Philosophical Perspectives Volume 17, Language and Philosophical Linguistics, contains over 20 articles from leading philosophers of language and linguists.

Philosophical Perspectives Volume 17, Language and Philosophical Linguistics, contains over 20 articles from leading philosophers of language and linguists ...

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyMany moons ago, Bertrand Russell thought of reference in epistemic terms: to mean an object—to refer to it—one had to be acquainted with it; for it is ‘scarcely conceivable’ that one should judge without knowing what one is judging about. The rest of the relation between language and the world is conceived as denoting, a feature of linguistic expressions and bits of the world which crucially holds or fails to hold without (...) affecting the reference or meaning of those expressions. Since acquaintance is here explained as epistemically fundamental—if one is acquainted with something then one cannot be mistaken about either the existence or the identity of the thing—he was led to posit sense‐data as the only individuals we genuinely refer to. For various reasons, the last part has not since proven popular, but the idea of acquaintance remained standing. It seems... (shrink)

Under what conditions are two utterances utterances of the same word? What are words? That these questions have not received much attention is rather surprising: after all, philosophers and linguists frequently appeal to considerations about word and sentence identity in connection with a variety of puzzles and problems that are foundational to the very subject matter of philosophy of language and linguistics.1 Kaplan’s attention to words is thus to be applauded. And there is no doubt that his discussion (...) contains many useful insights. Nevertheless, we find his picture deeply flawed for a variety of crosscutting reasons. Our aim in this paper is to further advance an understanding of the nature of words, both by remedying the problems with Kaplan’s account, and also by achieving a suitable perspective on what the metaphysical investigation of word identity can hope to achieve. Our discussion divides into four parts. In Part One, we examine and critique Kaplan’s discussion of a contrast integral to his own account: that between the type-token and the stage-continuant conceptions of words. In Part Two, we present three constraints on any account of words and two further themes in Kaplan’s discussion central to his conception of words – the role of repetition and the constitutive authority of intentions. While these ideas have laudable motivations, we argue they are far from the best way of making good on the insights that drive them. The final two sections take a skeptical turn. In Part Three, we express doubt about Kaplan’s presumption of the importance of what he calls ‘common currency names’, thus raising a suspicion that he may be in pursuit of chimera. Finally, in Part Four, we express pessimism about whether interesting answers to question above will be forthcoming, and suggest that the legitimacy of our word ontology need not depend on the availability of such answers. Along the way, we tease apart a number of metaphysical questions in the vicinity of the topic of word individuation – questions that are often not disentangled – and consider how the discussion of the previous parts bears on them.. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is dedicated to the timely publication of new work in metaphysics, broadly construed. These volumes provide a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. They offer a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighboring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. This book is the 13th volume in (...) the series. It is divided into three parts. Part I concerns parts and pluralities. It begins with Peter van Inwagen’s proposed paraphrase techniques to help nihilists handle certain challenging sentences. In chapter two, Simon Thunder defends manyism: the view that each composite object is simply its many parts. The third chapter presents Joshua Spencer’s puzzle that affects prominent answers to the Special Composition Question. Part II looks at causation, counterfactuals, and essence. It opens with chapter four, where Bradford Skow categorizes varieties of causal relevance and compares them to varieties of relevance found in other domains. In chapter five, John Hawthorne and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri propose a novel translation scheme from the language of quantified model logic into the language of counterpart theory. In chapter six, Sungil Han argues against the definitional model of essence. Topics in Part III include persistence, time, and change. Chapter seven, by Kristie Miller and Caroline West, contends that the normative argument against perdurantism fails. In chapter eight, Martin Pickup proposes a new solution to the problem of change: situationalism. Then, in the final chapter of the volume, Alexander Kaiserman articulates a novel tense logic and uses it to argue that past alteration is possible. (shrink)

This anthology introduces advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students to today's debates in metaphysics. The book consists of essays by contemporary metaphysicians, and all but one appear here for the first time. For each of nine topics, there are two essays, one "pro-" and one "con-".

