Stefano Predelli comes to the defense of the traditional "formal" approach to natural-language semantics, arguing that it has been misrepresented not only by its critics, but also by its foremost defenders. In Contexts he offers a fundamental reappraisal, with particular attention to the treatment of indexicality and other forms of contextual dependence which have been the focus of much recent controversy. In the process, he presents original approaches to a number of important semantic issues, including the relationship between validity and (...) indexicality, the limits of token-reflexive systems, the significance of contextualist arguments, and the interpretation of attitude reports. Contexts will make invigorating reading for all philosophers of language and many linguists. (shrink)

In this ingenious and powerfully argued book Tim Maudlin sets out a novel account of logic and semantics which allows him to deal with certain notorious paradoxes which have bedevilled philosophical theories of truth. All philosophers interested in logic and language will find this a stimulating read.

Roy Sorenson offers a unique exploration of an ancient problem: vagueness. Did Buddha become a fat man in one second? Is there a tallest short giraffe? According to Sorenson's epistemicist approach, the answers are yes! Although vagueness abounds in the way the world is divided, Sorenson argues that the divisions are sharp; yet we often do not know where they are. Written in Sorenson'e usual inventive and amusing style, this book offers original insight on language and logic, the way world (...) is, and our understanding of it. (shrink)

This anthology of essays on the work of David Kaplan, a leading contemporary philosopher of language, sprang from a conference, "Themes from Kaplan," organized by the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University.

According to the principle of bivalence, truth and falsity are jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive options for a statement. It is either true or false, and not both, even in a borderline case. That highly controversial claim is central to the epistemic theory of vagueness, which holds that borderline cases are distinguished by a special kind of obstacle to knowing the truth-value of the statement. But this paper is not a defence of the epistemic theory. If bivalence holds, it presumably (...) does so as a consequence of what truth and falsity separately are. One may therefore expect bivalence to be derivable from a combination of some principles characterizing truth and other principles characterizing falsity. Indeed, such derivations are easily found. Their form will of course depend on the initial characterizations of truth and falsity, and not all such characterizations will permit bivalence to be derived. In this paper we focus on the relation between its derivability and some principles about truth and falsity. We will use borderline cases for vague expressions as primary examples of an urgent.. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to make sense of relativism about truth. There are two key ideas. (1) To be a relativist about truth is to allow that a sentence or proposition might be assessment-sensitive: that is, its truth value might vary with the context of assessment as well as the context of use. (2) Making sense of relativism is a matter of understanding what it would be to commit oneself to the truth of an assessment-sensitive sentence or proposition.

I hear the patter of little feet around the house, I expect Bruce. What I expect is a cat, a particular cat. If I heard such a patter in another house, I might expect a cat but no particular cat. What I expect then seems to be a Meinongian incomplete cat. I expect winter, expect stormy weather, expect to shovel snow, expect fatigue---a season, a phenomenon, an activity, a state. I expect that someday mankind will inhabit at least five planets. (...) This time what I expect is a state of affairs. If we let surface grammar be our guide, the objects of expectation seem quite a miscellany. The same goes for belief, since expectation is one kind of belief. The same goes for desire: I could want Bruce, want a cat but no particular cat, want winter, want stormy weather, want to shovel snow, want fatigue, or want that someday mankind will inhabit at least five planets. The same goes for other attitudes to the extent that they consist partly of beliefs or desires or lacks thereof. But the seeming diversity of objects might be an illusion. Perhaps the objects of attitudes are uniform in category, and it is our ways of speaking elliptically about these uniform objects that are diverse. That indeed is our consensus. We mostly think that the attitudes uniformly have propositions as their objects. That is why we speak habitually of "propositional attitudes.". (shrink)

According to the dominant position among philosophers of language today, we can legitimately ascribe determinate contents to natural language sentences, independently of what the speaker actually means. This view contrasts with that held by ordinary language philosophers fifty years ago: according to them, speech acts, not sentences, are the primary bearers of content. François Recanati argues for the relevance of this controversy to the current debate about semantics and pragmatics. Is 'what is said' determined by linguistic conventions, or is it (...) an aspect of 'speaker's meaning'? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is 'literal meaning'? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati provides an original and insightful defence of 'contextualism', and offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the semantics/pragmatics interface. (shrink)

Cappelen and Hawthorne present a powerful critique of fashionable relativist accounts of truth, and the foundational ideas in semantics on which the new relativism draws. They argue compellingly that the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth and falsity.

