to have meaning, says that constitutively, semantic facts are fixed by best semantic theory. As here developed, it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Speech Act Theoretic Semantics.Daniel Harris - 2014 - Dissertation, Cuny
    I defend the view that linguistic meaning is a relation borne by an expression to a type of speech act, and that this relation holds in virtue of our overlapping communicative dispositions, and not in virtue of linguistic conventions. I argue that this theory gives the right account of the semantics–pragmatics interface and the best-available semantics for non-declarative clauses, and show that it allows for the construction of a rigorous compositional semantic theory with greater explanatory power than both truth-conditional and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Why Philosophers should do Semantics : a Reply to Cappelen.Ryan M. Nefdt - 2019 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 10 (1):243-256.
    In this paper, I address a series of arguments recently put forward by Cappelen Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8: 743–762 to the effect that philosophers should not do formal semantics or be concerned with the “minutiae of natural language semantics”. He offers two paths for accessing his ideas. I argue that his arguments fail in favour of the first and cast some doubt on the second in so doing. I then proffer an alternative conception of why exactly philosophers should (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Truth-Theoretic Semantics and Its Limits.Kirk Ludwig - 2017 - Argumenta (3):21-38.
    Donald Davidson was one of the most influential philosophers of the last half of the 20th century, especially in the theory of meaning and in the philosophy of mind and action. In this paper, I concentrate on a field-shaping proposal of Davidson’s in the theory of meaning, arguably his most influential, namely, that insight into meaning may be best pursued by a bit of indirection, by showing how appropriate knowledge of a finitely axiomatized truth theory for a language can put (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Semantic Verbs Are Intensional Transitives.Justin D’Ambrosio - 2019 - Mind 128 (509):213-248.
    In this paper I show that we have strong empirical and theoretical reasons to treat the verbs we use in our semantic theorizing—particularly ‘refers to ’, ‘applies to ’, and ‘is true of ’—as intensional transitive verbs. Stating our semantic theories with intensional vocabulary allows us to partially reconcile two competing approaches to the nature and subject-matter of semantics: the Chomskian approach, on which semantics is non-relational, internalistic, and concerns the psychology of language users, and the Lewisian approach, on which (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Almost Ideal: Computational Epistemology and the Limits of Rationality for Finite Reasoners.Danilo Fraga Dantas - 2016 - Dissertation, University of California, Davis
    The notion of an ideal reasoner has several uses in epistemology. Often, ideal reasoners are used as a parameter of (maximum) rationality for finite reasoners (e.g. humans). However, the notion of an ideal reasoner is normally construed in such a high degree of idealization (e.g. infinite/unbounded memory) that this use is unadvised. In this dissertation, I investigate the conditions under which an ideal reasoner may be used as a parameter of rationality for finite reasoners. In addition, I present and justify (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Agency and Practical Abilities.Will Small - 2017 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 80:235-264.
    Though everyday life accords a great deal of significance to practical abilities—such as the ability to walk, to speak French, to play the piano—philosophers of action pay surprisingly little attention to them. By contrast, abilities are discussed in various other philosophical projects. From these discussions, a partial theory of abilities emerges. If the partial theory—which is at best adequate only to a few examples of practical abilities—were correct, then philosophers of action would be right to ignore practical abilities, because they (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Beyond the Tractatus Wars: The New Wittgenstein Debate.Rupert J. Read & Matthew A. Lavery (eds.) - 2011 - New York: Routledge.
    Over fifteen years have passed since Cora Diamond and James Conant turned Wittgenstein scholarship upside down with the program of “resolute” reading, and ten years since this reading was crystallized in the major collection _The New Wittgenstein_. This approach remains at the center of the debate about Wittgenstein and his philosophy, and this book draws together the latest thinking of the world’s leading Tractatarian scholars and promising newcomers. Showcasing one piece alternately from each “camp”, _Beyond the Tractatus Wars_ pairs newly (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Coordination, Triangulation, and Language Use.Josh Armstrong - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (1):80-112.