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is the forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character: this new series is a much-needed focus for it. OSM offers a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. (...) Besides independent essays, volumes will often contain a critical essay on a recent book, or a symposium that allows participants to respond to one another's criticisms and questions. Anyone who wants to know what's happening in metaphysics can start here. Volume Two begins with a major paper on consciousness by Ned Block. Block examines 'Max Black's Objection to Mind-Body Identity', an argument for a dualism of physical and phenomenal properties, closely related to Jackson's 'knowledge argument'. His extensive exploration of this family of arguments for property dualism includes considerable discussion of John Perry and Stephen White; their responses to Block's paper complete the section on the metaphysics of consciousness.Three papers consider the thesis that the future is, in some sense, 'open'. Eli Hirsch elaborates a view according to which contingent statements about the future can be indeterminate in truth-value, while preserving 'straight logic', including a principle of bivalence. Peter Forrest defends a sort of 'growing block' theory of the passage of time, emphasizing the way such a metaphysics, combined with a truth-maker principle, can provide an analysis of natural necessity. Trenton Merricks presents a trenchant and original criticism of the 'growing block' theory of time.The volume continues with a group of papers on problems of ontology. Thomas Hofweber's paper, defending nominalism from the objection that there are 'inexpressible' properties and propositions, won the first annual Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholar Prize. The papers by Phillip Bricker and Michael Loux examine a couple of deep divides within ontology. John Hawthorne's paper raises some extremely puzzling questions about the nature of persons, given the ontology needed for Timothy Williamson's theory of vagueness. Hawthorne uses these problems to motivate an alternative style of epistemicism. The final three papers take up several issues in the metaphysics of traditional theism. Michael Bergmann and Jeffrey Brower raise objections to combining a Platonic conception of universals with the doctrine of divine aseity; while Brian Leftow defends a non-Platonic theory of universals - a kind of divine-concept nominalism. Hud Hudson suggests that contemplation of the possibility of higher dimensions opens up new avenues in theodicy. (shrink)

‘Why does language matter to philosophy?’ is the name of a minor classic by Ian Hacking published in 1975. It’s a good question. Among the many charges laid against academic philosophy, one of the more familiar is that it concerns itself excessively with verbal or ‘merely semantic’ questions, at the expense of the real questions of philosophy. And yet those who have made a serious attempt to engage with philosophical problems quite soon finds themselves grappling with the very (...) words they use to formulate the problems. (shrink)

In this book, internationally recognized scholars in philosophical hermeneutics discuss various aspects of language and linguisticality. The translations of Hans-Georg Gadamer's two recent essays provoke a preliminary discussion on the philosopher's polemic claim in Truth and Method—"Being that can be understood is language." Topics addressed by the contributors include the relationship of rituals to tradition and the immemorial; the unity of the word; conversation; translation and conceptuality; and the interrelationship between the art of writing and linguisticality. This (...) work is of critical importance to anyone interested in Gadamer's claims regarding the boundaries of language, the transition from the prelinguistic to linguistic realms, and the role of rituals in this transition. (shrink)

This article argues that Iris Murdoch, who was supervised by John Wisdom during her 1947–48 fellowship at Newnham College Cambridge, went on to practice philosophy in a recognizably Wisdomian manner in her earliest paper, “Thinking and Language” (1951). To do so, I first describe how Wisdom understood philosophical perplexity and paradox. One task that linguistic philosophers should take up is to investigate the concrete cases that give paradoxical philosophical statements their sense and to sift the truth (...) they contain from the distortion. I then show how this vision informed his critical reception of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind as well as his own investigation of the Hidden Stream Paradox. Finally, I trace a similar approach to Murdoch's discussions of a paradox I call the Coarse Net Paradox. Recognizing Murdoch's intellectual inheritance from Wisdom enables us to see a thus‐far overlooked connection between Murdoch and the tradition of linguistic philosophy. (shrink)

The adjective ‘is justified’ has all the hallmarks of a gradable adjective. But the relationship between gradable uses and straightforward predications of the form ‘x is justified’ has been underexplored by epistemologists. In this paper we undertake to do some ground clearing as a prelude to better understanding this relationship.

Recent developments in the semantics of natural language seem to lead to a genuine synthesis of ideas from linguistics and logic, producing novel concepts and questions of interest to both parent disciplines. This book is a collection of essays on such new topics, which have arisen over the past few years. Taking a broad view, developments in formal semantics over the past decade can be seen as follows. At the beginning stands Montague's pioneering work, showing how a rigorous (...) semantics can be given for complete fragments of natural language by creating a suitable fit between syntactic categories and semantic types. This very enterprise already dispelled entrenched prejudices concerning the separation of linguistics and logic. Having seen the light, however, there is no reason at all to stick to the letter of Montague's proposals, which are often debatable. Subsequently, then, many improvements have been made upon virtually every aspect of the enterprise. More sophisticated grammars have been inserted (lately, lexical-functional grammar and generalized phrase structure grammar), more sensitive model structures have been developed (lately, 'partial' rather than 'total' in their com position), and even the mechanism of interpretation itself may be fine-tuned more delicately, using various forms of 'representations' mediating between linguistic items and semantic reality. In addition to all these refinements of the semantic format, descriptive coverage has extended considerably. (shrink)

