Completely revised and updated in its Second Edition, Language and Reality provides students, philosophers and cognitive scientists with a lucid and provocative introduction to the philosophy of language.

The purpose of this book is to develop a terminological structure in which private perceptions can be discussed publicly without bringing into existence the usual unnecessary philosophical problems of confused usage of language. chisholm displays an appraisive, quasi-ethical use of language, whereby he claims that a thing has some particular sensible property is to have adequate evidence that it actually does have that property. (staff).

Let psychologism be the doctrine that whether behavior is intelligent behavior depends on the character of the internal information processing that produces it. More specifically, I mean psychologism to involve the doctrine that two systems could have actual and potential behavior _typical_ of familiar intelligent beings, that the two systems could be exactly alike in their actual and potential behavior, and in their behavioral dispositions and capacities and counterfactual behavioral properties (i.e., what behaviors, behavioral dispositions, and behavioral capacities they would (...) have exhibited had their stimuli differed)--the two systems could be alike in all these ways, yet there could be a difference in the information processing that mediates their stimuli and responses that determines that one is not at all intelligent while the other is fully intelligent. (shrink)

A transcript of three lectures, given at Princeton University in 1970, which deals with (inter alia) debates concerning proper names in the philosophy of language.

Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...

In the course of the discussion, Professor Quine pinpoints the difficulties involved in translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our ...

W.V.O. Quine's doctrines of the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference are among the most famous and influential theses in philosophy in the past fifty years. Although by no means universally accepted, the arguments for them have been widely regarded as powerful challenges to our most fundamental beliefs about meaning and reference — including the belief that many of our words have meaning and reference in the sense in which we ordinarily understand those notions, as well as beliefs (...) about the particular things meant and referred to in specific cases, such as my belief that in the past my son Brian often referred with affection to his pet rabbit Bigwig. If Quine's doctrines, and the arguments for them, are correct, then beliefs such as these cannot be accepted as true.One might expect that with consequences like these Quine's theses would widely be regarded as obviously incorrect. (shrink)

W.V.O. Quine's doctrines of the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference are among the most famous and influential theses in philosophy in the past fifty years. Although by no means universally accepted, the arguments for them have been widely regarded as powerful challenges to our most fundamental beliefs about meaning and reference — including the belief that many of our words have meaning and reference in the sense in which we ordinarily understand those notions, as well as beliefs (...) about the particular things meant and referred to in specific cases, such as my belief that in the past my son Brian often referred with affection to his pet rabbit Bigwig. If Quine's doctrines, and the arguments for them, are correct, then beliefs such as these cannot be accepted as true.One might expect that with consequences like these Quine's theses would widely be regarded as obviously incorrect. (shrink)

A respected Harvard logician and philosopher gathers together twenty-nine writings dealing with the foundations of mathematics, Rudolf Carnap, lin-guistics, ...

In retrospecting "Two Dogmas" I find myself overshooting by twenty years. I think back to college days, 61 years agao. I majored in mathematics and was doing my honors reading in mathematical logic, a subject that had not yet penetrated the Oberlin curriculum. My new love, in the platonic sense, was Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica.

Accession Number: WOS:A1980JY66900002 Document Type: Article Language: English Reprint Address: QUINE, WV (reprint author), HARVARD UNIV,CAMBRIDGE,MA 02138 Publisher: BLACKWELL PUBL LTD, 108 COWLEY RD, OXFORD, OXON, ENGLAND OX4 1JF Web of Science Category: Philosophy Subject Category: Philosophy IDS Number: JY669 ISSN: 0031-5621.

" This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life's work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth ...

Quine's areas of interest are panoramic, as this lively book amply demonstrates.

This volume consists of the first of the John Dewey Lectures delivered under the auspices of Columbia University's Philosophy Department as well as other essays by the author. Intended to clarify the meaning of the philosophical doctrines propounded by Professor Quine in 'Word and Objects', the essays included herein both support and expand those doctrines.

Words and phrases refer to things in either of two ways. A name or singular description designates its object, if any. A predicate denotes each of the objects of which it is true. Such are the two sorts of reference: designation and denotation. We are often told, and rightly, that neither sort is to be confused with meaning. The descriptions ‘the author of Waverley’ and ‘the author of Ivanhoe’ designate the same man, after all, but differ in meaning; and a (...) predicate may denote each of many things, while having only one meaning. (shrink)

ACT, CONTENT, AND OBJECT THE TITLE I have chosen for this work is a mere label for a set of problems; the controversial views that have historically been ...

ACT, CONTENT, AND OBJECT THE TITLE I have chosen for this work is a mere label for a set of problems; the controversial views that have historically been ...

Translation of Frege's 'Über Begriff und Gegenstand' (1892). Translation by Peter Geach, revised by Max Black.

A correspondence theory of truth explains truth in terms of various correspondence relations (e.G., Reference) between words and the extralinguistic world. What are the consequences of quine's doctrine of indeterminacy for correspondence theories? in "ontological relativity" quine implicitly claims that correspondence theories are impossible; that is what the doctrine of 'relative reference' amounts to. But quine's doctrine of relative reference is incoherent. Those who think the indeterminacy thesis valid should not try to relativize reference, They should abandon the relation and (...) replace it by certain more general correspondence relations between words and extralinguistic objects. Doing so will not interfere with the task of defining truth in terms of correspondence relations. (shrink)