    In this paper, I explore two contrasting conceptions of the social character of language. The first takes language to be grounded in social convention. The second, famously developed by Donald Davidson, takes language to be grounded in a social relation called triangulation. I aim both to clarify and to evaluate these two conceptions of language. First, I propose that Davidson’s triangulation-based story can be understood as the result of relaxing core features of conventionalism pertaining to both common-interest and diachronic stability—specifically, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Deranging the Mental Lexicon.Endre Begby - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (1):33-55.
    This paper offers a defense of Davidson’s conclusion in ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, focusing on the psychology and epistemology of language. Drawing on empirical studies in language acquisition and sociolinguistics, I problematize the traditional idealizing assumption that a person’s mental lexicon consists of two distinct parts—a dictionary, comprising her knowledge of word meanings proper, and an encyclopedia, comprising her wider knowledge of worldly affairs. I argue that the breakdown of the dictionary–encyclopedia distinction can be given a cognitive and functional (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Compositionality as weak supervenience.Toby Napoletano - 2015 - Synthese 192 (1):201-220.
    This paper argues against Zoltán Szabó’s claim in “Compositionality as Supervenience” that we ought to understand the principle of compositionality as the idea that in natural language, the meanings of complex expressions strongly supervene on the meanings of their constituents and how the constituents are combined. The argument is that if we understand compositionality Szabó’s way, then compositionality can play no role in explanations of the acquirability of natural languages, because it makes these explanations circular. This, in turn, would undermine (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Pluralism and the absence of truth.Jeremy Wyatt - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Connecticut
    In this dissertation, I argue that we should be pluralists about truth and in turn, eliminativists about the property Truth. Traditional deflationists were right to suspect that there is no such property as Truth. Yet there is a plurality of pluralities of properties which enjoy defining features that Truth would have, were it to exist. So although, in this sense, truth is plural, Truth is non-existent. The resulting account of truth is indebted to deflationism as the provenance of the suspicion (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • (1 other version)Adverbs of Action and Logical Form.Kirk Ludwig - 2010 - In Timothy O'Connor & Constantine Sandis (eds.), Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Action. Blackwell.
    This article discusses the logical form of action sentences with particular attention to the role of adverbial modification, reviewing and extending the event analysis of action sentences.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • (1 other version)Property Theories.George Bealer & Uwe Mönnich - 1983 - In Dov M. Gabbay & Franz Guenthner (eds.), Handbook of Philosophical Logic. Dordrecht, Netherland: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 133-251.
    Revised and reprinted in Handbook of Philosophical Logic, volume 10, Dov Gabbay and Frans Guenthner (eds.), Dordrecht: Kluwer, (2003). -- Two sorts of property theory are distinguished, those dealing with intensional contexts property abstracts (infinitive and gerundive phrases) and proposition abstracts (‘that’-clauses) and those dealing with predication (or instantiation) relations. The first is deemed to be epistemologically more primary, for “the argument from intensional logic” is perhaps the best argument for the existence of properties. This argument is presented in the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • Knowledge and Semantic Competence.Kent Johnson & Ernie Lepore - 2004 - In Ilkka Niiniluoto, Matti Sintonen & Jan Woleński (eds.), Handbook of Epistemology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. pp. 707--731.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • L’attitude de tenir une phrase pour vraie et le holisme psycholinguistique.Jean-David Lafrance - 2004 - Philosophiques 31 (2):373-392.