This paper presents considerations in favour of the view that traditional (classical) architectures can be seen as emergent features of connectionist networks with distributed representation. A recent paper by William Bechtel (1988) which argues for a similar conclusion is unsatisfactory in that it fails to consider whether the compositional syntax and semantics attributed to mental representations by classical models can emerge within a connectionist network. The compatibility of the two paradigms hinges largely, I suggest, on how this question is answered. (...) Focusing on the issue of syntax, I argue that while such structure is lacking in connectionist models with local representation, it can be accommodated within networks where representation is distributed. I discuss an important paper by Smolenski (1988) which attempts to show how connectionists can incorporate the relevant syntactic structure, suggesting that some criticisms levelled against that paper by Fodor & Pylyshyn (1988) are wanting. I then go on to indicate a strategy by which a compositional syntax and semantics can be defined for the sort of network that Smolenski describes. I conclude that since the connectionist can respect the central tenets of classicism, the two approaches are compatible with one another. (shrink)

This is the tenth volume of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. As with earlier volumes, these essays follow the tradition of providing a non-sectarian and non-partisan snapshot of the subdiscipline of philosophy of religion. This subdiscipline has become an increasingly important one within philosophy over the last century, and especially over the past half-century, having emerged as an identifiable subfield at the same time as other emerging subfields such as the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language. (...) This volume continues the initial intention behind the series: attracting the best work from philosophers well known for their work in philosophy of religion, while also including essays by philosophers working mainly in other subfields when their research addresses religious matters. This inclusive approach to the series provides an opportunity to mitigate some of the costs of greater specialization in our discipline, while at the same time inviting wider interest in the work being done in the subfield. Volumes also typically contain the winner of the Sanders Prize in the Philosophy of Religion and other essays submitted to that competition. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is dedicated to the timely publication of new work in metaphysics, broadly construed. These volumes provide a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. They offer a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. This book is the eighth volume in (...) the series. It contains essays by Cian Dorr and John Hawthorne, Maya Eddon, Shamik Dasgupta, Bill Dunaway, Cody Gilmore, Ted Sider, Aaron Cotnoir, Katherine Hawley, Frabrice Correia and Sven Rosencrantz, David Braddon-Mitchell, and Ross Cameron. (shrink)

In this reply to Alex Byrne’s comment on our book Narrow Content, we address Byrne’s claim that internalism is best framed as a thesis about properties of agents rather than properties of thoughts, arguing that a thought-based framework is better suited to standard internalist ambitions. We also discuss whether there is any prospect for a view in the internalist spirit that prescinds from multiplying indices beyond worlds, address Byrne’s ordinary language considerations against an ontology of thoughts, and briefly evaluate (...) the prospects for giving narrow content ascriptions explanatory life by using them to give an account of how things perceptually seem. (shrink)

There are more than six thousand human languages, each one unique. For the last five hundred years, people have argued about how important language differences are. This book traces that history and shows how language differences have generally been treated either as of no importance or as all-important, depending on broader approaches taken to human life and knowledge. It was only in the twentieth century, in the work of Franz Boas and his students, that an attempt was made (...) to engage seriously with the reality of language specificities. Since the 1950s, this work has been largely presented as yet another claim that language differences are all-important by cognitive scientists and philosophers who believe that such differences are of no importance. This book seeks to correct this misrepresentation and point to the new directions taken by the Boasians, directions now being recovered in the most recent work in psychology and linguistics. (shrink)

In this thesis, Semantics, Meta-Semantics, and Ontology, I provide a critique of the method of truth in metaphysics. Davidson has suggested that we can determine the metaphysical nature and structure of reality through semantic investigations. By contrast, I argue that it is not semantics, but meta-semantics, which reveals the metaphysically necessary and sufficient truth conditions of our claims. As a consequence I reject the Quinean criterion of ontological commitment. In Part I, chapter 1, I argue that the metaphysically primary truth (...) bearers are not propositions, but rather concrete representations, either beliefs or sentences. I show, in chapter 2, that we can give sense to a truth predicate applying to sentences, given a truth operator and quantification into sentence position. I argue that this strategy does not commit us to the existence of propositions serving as truth bearers. In Part II I argue that although we must assign semantic values to sentences and/or predicates, the meaningfulness of these expressions is not thereby explained. In chapter 3 I articulate Davidson’s problem of predication and his solution, but argue that he was wrong to attribute this solution to Tarski. In chapter 4 I examine the semantics of modal languages; I conclude that although they require semantic values for predicates and/or sentences we should be instrumentalists about these theories. In Part III I consider the relationship between truth and existence. In chapter 5, I defend Pluralism about truth: in some domains of discourse, I claim, semantic reference plays a merely instrumental role in explaining truth. In chapter 6, I show that Hume’s Principle, which is committed by the Quinean criterion to the existence of numbers, can be true even though numbers do not exist. In doing so, I appeal to meta-semantic and diachronic considerations. In the conclusion I compare my views on ontology and commitment to Jody Azzouni’s; and in the appendix I suggest how one might pursue diachronic linguistics. (shrink)

Argues that categorization, and not syntax, is the most important aspect of language, suggests that some philosophical problems are caused by an inadequate theory of language, and promotes a fresh approach to linguistic theory.

