In his latest book, Frank Ankersmit proposes an original theory of historical representation. In this review I focus on what I take to be his most important semantic points with respect to representation, meaning, truth, and reference. First, I provide a short summary of the book. Second, I explore his semantics in terms of aspects and compare it with a different account inspired by the Fregean notion of mode of presentation. As my examination shows, Ankersmit’s analysis faces the problem (...) of “loosing indirectness” and, moreover, there seems to exist an alternative and plausible view that does not suffer from this problem. Finally, I conclude with a couple of comments on the Copernican Revolution advocated in the book. (shrink)

The book presents two fundamental theories that characterize the cultural-historical perspective in cognitive semantics: the Four-Level Theory of Cognitive Development (FLTCD) and the Sociocultural Theory of Lexical Complexes (STLC) as well as their application to the analysis of specific material. In particular, the book analyzes the sociocultural history of the machine metaphor, specifically its use in the texts of René Descartes and Francis Bacon. The practical embodiment of STLC is demonstrated through the analysis of lexical complexes such as otkryvat' (...) 'to open,' kamen' 'stone,' and intelligencija 'intelligentsia.' In the final chapter of the monograph, FLTCD and STLC are used for the diachronic analysis of semantic change. The monograph will be of interest to a wide range of linguists, psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and philosophers who consider language as a sociocultural phenomenon. (shrink)

Semantic categories in the world's languages often reflect a historical process of chaining: A name for one referent is extended to a conceptually related referent, and from there on to other referents, producing a chain of exemplars that all bear the same name. The beginning and end points of such a chain might in principle be rather dissimilar. There is also evidence supporting a contrasting picture: Languages tend to support efficient, informative communication, often through semantic categories in which all (...) exemplars are similar. Here, we explore this tension through computational analyses of existing cross-language naming and sorting data from the domain of household containers. We find formal evidence for historical semantic chaining, and evidence that systems of categories in this domain nonetheless support near-optimally efficient communication. Our results demonstrate that semantic chaining is compatible with efficient communication, and they suggest that chaining may be constrained by the functional need for efficient communication. (shrink)

Prototype theory makes a crucial distinction between central and peripheral sense of words. Geeraerts explores the implications of this model for a theory of semantic change, in the first full-scale treatment of the impact of the most recent developments in lexicological theory on the study of meaning change. He identifies structural features of the development of word meanings which follow from a prototype-theoretical model of semantic structure, and incorporates these diachronic prototypicality effects into a theory of meaning change.

Innovative, data-driven methods provide more rigorous and systematic evidence for the description and explanation of diachronic semantic processes. The volume systematises, reviews, and promotes a range of empirical research techniques and theoretical perspectives that currently inform work across the discipline of historical semantics. In addition to emphasising the use of new technology, the potential of current theoretical models (e.g. within variationist, sociolinguistic or cognitive frameworks) is explored along the way.

The article shows that in the Archaic period the Greeks did not possess a term equivalent to Classical ποιητής “poet-composer.” The principal meaning of the word άοιδός, often claimed to correspond to ποιητής and modern English poet, was “tuneful” or “singer” . The secondary meaning “poet working in the hexameter medium” is limited to the post-Iliadic hexameter corpus. It is furthermore possible to show that the simplex άοιδός was backderived from a compound. More specifically, following Hermann Koller, I propose that (...) the secondary meaning, being an epic innovation, developed from the compound *θεσπιαοιδός “singer of things divine,” whereas the primary meaning “singer” may go back to έπαοιδός, which later acquired the specialized meaning “singer of incantations.”. (shrink)

Contains revised papers from a September 1996 symposium which provided a forum for synchronically and diachronically oriented scholars to exchange ideas and for ...

This article is currently available as a free download on Ingenta Connect.

In these fifteen essays, one Of Germany's most distinguished philosophers of history invokes an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts to explore the concept of historical time. The witnesses include politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets, and the texts range from Renaissance paintings to the dreams of German citizens in the 1930s. Using these remarkable materials, Koselleck investigates the relationship of history to language, and of language to the deeper movements of human understanding.Reinhart Koselleck is Professor of the Theory of (...) History at the University of Bielefeld. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 92 Heft: 1 Seiten: 85-123.