    En m’appuyant sur une distinction de Daniel Laurier entre holismes métaphysique et épistémique ainsi que sur le fait généralement admis qu’il n’y a que deux types de relations susceptibles de prévaloir entre états mentaux, j’évalue différentes définitions, proposées par Donald Davidson, de l’attitude de tenir une phrase pour vraie, soient celle qui fait de cette attitude une attitude propositionnelle, celle qui prétend qu’elle est une attitude non individuative et, enfin, celle qui suggère qu’elle est une action. J’essaie de voir les (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Sobre a possibilidade de pensarmos o mundo: o debate entre John McDowell e Donald Davidson.Marco Aurelio Sousa Alves - 2008 - Dissertation, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
    The thesis evaluates a contemporary debate concerning the very possibility of thinking about the world. In the first chapter, McDowell's critique of Davidson is presented, focusing on the coherentism defended by the latter. The critique of the myth of the given (as it appears in Sellars and Wittgenstein), as well as the necessity of a minimal empiricism (which McDowell finds in Quine and Kant), lead to an oscillation in contemporary thinking between two equally unsatisfactory ways of understanding the empirical content (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Os paradoxos da identidade e seu papel como limitadores de uma teoria funcional da linguagem.Araceli Velloso - 2009 - Princípios 16 (26):05-34.
    O paradoxo da análise e a antinomia da relaçáo de nomeaçáo sáo dois argumentos que servem para explicitar um aspecto paradoxal das interpretações filosóficas da identidade. Meu objetivo nesse artigo será o de investigar esses paradoxos e seus papeis como limitadores de uma teoria semântica. Usarei como guia dessa investigaçáo a hipótese de que as dificuldades nas quais todas as teorias semânticas investigadas incorrem náo se devem a tese da relaçáo de nomeaçáo, como diria Carnap, mas ao caráter composicional dessas (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Essays on Actions and Events: Philosophical Essays Volume 1.Donald Davidson - 2001 - Oxford, GB: Clarendon Press.
    Donald Davidson has prepared a new edition of his classic 1980 collection of Essays on Actions and Events, including two additional essays. In this seminal investigation of the nature of human action, Davidson argues for an ontology which includes events along with persons and other objects. Certain events are identified and explained as actions when they are viewed as caused and rationalized by reasons; these same events, when described in physical, biological, or physiological terms, may be explained by appeal to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   55 citations  
  • Deflationism, Meaning and Truth-Conditions.Claire Horisk, Dorit Bar-On & William G. Lycan - 2000 - Philosophical Studies 101 (1):1 - 28.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  • Truth and meaning.Robert C. Cummins - 2002 - In Joseph Keim-Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & David Shier (eds.), Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics. Seven Bridges Press. pp. 175-197.
    D O N A L D D AV I D S O N’S “ Meaning and Truth,” re vo l u t i o n i zed our conception of how truth and meaning are related (Davidson    ). In that famous art i c l e , Davidson put forw a rd the bold conjecture that meanings are satisfaction conditions, and that a Tarskian theory of truth for a language is a theory of meaning for that language. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Frege's Hierarchies of Indirect Senses and the Paradox of Analysis.Terence D. Parsons - 1981 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 6 (1):37-58.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Truth and meaning redux.Ernie Lepore & Kirk Ludwig - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 154 (2):251-77.
    In this paper, we defend Davidson's program in truth-theoretical semantics against recent criticisms by Scott Soames. We argue that Soames has misunderstood Davidson's project, that in consequence his criticisms miss the mark, that appeal to meanings as entities in the alternative approach that Soames favors does no work, and that the approach is no advance over truth-theoretic semantics.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Impossible Worlds.Francesco Berto - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013):en ligne.
    It is a venerable slogan due to David Hume, and inherited by the empiricist tradition, that the impossible cannot be believed, or even conceived. In Positivismus und Realismus, Moritz Schlick claimed that, while the merely practically impossible is still conceivable, the logically impossible, such as an explicit inconsistency, is simply unthinkable. -/- An opposite philosophical tradition, however, maintains that inconsistencies and logical impossibilities are thinkable, and sometimes believable, too. In the Science of Logic, Hegel already complained against “one of the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   97 citations  
  • Names.Sam Cumming - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • The Heresy of Paraphrase: When the Medium Really Is the Message.Ernest Lepore - 2009 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33 (1):177-197.
    Now I may not be an educated man . . . But it seems to me to go against common sense to ask what the poet is ‘trying to say’. The poem isn’t a code for something easily understood. The poem is what he is trying to say.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference: Some Exegetical Notes.Saul A. Kripke - 2008 - Theoria 74 (3):181-218.