If the so-called 'science wars' are futile shouting-matches between extremists, some of the more bewildering skirmishes have been contested in the realm of colour science and culture. Ethnographers, postmodernists, and Wittgensteinians stress the specificity of local colour naming strategies, or the peculiarity of objects and emotions with which colours are associated, and may confess lingering attraction to Whorf's idea that cultures carve up an intrinsically unstructured colour space into quite arbitrary linguistic categories. Self-proclaimedly hard-headed biological and evolutionary psychologists, in contrast, (...) argue that the pan-human physiology of colour perception determines our colour categorization, and constrains whatever minimal linguistic variability there is. Don Dedrick's wonderful study in the philosophy of cognitive science offers not only a careful survey of the relevant evidence in this stand-off, but also a persuasive set of tools for thinking the issues through quite differently, and for avoiding the dichotomous terms in which the debates have previously been couched. The book should be essential reading for colour scientists, and for philosophers interested in links between cognition and culture; and it offers useful advanced introductions to detailed technical literatures in psychophysics, colour linguistics, and cognitive anthropol. (shrink)

In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in early-modern philosophy, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of John Locke's critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in writers such as Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Nicole, Pufendorf, Boyle, Malebranche and Locke. Locke, Language and Early-Modern (...) Philosophy demonstrates that new developments in philosophy, in conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves. Dr Dawson shows that language so fixated all manner of early-modern authors because it was seen as an obstacle to both knowledge and society. She thereby uncovers a novel story about the problem of language in philosophy, and in the process reshapes our understanding of early-modern epistemology, morality and politics. (shrink)

Answering the simplest questions satisfactorily often poses the greatest challenge and difficulty to philosophers. Since these questions concern principles underlying our everyday conduct, the inability to provide convincing answers can be exceedingly frustrating. When, during a career of teaching, John T. Goldthwait was asked by his students "Why is that good?" - in regard to art and to conduct - he realized he had no answer that would satisfy his students and himself. And so, his effort to answer his (...) students became a journey through the concept of value judgments, resulting in his book, Value, Language, and Life. What is value? What makes things good? Value, Language, and Life presents a new answer to these age-old questions through Goldthwait's adaptation of linguistic analysis and phenomenological methodology. By examining our everyday experience and use of language, he arrives at a knowledge of value that can be applied in solving problems and reconciling disputes about value. This unique approach enables us to place ethics, aesthetics, and other fields in which value is prominent on a single foundation. (shrink)

In this short monograph, John Horty explores the difficulties presented for Gottlob Frege's semantic theory, as well as its modern descendents, by the treatment of defined expressions. The book begins by focusing on the psychological constraints governing Frege's notion of sense, or meaning, and argues that, given these constraints, even the treatment of simple stipulative definitions led Frege to important difficulties. Horty is able to suggest ways out of these difficulties that are both philosophically and logically plausible and Fregean (...) in spirit. This discussion is then connected to a number of more familiar topics, such as indexicality and the discussion of concepts in recent theories of mind and language. In the latter part of the book, after introducing a simple semantic model of senses as procedures, Horty considers the problems that definitions present for Frege's idea that the sense of an expression should mirror its grammatical structure. The requirement can be satisfied, he argues, only if defined expressions--and incomplete expressions as well--are assigned senses of their own, rather than treated contextually. He then explores one way in which these senses might be reified within the procedural model, drawing on ideas from work in the semantics of computer programming languages. With its combination of technical semantics and history of philosophy, Horty's book tackles some of the hardest questions in the philosophy of language. It should interest philosophers, logicians, and linguists. (shrink)

Philosophical themes as diverse as language, value, mind and God are among the topics discussed in this book, originally published in 1963. Considerably influential, there are contributions on Time, Camrbidge Philosophy, Doedelian Sentences, Morality by Convention and the Non-Existence of God. They reflect a gradual move from a position where the influence of Wittgenstein is paramount, to a position where there is considerable criticism of linguistic philosophy and a growing interest in the approaches of Hegel and the phenomenologists.

This book is intended to challenge Frege's Begriffsschrift as the foundation of philosophical work which either uses formal methods or is inspired by them s it attempts the synthesis of the antithetical ideas associated with Wittgenstein, the Picture-Theory, and the language-game conceived as the untimate level of explanation.