In these fifteen essays, one Of Germany's most distinguished philosophers of history invokes an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts to explore the concept of historical time. The witnesses include politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets, and the texts range from Renaissance paintings to the dreams of German citizens in the 1930s. Using these remarkable materials, Koselleck investigates the relationship of history to language, and of language to the deeper movements of human understanding.Reinhart Koselleck is Professor of the Theory of (...) History at the University of Bielefeld. (shrink)

Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al. 2001) has shown systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical (...) cases (Weinberg et al. 2001). In light of these findings on cultural differences, two experiments were conducted which explored intuitions about reference in Westerners and East Asians. Both experiments indicate that, for certain central cases, Westerners are more likely than East Asians to report intuitions that are consistent with the causal-historical view. These results constitute prima facie evidence that semantic intuitions vary from culture to culture, and the paper argues that this fact raises questions about the nature of the philosophical enterprise of developing a theory of reference. (shrink)

This new and important study of semantic change examines how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. In the last few decades there has been growing interest in exploring systemicities in semantic change from a number of perspectives including theories of metaphor, pragmatic inferencing, and grammaticalization. Like earlier studies, these have for the most part been based on (...) data taken out of context. This book is the first detailed examination of semantic change from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy. (shrink)

The collection focuses on meaning change as a topic of interdisciplinary research.

This paper uses Wmatrix to generate semantic tagging to compare corpora of media representations between the American Dream and the Chinese Dream. The USAS tagger is used to assign the semantic field tags to the America Dream Corpus and the Chinese Dream Corpus. The motivation of this study is to replicate the studies using an automated and inclusive method based on semantic tagging. 295–324), and more importantly, to conduct a broad semantic categorization on both national dreams so as to uncover (...) the cultural, social and historical similarities and/or differences. It is found that the cultural difference of the individualistic home and work association of the American Dream versus the collectivistic nation and world attributions of the Chinese Dream. The different historical stage and social-economic contexts are disclosed from the different temporal positions from time category, and the contrastive tags associated with negative representation of the American Dream and positive representation of the Chinese Dream. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of Ding and Liu’s (2022) contribution to the ongoing debate stemming from Machery et al.’s (2004) experimental investigation of Kripke’s Gödel Case. Machery et al. test referential intuitions on proper names among laypeople from American and Chinese backgrounds and contend that their results challenge Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism. Ding and Liu argue that descriptions in Gödel-style scenarios are ambiguous between a brute-fact and a social-fact interpretation, and Machery et al. overlook the latter. Building upon (...) this ambiguity, Ding and Liu conduct several studies, maintaining that the results reveal that Machery et al. misclassify some descriptivist answers as causal-historical. If that is the case, the challenge that experimental philosophy poses to Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism is even more substantial than Machery et al. claim. In this paper, I argue that, even granting some specific points that Ding and Liu endorse, their main experiment (Study 3) fails to provide the intended evidence. Despite the authors’ attempted rejoinders, the social-fact interpretation of the description in the Gödel Case is either circular or implicitly presupposes a referential role for the name’s causal-historical chain. Hence, in contrast to Ding and Liu’s interpretation, from their premises, they can only conclude that their main experiment’s results do not bolster Machery et al.’s (2004) challenge against Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism, but rather diminish it. (shrink)

This collection of new essays presents cutting-edge research on the semantic conception of logic, the invariance criteria of logicality, grammaticality, and logical truth. Contributors explore the history of the semantic tradition, starting with Tarski, and its historical applications, while central criticisms of the tradition, and especially the use of invariance criteria to explain logicality, are revisited by the original participants in that debate. Other essays discuss more recent criticism of the approach, and researchers from mathematics and linguistics weigh in (...) on the role of the semantic tradition in their disciplines. This book will be invaluable to philosophers and logicians alike. (shrink)

