Concepts, meanings and truth: First nature, second nature and hard work

Mind and Language 25 (3):247-278 (2010)
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Abstract

I argue that linguistic meanings are instructions to build monadic concepts that lie between lexicalizable concepts and truth-evaluable judgments. In acquiring words, humans use concepts of various adicities to introduce concepts that can be fetched and systematically combined via certain conjunctive operations, which require monadic inputs. These concepts do not have Tarskian satisfaction conditions. But they provide bases for refinements and elaborations that can yield truth-evaluable judgments. Constructing mental sentences that are true or false requires cognitive work, not just an exercise of basic linguistic capacities

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10.1111/j.1468-0017.2010.01389.x

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Paul Pietroski
Rutgers - New Brunswick

Citations of this work

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On the semantics of comparison across categories.Alexis Wellwood - 2015 - Linguistics and Philosophy 38 (1):67-101.

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The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans - 1982 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by John Henry McDowell.
Vision.David Marr - 1982 - W. H. Freeman.
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The Language of Thought.Jerry Fodor - 1975 - Harvard University Press.
Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use.Noam Chomsky - 1986 - Prager. Edited by Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel.

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