By John R. Searle Copyright John R. Searle I. Naturalizing Language I believe that the greatest achievements in philosophy over the past hundred or one hundred and twenty five years have been in the philosophy of language. Beginning with Frege, who invented the subject, and continuing through Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Austin and their successors, right to the present day, there is no branch of philosophy with so much high quality work as the philosophy of language. (...) In my view, the only achievement comparable to those of the great philosophers of language is Rawls’s reinvention of the subject of political philosophy (and therefore implicitly the subject of ethics). But with this one possible exception, I think that work in the philosophy of language is at the top of our achievements. Having said that, however, I have to record a serious misgiving I have about the subject. The problem is that its practitioners in general do not treat language as a natural phenomenon. This may seem a strange charge to make, given that so many contemporary and recent philosophers of language are anxious to emphasize the empirical character of their theories of language. Quine and Davidson are striking examples of resolute empiricism. My objection is that few contemporary and recent philosophers of language attempt to treat language as a natural extension of non-linguistic biological capacities. Language is not seen as continuous with, nor as an extension of, the rest of our specifically human biological inheritance. I think there is a deep reason, both historically and intellectually, why language has not been treated naturalistically. It is.. (shrink)

‘Language and End Time’ is a translation of Sections I, IV and V of ‘Sprache und Endzeit’, a substantial essay by Günther Anders that was published in eight instalments in the Austrian journal FORVM from 1989 to 1991 (the full essay consists of 38 sections). The original essay was planned for inclusion in the third (unrealised) volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings. ‘Language and End Time’ builds on the diagnosis of ‘our blindness toward the apocalypse’ that was (...) advanced in the first volume of The Obsolescence in 1956. The essay asks if there is a language that is capable of making us fully comprehend the looming ‘man-made apocalypse’. In response to this, it offers a critique of philosophical jargon and of the putatively ‘objective’ language of (nuclear) science, which are both dismissed as unsuitable. Sections I, IV and V introduce this core problematic. The selection of this text for inclusion in this special journal issue responds to present-day realities that inscribe Anders’s reflections on nuclear science and the nuclear situation into new contexts. The critique that ‘Language and End Time’ advances resonates with the way in which the (undemocratic) decisions of a few companies and individuals are shaping the future of life on earth. At the same time, the wider stakes of Anders’s turn against the language employed by (weapons) scientists are newly laid bare by the realities and politics of climate change and fake news. In this new context, the language of science is all too readily dismissed as if it were a mere idiom that can be ignored without consequence. It is against the backdrop of a future that is, if anything, more uncertain than at the time of Anders’s writing, that the essay’s reflections on popularisation, the limits of language and the nature of truth gain added significance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION, AND REPRESENTATION IN THE SEMIOTIC OF JOHN POINSOT1 }AMES BERNARD MURPHY Dartmouth College Hanover, New Hampshire 1) Language and the Semiotic of John Poinsot HE SEMIOTIC of John Poinsot is to the study of gns what physics is to the study of nature. Physics is oth the most fundamental and the most general science of nature. All natural processes, from the motion (...) of planets to the division of cells, are governed by, but not only by, laws of physics. Similarly, the semiotic of John Poinsot (traditionally known by his Dominican name, John of St. Thomas) is the most fundamental and general science of signs. The actions of all signs -from natural signs such as footprints and symptoms of disease, to signs of communication, such as logical operators and linguistic signs, to signs in cognition, such as concepts and percepts -are governed by, but not only by, the fundamental relational logic of semiosis set forth in his Ars Logica [1632]. If C. S. Peirce can be said to give us a chemistry of sixty-six signcompounds, John Poinsot, suitably revised, gives us the basic physical laws of motion that bring sign, object, and mind into relation.2 i The author would like to acknowledge gratefully the fellowships received from the American Council of Learned Societies and from Dartmouth College supporting the research of this article. I also wish to acknowledge the help of my research assistant, Daniel Glazer, in hunting down many essential books and articles. John Deely assisted by correcting my discussion of some of the finer points of Poinsot's theory as well as by providing many other helpful suggestions for revision. 2 The first modern author to point this out was Jacques Maritain, especially in "Signe et symbole," Revue Thomiste 44 (April 1938), pp. 299-300 and 569 570 JAMES BERNARD MURPHY What I wish to explore here is the question: To what extent does the semiotic of John Poinsot account for the meaning of linguistic signs? In one sense, we cannot expect such a fundamental and general theory of the action of signs to tell us much about language. Language is a surpassingly complex and, in many ways, a unique sign-system. Expecting a general theory of signs to capture the meaning of the linguistic sign is like expecting physics to explain reproductive biology. In another sense, though, we ought to expect his semiotic to illuminate that preeminent system of signs, human language. For in addition to "Le Langage et la theorie du signe," Anne.:re au chapitre II of Quatre essais sur!'esprit dans sa condition charnelle (Nouvelle edition revue et augmentee; Paris: Alsatia, 1956), pp. 113-124. This latter essay appears in a modestly amplified English version, " Language and the Theory of Sign," from Language : An Enquiry into Its Meaning and Function, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), pp. 86-101; and, fully annotated in relation to Poinsot's Tractatus de Signis, it has been reprinted in Frontiers in Semiotics, edited by John Deely, Brooke Williams, and Felicia Kruse (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 51-62. Following Maritain, a number of authors have attempted to apply Poinsot's semiotic to contemporary debates. I note the principal ones in chronological order: John A. Oesterle, " Another Approach to the Problem of Meaning," The Thomist 7 (1944), pp. 233-263; John Wild, "An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Signs," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (December 1947), pp. 217-244; Henry B. Veatch, Intentional Logic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). Poinsot's Treatise on Signs was originally published in 1632 as a small part of volume 2 in the original five volumes (Alcala, Spain: 1631-1635) of his philosophical writings. These five volumes have been published as three volumes under the title Cursus Philosophicus Thomisticus in the modern edition by Beatus Reiser (Turin: Marietti, 1930, 1933, 1937). The first independent presentation of Poinsot's complete Tractatus de Signis was prepared by John Deely in consultation with Ralph A. Powell and published in bilingual critical edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Since the publication of this edition of the Tractatus, two major critiques and reconstructions of Poinsot's analysis... (shrink)