This book is concerned with the relationship between semantics and surface structure and in particular with the way in which each is mapped into the other. Jim Miller argues that semantic and syntactic structure require different representations and that semantic structure is far more complex than many analysts realise. He argues further that semantic structure should be based on notions of location and movement. The need for a semantic component of greater complexity is demonstrated by an examination of prepositions, particles, (...) adverbs and verb-prefixes, and is shown to accord with cross-language and historical facts. The volume goes on to consider the sort of rules that are required to map semantic structures onto syntax. Semantics and Syntax tackles fundamental issues and draws together many of the key concepts of traditional grammar and formal linguistics. The general framework for handling syntax, semantics and morphology that it outlines is perhaps a controversial one, but it will be recognized as challenging and original. (shrink)

Semantic roles have continued to intrigue linguists for more than four decades now, starting with determining their kind and number, with their morphological expression, and with their interaction with argument structure and syntax. The focus in this volume is on typological and historical issues. The papers focus on the cross-linguistic identification of semantic-role equivalents, on the regularity of, and exceptions concerning change and grammaticalization in semantic roles, the variation of encoding the roles of direction and experiencer in specific languages, (...) presenting evidence for identifying a new semantic role of speech addressee in Caucasian languages, on semantic roles in word formation, and finally a cross-linguistic comparison of the functions and the grammaticalization of the ethical dative in some Indo-European languages. The book will be of interest to anyone involved with case and semantic roles, with the syntax-semantics interface, and with semantic change and grammaticalization. (shrink)

A core feature of teleosemantic proposals has been to rely on selective history to justify semantic functional classification. Recently, Nanay and Bauer have offered ahistorical teleosemantic proposals intended to bypass the numerous criticisms arising from the dependence on history. However, part of the attraction of the traditional reliance on history is that it seemingly allowed teleosemantics to mesh with biological practice. For example, Millikan, a key advocate for the selective historical approach, argues that biological kind identity rests on (...) class='Hi'>historical relations. That would seem to place ahistorical teleosemantics directly at odds with biological practice. I suggest that ahistorical teleosemantics need not conflict with biological practice. This reflects the fact that biological inquiry combines two complimentary explanatory strategies, essentialist and populational reasoning. The complementary character of these strategies allows ahistorical teleosemantics, as an instance of essentialism, to integrate with populational reasoning without conflict. (shrink)

From her first chapter giving a historical sketch of the main ideas to her final chapter surveying the ways in which they have influenced education in America, ...

In their delightfully provocative paper, “Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style,” Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich (2004),[1] make several striking claims about theories of reference. First, they claim: (I) Philosophical views about reference “are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations” (p. B1). This claim is prompted by their observations of the role of intuitions in Saul Kripke’s refutation of the descriptivist view of proper names in favor of a causal-historical view (1980). (...) The particular intuitions they attend to are those aired in discussing Kripke’s cases of Gödel and Jonah. This prompts the next claim: (II) Those particular cases are “central” to Kripke’s refutation (p. B1). Indeed, Machery et al describe these cases as “some of the most influential thought experiments in the philosophy of reference” (p. B8). Inspired by recent work in psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al 2001) that shows “systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners” (p. B1), Machery et al predicted that there would be cultural differences in referential intuitions. They conducted some ingenious experiments on Gödel and Jonah cases to test this predication. The results in the Gödel cases, although not in the Jonah cases, confirmed their prediction, leading them to conclude: “Westerners are more likely than East Asians to report intuitions that are consistent with the causal-historical view” (p. B1). And, implicitly, they claim: (III) These results raise serious doubts about Kripke’s refutation, which relies solely on the intuitions of Westerners. They are explicit about the following bolder claim: (IV) The fact of these cultural differences “raises questions about the nature of the philosophical enterprise of developing a theory of reference” (p. B1); it points to “significant philosophical conclusions” (p.. (shrink)

This paper describes and compares the first step in modern semantic theory for deontic logic which appeared in works of Stig Kanger, Jaakko Hintikka, Richard Montague and Saul Kripke in late 50s and early 60s. Moreover, some further developments as well as systematizations are also noted.

The aim of this paper is to approach a basic question in semantics: what is semantic reference? Or, what is reference, insofar as the notion has a role in the semantics of natural language? I highlight two ways of conceiving of semantic reference, which offer different starting points for answering the question. One of these conceptions – what I call the conventional conception of semantic reference – is the standard conception. I propose an alternative to this conception: what I call (...) the historical conception of semantic reference. The first section of the paper explains the two conceptions, highlighting their common ground and how they differ. The second section offers a preliminary argument that the two conceptions are really both ways of conceiving of semantic reference, and that the historical conception is more viable as a basis for the semantics of natural language than the conventional conception. Finally, in the third section, I comment on the status of the historical conception as a basic view about semantic reference that sets the stage for the development of a theory of semantic reference. (shrink)

BackgroundIn December 2014, China announced that only voluntarily donated organs from citizens would be used for transplantation after January 1, 2015. Many medical professionals worldwide believe that China has stopped using organs from death-row prisoners.DiscussionIn the present article, we briefly review the historical development of organ procurement from death-row prisoners in China and comprehensively analyze the social-political background and the legal basis of the announcement. The announcement was not accompanied by any change in organ sourcing legislations or regulations. As (...) a fact, the use of prisoner organs remains legal in China. Even after January 2015, key Chinese transplant officials have repeatedly stated that death-row prisoners have the same right as regular citizens to “voluntarily donate” organs. This perpetuates an unethical organ procurement system in ongoing violation of international standards.ConclusionsOrgan sourcing from death-row prisoners has not stopped in China. The 2014 announcement refers to the intention to stop the use of organs illegally harvested without the consent of the prisoners. Prisoner organs procured with “consent” are now simply labelled as “voluntarily donations from citizens”. The semantic switch may whitewash sourcing from both death-row prisoners and prisoners of conscience. China can gain credibility only by enacting new legislation prohibiting use of prisoner organs and by making its organ sourcing system open to international inspections. Until international ethical standards are transparently met, sanctions should remain. (shrink)

What is a “historical” video game, let alone a successful one? It is difficult to answer this question because all our definitions of history have been constructed in a linear-narrative cultural context that is currently being challenged and in large part displaced by digital media, especially video games. I therefore consider this question from the point of view of historical semantics and in relation to the impact of digital technology on all aspects of the historiographical operation, from the (...) establishment of digital archives, to the production of e-texts, to the digital remediation of visual modes of historical representation. Seen from this dual perspective, video games appear to participate in a process of spatialization and virtualization of historical semantics. In the first place, video games have begun to detach the notion of history from its double reference to the past and to the real—“what essentially happened”—that it had acquired at the end of the eighteenth century. Second, they also challenge the semiotic production of “historic events” that has characterized the construction of modern historical consciousness. Historical video games, in other words, replace representation with simulation and presence with virtuality, thereby marginalizing the oscillation of the modern historical imagination between historical facts and historic events, transcendence and immanence, representation and presence. Although digital reworkings of historical semantics have not produced any grammatical transformation of the signifier, history—nor does this essay propose one—I do argue that the impact of video games on our contemporary historic culture is of paradigmatic proportions similar to those described by Reinhart Koselleck for the dawn of the modern age. Focusing on one of the most successful contemporary video games, Sid Meier’s Civilization, I show how the remediation of cinematic genres by video games is pushing the processes of de-temporalization and de-referentialization of history toward the formation of a new notion of the historical that may be conceptualized as the inversion of the classic Aristotelian paradigm: history has replaced poetry and philosophy as the realm of the possible. (shrink)

In Historical Representation Frank Ankersmit seeks a juste milieu between postmodern theory and historical practice. But he still insists that the meaning of a historical representation “is not found, but made in and by [the] text.” Thus “there will be nothing, outside the text itself, that can govern or check [the conceptualization].” Accordingly, “a representation itself cannot be interpreted as one large description. I would not hesitate to say that this—and nothing else—is the central problem in the (...) philosophy of history.” On the other hand, he affirms that “a historical representation ‘is about’ a certain part of the past,” that historical debate is a “semantic quarrel not about the exact meaning of words, but about the past.” Everything hinges on how to grasp this idea of “aboutness.” I propose an alternative reading of post-positivist philosophy of science in hopes of reaching the juste milieu. The issue is whether colligatory concepts in history have a more radically constructed character than theoretical terms in natural-scientific theory, and whether, as with the latter, they can make intersubjective claims to warrant. My view is that colligatory concepts in historical representations can be conceived to refer in roughly the same way that theoretical terms do in natural-scientific theories. All the problems I find in Ankersmit’s approach come to the fore in his fruitful analogy to portrait painting. First, the personality the portrait evokes is not restricted to the representation, but is of the sitter. We are offered insight not into painting but into an actual character. That is, there is a cognitive, not simply an aesthetic, dimension to representation. Historical terms pick out something intersubjectively affirmable in reality, and discrimination is possible among rival versions. The question is how to regard—to explain and to evaluate—these underdetermined objects of consideration, not to preclude them by stipulation. (shrink)

The book provides a historical and systematic exposition of the semantic theory of truth formulated by Alfred Tarski in the 1930s. This theory became famous very soon and inspired logicians and philosophers. It has two different, but interconnected aspects: formal-logical and philosophical. The book deals with both, but it is intended mostly as a philosophical monograph. It explains Tarski’s motivation and presents discussions about his ideas as well as points out various applications of the semantic theory of truth to (...) philosophical problems. (shrink)

This article deals with an alternative interpretation of syllogistics, different from the classical one: an intensional one, in which subject and predicate are not associated with a set of individuals but a set of attributes. The authors of the paper draw attention to the fact that this approach was first proposed by Leibniz in works on logical calculus, which for a long time remained in the shadow of his other philosophical works. Currently, the intensional approach is gaining more and more (...) popularity due to the development of non-classical logics, and the article will present several existing intensional formal syllogistic semantics. The paper will also consider another historical approach to syllogistics, associated with the name of the Russian logician Nikolai Vasiliev, who is not only one of the founders of non-classical but also of a different intensional interpretation of such logic. The authors, along with the already known formalizations of Vasiliev’s ideas, present two new systems. One of them is a reconstruction of one type of imaginary logic with statements of three qualities: affirmative and two types of negative statements. The second system is the one that is adequate to semantics, in which instead of the four classical ones, only three types of statements are presented, and their significance is determined through the relation of the classical logical entailment. Both of them are interpreted intensionally. The intensional approach in logic and, in particular, in syllogistics allows us to expand the class of accepted principles. (shrink)

This book will interest typological and historical linguists at graduate level and above.

In this book, Michael Blome-Tillmann offers a critical overview of the current debate on the semantics of knowledge attributions. The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 introduces the reader to the literature on 'knowledge' attributions by outlining the historical roots of the debate andproviding an in-depth discussion of epistemic contextualism. After examining the advantages and disadvantages of the view, Part 2 offers a detailed investigation of epistemic impurism, while Part 3 is devoted to a careful examination of (...) epistemic relativism and Part4 to two different types of strict invariantism. The final part of the book explores Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism - a version of contextualism that is argued to provide a more powerful and elegant account of the semantics of 'knowledge' attributions thanmany of its competitors. A clear and precise account is provided of the main principles underlying each view and of how they aim to explain the pertinent data and resolve philosophical puzzles and challenges. The book also provides charts outlining the relations between the positions discussed andoffers suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

A recent innovation in the study of methods in the history of ideas is the introduction of elements of semantic externalism from the philosophy of language. Studies that rely on semantic externalism have done so to address particular questions of method in political theorising, including the interpretation of ‘essentially contested concepts’, and the issue of relativism in historical contextualism. In this paper, I critically review the use of semantic externalism, and associated methods such as Kripke’s causal theory of reference, (...) in the history of ideas. I explore the barriers that might prevent the use of externalism, and how studies relying on externalism seek to overcome such barriers. I then assess both the implications of relying on externalism, as well as a set of limitations. (shrink)

Experimental semanticists have concluded that there is wide variation in referential intuitions among speakers, for it appears that some speakers display referential intuitions that are in line with descriptivism, whereas other speakers’ intuitions are in line with the predictions of the causal-historical picture. In this chapter, I first situate the debate by comparing descriptivist and non-descriptivist approaches to reference. After examining some of the experimental results, I argue that the tests conducted do not elicit data that are relevant for (...) semantic theorizing and, hence, that the results should not have an impact in the theory of reference. (shrink)