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw something of a comeback for relativism within analytical philosophy. Relativism and Monadic Truth has three main goals. First, we wished to clarify what we take to be the key moving parts in the intellectual machinations of self-described relativists. Secondly, we aimed to expose fundamental flaws in those argumentative strategies that drive the pro-relativist movement and precursors from which they draw inspiration. Thirdly, we hoped that our polemic would serve as an indirect defence of (...) a traditional and natural picture concerning truth. According to this picture, what we call ‘Simplicity’, the fundamental structure of semantic reality is best revealed by construing truth as a simple monadic property of propositions that serve as the objects of belief, assertion, meaning and agreement. Our project was not a straightforward one. So-called relativists are not uniform in their key ideology, are often sloppy, casual, obscure or confused in their self-characterization, and differ in their argumentative emphasis among themselves and over time, thereby presenting a target that is both amorphous and shifty. This is an area where parties will frequently claim not to understand each other and where certain parties will sometimes accuse others of failing to make any sense at all. In such a situation, any effort to impose order will inevitably strike some parties as tendentious and unfair. That said, we felt that we had enough of …. (shrink)

Excerpt from A History of Formal Logic In this edition of the most considerable history Of formal logic yet published, the Opportunity has Of course been taken to make some adjustments seen to be necessary in the original, with the author's full concurrence. Only in 36, however, has the numeration of cited passages been altered owing to the introduction of new matter. Those changes are as follows. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. (...) Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Of all the cases made against classical logic, Michael Dummett's is the most deeply considered. Issuing from a systematic and original conception of the discipline, it constitutes one of the most distinctive achievements of twentieth century British philosophy. Although Dummett builds on the work of Brouwer and Heyting, he provides the case against classical logic with a new, explicit and general foundation in the philosophy of language. Dummett's central arguments, widely celebrated if not widely endorsed, concern the implications of the (...) relation between meaning and use for both the inference rules that govern logical connectives and the relation between truth and its recognition. It is less often noted that Dummett has a further argument against classical logic, one based on the semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes. That is the topic of this paper. (shrink)

Classic work by one of the most brilliant figures in post-war analytic philosophy.

Dummett's account of the semantic paradoxes in terms of his theory of indefinitely extensible concepts is compared with Bürge's account in terms of indexicality. Dummett's appeal to intuitionistic logic does not block the paradoxes but Bürge's attempt to avoid the Strengthened Liar is unconvincing. It is argued that in order to avoid the Strengthened Liar and other semantic paradoxes involving nonindexical expressions (constants), one must postulate that when we reflect on the paradoxes there are slight shifts in the meaning (not (...) just reference) we ascribe to metalinguistic expressions (in particular 'say', and derivatively 'true' and 'false'). Consideration of metaphor and gradual linguistic change suggests that such semantic shifts are consistent with language-learning and communication. On this account there is no threat to classical logic, bivalence or the fundamental principles governing 'true' and 'false'. (shrink)

Philip Percival; X*—Absolute Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 189–214, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelia.

The French philosopher Jean Buridan's work on the logical paradoxes is currently attracting more attention than it has for several centuries. In part this is due to a general resurgence of interest in the paradoxes, but the immediate occasion is the recent publication of G. E. Hughes's edition, translation, and commentary on the chapter of Buridan's Sophismata most immediately concerned with the paradoxes. It is worth noting, therefore, that Buridan's theory fails, and in a way that makes it seem unlikely (...) that it can be developed into a serious rival of more modern theories. (shrink)

Alan Hazen has claimed that Buridan’s theory of truth does not escape semantic paradox.In this paper, I claim that Buridan's theory is untouched by Hazen's case.My solution to Hazen's paradox requires the recognition of the exceptionability of what I shall call T-Elimination, namely, the principle that from a statement that such and such is true, we may deduce such and such. The exceptions are explained by reference to the role of what I shall call the meta-content of a locution, that (...) is, that information conveyed by any locution that tells us what sort of a locution it is intended to be. The exceptionability of T-Elimination turns out to be shared by other well-accepted principles of deduction also—and for the same reasons. (shrink)

Though the phrase 'x is true of x' is well formed grammatically, it does not express any predicate in the logical sense, because it does not satisfy the principle of reduction for statements containing 'x is true of'. recognition of this allows for solution of russell's paradox without his restrictive theory of types.