Daniel Dennett once invited us to consider super-Martians who were highly advanced scientifically yet lacked all intentional concepts. They spoke the language of austere physics and were capable of perceiving and describing the world at the micro-level. If such beings could accurately report happenings in their environment, make predictions, and generally live out their lives wholly within the scientific image, what would they be missing, Dennett wondered, by virtue of lacking intentional concepts? Dennett’s answer was that they would miss (...) out on various higher level patterns describable by way of mentalistic and semantic vocabulary. (shrink)

Reconciling paraphrases, this chapter states, are intended to show that two apparently inconsistent claims are in fact consistent. A growing number of philosophers have come to doubt the legitimacy of reconciling paraphrases due to the lack of ‘respectable’ evidence that can be provided on their behalf. Specifically, these critics think that in order to be plausible, reconciling paraphrases must be accompanied by evidence that would be of interest to linguists, semanticists, or philosophers of language. Since reconciling paraphrases are almost (...) never offered with such evidence, these critics maintain that such paraphrases can be dismissed as mere wishful thinking. This chapter argues that this concern is mistaken: for many paraphrases, a lack of such evidence is not even a concern, much less a condemnation. (shrink)

Knowledge how to do things is a pervasive and central element of everyday life. Yet it raises many difficult questions that must be answered by philosophers and cognitive scientists aspiring to understand human cognition and agency. What is the connection between knowing how and knowing that? Is knowledge how simply a type of ability or disposition to act? Is there an irreducibly practical form of knowledge? What is the role of the intellect in intelligent action? This volume contains fifteen state (...) of the art essays by leading figures in philosophy and linguistics that amplify and sharpen the debate between "intellectualists" and "anti-intellectualists" about mind and action, highlighting the conceptual, empirical, and linguistic issues that motivate and sustain the conflict. The essays also explore various ways in which this debate informs central areas of ethics, philosophy of action, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Knowing How covers a broad range of topics dealing with tacit and procedural knowledge, the psychology of skill, expertise, intelligence and intelligent action, the nature of ability, the syntax and semantics of embedded questions, the mind-body problem, phenomenal character, epistemic injustice, moral knowledge, the epistemology of logic, linguistic competence, the connection between knowledge and understanding, and the relation between theory and practice. This is the book on knowing how--an invaluable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and others concerned with knowledge, mind, and action. (shrink)

First published in 1966, the Language of Criticism was the first systematic attempt to understand literary criticism through the methods of linguistic philosophy and the later work of Wittgenstein. Literary critical and aesthetic judgements are rational, but are not to be explained by scientific methods. Criticism discovers reasons for a response, rather than causes, and is a rational procedure, rather than the expression of simply subjective taste, or of ideology, or of the power relations of society. The book aims (...) at a philosophical justification of the tradition of practical criticism that runs from Matthew Arnold, through T.S.Eliot to I.A.Richards, William Empson, F.R.Leavis and the American New Critics. It argues that the close reading of texts moves justifiably from text to world, from aesthetic to ethical valuation. In this it differs radically from the schools of "theory" that have recently dominated the humanities. (shrink)