    Frege's theory of indirect contexts and the shift of sense and reference in these contexts has puzzled many. What can the hierarchy of indirect senses, doubly indirect senses, and so on, be? Donald Davidson gave a well-known 'unlearnability' argument against Frege's theory. The present paper argues that the key to Frege's theory lies in the fact that whenever a reference is specified (even though many senses determine a single reference), it is specified in a particular way, so that giving a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   74 citations  
  • Communication And The complexity of semantics.Peter Pagin - 2012 - In Markus Werning, Wolfram Hinzen & Edouard Machery (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality. Oxford University Press.
    This article focuses on the relevance of computational complexity for cognition. The syntactic items may be expressions that are surface strings. But in general, strings are syntactically ambiguous in that they can be generated in more than one way from atomic expressions and operations. The semantic function must take disambiguated items as arguments. When expressions are ambiguous, expressions cannot be the arguments. Instead, it is common to take the arguments to be terms, whose surface syntax reflects the derivation of the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • (1 other version)Compositionality.Zoltán Gendler Szabó - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   61 citations  
  • Zitierte Zeichenreihen.Olaf Müller - 1996 - Erkenntnis 44 (3):279 - 304.
    We use quotation marks when we wish to refer to an expression. We can and do so refer even when this expression is composed of characters that do not occur in our alphabet. That's why Tarski, Quine, and Geach's theories of quotation don't work. The proposals of Davidson, Frege, and C. Washington, however, do not provide a plausible account of quotation either. (Section I). The problem is to construct a Tarskian theory of truth for an object language that contains quotation (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Salmon on Fregean approaches to the paradox of analysis.Gary Kemp - 1995 - Philosophical Studies 78 (2):153 - 162.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Quine's theory of logic.R. J. Haack - 1978 - Erkenntnis 13 (1):231 - 259.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • On Designating.Nathan Salmon - 2005 - Mind 114 (456):1069-1133.
    A detailed interpretation is provided of the ‘Gray's Elegy’ passage in Russell's ‘On Denoting’. The passage is suffciently obscure that its principal lessons have been independently rediscovered. Russell attempts to demonstrate that the thesis that definite descriptions are singular terms is untenable. The thesis demands a distinction be drawn between content and designation, but the attempt to form a proposition directly about the content (as by using an appropriate form of quotation) inevitably results in a proposition about the thing designated (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Holes.David K. Lewis & Stephanie Lewis - 1970 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 48 (2):206 – 212.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   98 citations  
  • The semantics of mass-predicates.Kathrin Koslicki - 1999 - Noûs 33 (1):46-91.
    Along with many other languages, English has a relatively straightforward grammatical distinction between mass-occurrences of nouns and their countoccurrences. As the mass-count distinction, in my view, is best drawn between occurrences of expressions, rather than expressions themselves, it becomes important that there be some rule-governed way of classifying a given noun-occurrence into mass or count. The project of classifying noun-occurrences is the topic of Section II of this paper. Section III, the remainder of the paper, concerns the semantic differences between (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  • The ontology of concepts: Abstract objects or mental representations?Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence - 2007 - Noûs 41 (4):561-593.
    What is a concept? Philosophers have given many different answers to this question, reflecting a wide variety of approaches to the study of mind and language. Nonetheless, at the most general level, there are two dominant frameworks in contemporary philosophy. One proposes that concepts are mental representations, while the other proposes that they are abstract objects. This paper looks at the differences between these two approaches, the prospects for combining them, and the issues that are involved in the dispute. We (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   71 citations  
  • Do inferential roles compose?Mark McCullagh - 2003 - Dialectica 57 (4):431-38.
    Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have argued that inferential roles are not compositional. It is unclear, however, whether the theories at which they aim their objection are obliged to meet the strong compositionality requirement they have in mind. But even if that requirement is accepted, the data they adduce can in fact be derived from an inferential-role theory that meets it. Technically this is trivial, but it raises some interesting objections turning on the issue of the generality of inferential roles. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations