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Katz offers such a grammatical account, in which makes it possible for the first time to explain the illocutionary potential of sentences within grammar.

In _Realistic Rationalism_, Jerrold J. Katz develops a new philosophical position integrating realism and rationalism. Realism here means that the objects of study in mathematics and other formal sciences are abstract; rationalism means that our knowledge of them is not empirical. Katz uses this position to meet the principal challenges to realism. In exposing the flaws in criticisms of the antirealists, he shows that realists can explain knowledge of abstract objects without supposing we have causal contact with them, that numbers (...) are determinate objects, and that the standard counterexamples to the abstract/concrete distinction have no force. Generalizing the account of knowledge used to meet the challenges to realism, he develops a rationalist and non-naturalist account of philosophical knowledge and argues that it is preferable to contemporary naturalist and empiricist accounts. The book illuminates a wide range of philosophical issues, including the nature of necessity, the distinction between the formal and natural sciences, empiricist holism, the structure of ontology, and philosophical skepticism. Philosophers will use this fresh treatment of realism and rationalism as a starting point for new directions in their own research. (shrink)

In _Realistic Rationalism_, Jerrold J. Katz develops a new philosophical position integrating realism and rationalism. Realism here means that the objects of study in mathematics and other formal sciences are abstract; rationalism means that our knowledge of them is not empirical. Katz uses this position to meet the principal challenges to realism. In exposing the flaws in criticisms of the antirealists, he shows that realists can explain knowledge of abstract objects without supposing we have causal contact with them, that numbers (...) are determinate objects, and that the standard counterexamples to the abstract/concrete distinction have no force. Generalizing the account of knowledge used to meet the challenges to realism, he develops a rationalist and non-naturalist account of philosophical knowledge and argues that it is preferable to contemporary naturalist and empiricist accounts. The book illuminates a wide range of philosophical issues, including the nature of necessity, the distinction between the formal and natural sciences, empiricist holism, the structure of ontology, and philosophical skepticism. Philosophers will use this fresh treatment of realism and rationalism as a starting point for new directions in their own research. (shrink)

Fodor and katz criticize cavell's position on the relation between ordinary language philosophy and empirical investigations of ordinary language, In "must we mean what we say?," _inquiry, Volume 1, Pages 172-212, And "the availability of wittgenstein's later philosophy," "philosophical review", Volume 71, Pages 67-93. Cavell holds that disagreements between ordinary language philosophers over grammar and semantics are in no sense empirical. Fodor and katz show that ordinary language philosophers are engaged in empirical investigation. (staff).

Sense, Reference, and Philosophy develops the far-reaching consequences for philosophy of adopting non-Fregean intensionalism, showing that long-standing problems in the philosophy of language, and indeed other areas, that appeared intractable can now be solved. Katz proceeds to examine some of those problems in this new light, including the problem of names, natural kind terms, the Liar Paradox, the distinction between logical and extra-logical vocabulary, and the Raven paradox. In each case, a non-Fregean intentionalism provides a philosophically more satisfying solution.

Contemporary philosophy standardly accepts Frege's conceptions of sense as the determiner of reference and of analyticity as (necessary) truth in virtue of meaning. This paper argues that those conceptions are mistaken. It develops referentially autonomous notions of sense and analyticity and applies them to the semantics of natural kind terms. The arguments of Donnellan, Putnam, and Kripke concerning natural kind terms are widely taken to refute internalist and rationalist theories of meaning. This paper shows that the counter-intuitive consequences about the (...) reference of natural kind terms depend as much on Frege's conceptions of sense and analyticity as on what such theories of meaning say about the senses of natural kind terms. Rather than refuting the internalist and rationalist theories of meaning, the arguments of Donnellan, Putnam, and Kripke are best recast as refutations of their own Fregean assumptions. The paper also shows how autonomous notions of sense and analyticity enable us to reconstruct such theories, formulate an internalist/ rationalist account of semantic knowledge, and preserve Donnellan's, Putnam's, and Kripke's insights about reference. (shrink)

Chomsky's criticism of Bloomfieldian structuralism's conception of linguistic reality applies equally to his own conception of linguistic reality. There are too many sentences in a natural language for them to have either concrete acoustic reality or concrete psychological or neural reality. Sentences have to be types, which, by Peirce's generally accepted definition, means that they are abstract objects. Given that sentences are abstract objects, Chomsky's generativism as well as his psychologism have to be given up. Langendoen and Postal's argument in (...) The Vastness of Natural Languages to show that there are more than denumerably many sentences is flawed. But, with the view that sentences are abstract objects, the flaws can be corrected. Once psychologism and generativism are abandoned, the revolution against Bloomfieldian structuralism can be brought to completion and linguistics can be put on a sound philosophical basis. (shrink)

The cogito ergo sum of Descartes is one of the best-known--and simplest--of all philosophical formulations, but ever since it was first propounded it has defied any formal accounting of its validity. How is it that so simple and important an argument has caused such difficulty and such philosophical controversy? In this pioneering work, Jerrold Katz argues that the problem with the cogito lies where it is least suspected--in a deficiency in the theory of language and logic that Cartesian scholars have (...) brought to the study of the cogito. Katz contends that the laws of traditional logic have distorted Descartes's reasoning so that it no longer fits either Descartes's own account of the cogito in his writings or the role he assigns it in his project. Katz proposes that the cogito can be understood as an example of "analytic entailment," a concept in the philosophy of language whereby a statement can be a formally valid inference without depending on a law of logic. Developing and defending his thesis, he shows us that by grappling with an historical philosophical problem it is possible to make an original contribution to the advance of contemporary philosopy. (shrink)

In light of the sharp linguistic turn philosophy has taken in this century, this collection provides a much-needed and long-overdue reference for philosophical discussion. The first collection of its kind, it explores questions of the nature and existence of linguistic objects--including sentences and meanings--and considers the concept of truth in linguistics. The status of linguistics and the nature of language now take a central place in discussions of the nature of philosophy; the essays in this volume both inform these discussions (...) and lay the groundwork for further examination. (shrink)

Constructs developed for the semantics of artificial languages are often proposed as the proper description of aspects of the semantics of natural languages. Most of us are familiar with the claims that conjunction, disjunction, negation, and material implication in standard versions of propositional calculus describe the meaning of “and”, “or”, “not”, and “if …, then …” in English. The argument for such claims is not only that these constructs account for meanings in English but that they offer the advantage of (...) well-understood formal apparatus for the explication of meaning in natural language. The argument against such claims is that explications based on this apparatus leave important aspects of the meaning of “and”, “or”, “not”, and “if …, then …” unexplicated. It is charged that the advantage of a well-understood formalism is secured at the expense of truth. Many of the most significant issues in philosophic logic are or depend on questions about whether constructs from artificial languages provide adequate semantic descriptions for natural languages. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that there is a large class of expressions, typified by ‘plastic flower’, ‘stuffed animal’ and ‘kosher bacon’, that have a unique semantics combining compositional, idiomatic and decompositional interpretation. These expressions are compositional because their constituents contribute their meanings to the meanings of the wholes; they are idiomatic because their interpretation involves assigning dictionary entries to non-terminal elements in their syntactic structure; and they are decompositional because their meanings have proper parts that are not the meanings (...) of any of their syntactic constituents. We argue that extensionalist semantics, on which the meaning of an expression is a function from domains to extensions in those domains, cannot provide an adequate account of the semantics of these expressions, and that supplementation with a theory of pragmatic interpretation does not improve the situation. We show how our account explains the intensionality and the productivity of these expressions. (shrink)

THIS PAPER PRESENTS THE INTERPRETATION OF DESCARTES'S "COGITO" IN MY BOOK "COGITATIONS" IN A CONCISE AND SLIGHTLY EXTENDED FORM. THE EMPHASIS IS ON CONVEYING THE ESSENTIALS OF THE ARGUMENT THAT "COGITO ERGO SUM" IS AN ANALYTIC ENTAILMENT, BUT I HAVE TAKEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO IMPROVE MY ARGUMENT IN A FEW SMALL WAYS AND TO RELATE THE EXPLICIT FORM OF THE "COGITO" TO SIMILAR REASONING IN DESCARTES'S "SECOND MEDITATION". MY PRIMARY AIM IS TO EXPLAIN HOW THE "COGITO" CAN BOTH BE THE (...) SIMPLE INFERENCE WE FIND IN DESCARTES'S OWN PRESENTATIONS AND YET BE FORMALLY VALID AS IT STANDS. (shrink)