In epistemology and in philosophy of language there is fierce debate about the role of context in knowledge, understanding, and meaning. Many contemporary epistemologists take seriously the thesis that epistemic vocabulary is context-sensitive. This thesis is of course a semantic claim, so it has brought epistemologists into contact with work on context in semantics by philosophers of language. This volume brings together the debates, in a set of twelve specially written essays representing the latest work by leading figures (...) in the two fields. All future work on contextualism will start here. Contributors: Kent Bach, Herman Cappelen, Andy Egan, Michael Glanzberg, John Hawthorne, Ernest Lepore, Peter Ludlow, Peter Pagin, Georg Peter, Paul M. Pietroski, Gerhard Preyer, Jonathan Schaffer, Jason Stanley, Brian Weatherson, Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

The ‘friends of temporal parts’ and their opponents disagree about how things persist through time. The former, who hold what is sometimes called a ‘4D’ theory of persistence, typically claim that all objects that last for any period of time are spread out through time in the same way that spatially extended objects are spread out through space — a different part for each region that the object fills. David Lewis calls this manner of persisting ‘perdurance’. The opposing, ‘3D’ theory (...) has it that at least some objects do not persist in this manner; they ‘endure’ through time by ‘being wholly present at more than one time’.1 A related dispute pits ‘presentists’ against ‘non-presentists’. Presentists hold that the only things that really exist are those that exist now, at the present moment; and nonpresentists believe in something like a ‘block-universe’ in which non-simultaneous objects and events nevertheless co-exist (in a tenseless or non-temporal sense). Of late, the relations between these four positions have come under considerable scrutiny.2 As Ned Markosian has pointed out, it would be surprising if commitment to a perdurance or endurance theory of persistence automatically foreclosed one’s options in the presentism—non-presentism debate. But, says Markosian, that is just what the standard formulations of the perdurance and endurance theories imply.3 David Lewis has set the terms of the debate; in his usage, someone who thinks that all persisting objects endure would be said to hold the following. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 165 of the church regularly gives renewed expression to inspiration in constantly new existential contexts. There the Christian churches have sometimes done well, and sometimes less well, leading to disillusionment. We can regard all this as a generally accepted consensus among contemporary theologians, though the instruments of the church's teaching authority often have a tendency to dwell on ' the letter ' of earlier statements and to (...) underestimate their historieal and hermeneutical dimensions" (208). Those in the Magisterium who dwell on 'the letter ' believe, erroneously in Schillebeeckx's judgment, that history can and does give rise to nonnative, enduring facts and forms. Theologians who attend to historical relativizing and hermeneutical theorizing, correctly in Schillebeeckx's judgment, know better. His book is clearly designed to demonstrate this point. There is one sense in which his hook docs not, and indeed cannot, fail, given how the facts which he presents for the reader's judgment arise out of the theory with which he begins and necessarily point to the conclusion which his theory already presupposes. This is a fail-safe method for getting to where one wants to go. Unfortunately, it gets there by way of an enormous detour around the facticity of the Catholic faith and practice, a facticity which, despite the efforts of some of our best known (if not finest) theologians over a two thousand year history, has consistently refused to submit to the hypothetical and the theoretical reason of rationalist theologians. Our faith is centered on the Christ, the incarnate, historical Logos of tradition and Scripture, not on the disincarnate, unhistorical logos of theoretical theology. Schillebeeckx is not the first, nor will he be the last, theologian intent upon reducing the Catholic faith to some hypothetical methodology. Happily, however, and perhaps even miraculously, the Church always manages to survive her theologians, a fact which cannot but offer solace to many of the readers of this book. University of St. Thomas Houston, Texas JOYCE A. Ll'J'TLE The.Argument of the "Tractatus :" Its Relevance to Contempora~·y Theories of Logic, Language. Mind, and Philosophical Trust. By RroHARD M. McDoNOUGH. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Pp. xii + 311. This book attempts an analysis of the Tractatits Logico-Philosophicus based on taking Wittgenstein's professed "fundamental idea' as the hermeneutic key. Tractatus 4.0312 states, in part: "My fundamental idea is 166 BOOK REVIEWS that the 'log·ical constants' are not representatives." McDonough believes that previous interpreters of the Tractatus have either ignored or downplayed the importance of this statement, and he writes in the conviction that taking it seriously produc&s a reading of the Tractatits that is friendlier toward philosophical language and argumentation than " the strong nagativ& views... which have been hastily claimed " as the import of the book (p. 11). In order to establish this "fundamental idea" as an interpretative device McDonough reminds the reader of links among three ideas. The first is the idea that the logical constants are not representatives. The second is the idea that the sole (real) logical constant is the general propositional form (T 5.47). The third is the fact that the status of the propositions of logic as tautologies exhibits the logic of their constituents, and hence, the logical properties of language and the world (T 6.12). By developing the relations among these ideas, and extending them to the interpretation of the Tractatiis as a whole, McDonough aims to show that Wittgenstein is committed to an explicit, only "technically nonsensical," philosophical doctrin& concerning the derivation of general metaphysical facts about ontology from general facts about the philosophy of logic. This doctrine he characterizes as "the argument of th& Tractatus." By attributing to the book an argmnent or doctrine (in the sense just mention &d) he contradicts those commentators who have understood Wittg·enstein to be earnestly requiring real silence about philosophy and to b& asserting seriously that the Tractatu,s is a self-refuting treatise, to be kicked aside. once its lessons are learned. J\1foDonoug·h begins with vVittgenstein's understanding of negation and th& problem wheth&r there are negative facts. McDonough discusses Russell 's attempt to sort this out, and claims that Wittgenstein diagnoses Russell's mistake in this remark; "For it is difficult... (shrink)

Noam Chomsky's engagement with contemporary philosophy from the 1960s onwards has involved lengthy discussion with critics and others on the significance of linguistics for traditional and contemporary philosophy. This chapter draws the background to generative linguistics and shows how Chomsky's real philosophical achievement in this area was to pose an explanatory question that had previously been neglected. Generative grammar as a research field was initiated by Chomsky in the 1950s. Chomsky's cognitive turn was revolutionary, not least because (...) it went against the philosophical grain vis‐a‐vis the role of formalism or logical analysis. P. Strawson had suggested that there is a Homeric struggle between those who favor a formal approach to natural language and those who favor a communicationintention approach. For Chomsky, the proper role of formalism in the realm of natural language is the framing of structural constraints on the consumption and production of language, both of which are cognitive capacities. (shrink)

THIS PAPER ATTEMPTS TO PROVIDE A SYSTEMATIC CHARACTERIZATION OF THE UNDERSTANDING PRESUPPOSED BY PROPOSITIONAL KNOWLEDGE. BEGINNING WITH THE HYPOTHESIS THAT THE UNDERSTANDING UNDERLYING KNOWLEDGE IS LINGUISTIC IN NATURE, A HYPOTHESIS I CALL "LT," I STATE AND CRITICIZE DANTO'S VERSION OF LT, WHICH ANALYZES THIS UNDERSTANDING AS THE UNDERSTANDING OF SENTENCES. I SHOW THAT HIS (INTELLECTUALIZED) VIEW OF WHAT IT IS TO UNDERSTAND LANGUAGE IS INCORRECT. BY DISTINGUISHING A COMPETENCE FROM A PERFORMANCE SENSE OF "UNDERSTANDS "S"," AND BY NOTING THAT (...) LANGUAGE FORMS A SYSTEM, I SHOW THAT WE MUST REPLACE SENTENCE UNDERSTANDING WITH KNOWLEDGE OF RULES OF LANGUAGE. (shrink)

Since the pioneering work by Kripke and Montague, the term possible world has appeared in most theories of formal semantics for modal logics, natural languages, and knowledge-based systems. Yet that term obscures many questions about the relationships between the real world, various models of the world, and descriptions of those models in either formal languages or natural languages. Each step in that progression is an abstraction from the overwhelming complexity of the world. At the end, nothing is left but a (...) colorful metaphor for an undefined element of a set W called worlds, which are related by an undefined and undefinable primitive relation R called accessibility. For some purposes, the resulting abstraction has proved to be useful, but as a general theory of meaning, the abstraction omits too many significant features. So much information has been lost at each step that many philosophers, linguists, and psychologists have dismissed model-theoretic semantics as irrelevant to the study of meaning. This article examines the steps in the process of extractingthe pair (W,R) from the world and the way people talk about the world. It shows that the Kripke worlds can be reinterpreted as part of a Peircean semiotic theory, which can also include contributions from many other studies in cognitive science. Among them are Dunn’s semantics based on laws and facts, the lexical semantics preferred by manylinguists, psychological models of how the world is perceived, and philosophies of science that relate theories to the world. A full integration of all those sources is far beyond the scope of this article, but an outline of the approach suggests that Peirce’s vision is capable of relating and reconciling the competing sources. (shrink)

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This book addresses two basic questions: What is the proper philosophical analysis of the concept of substance? and What kinds of compound substances are there? The second question is mainly addressed by asking what relations among objects are necessary and sufficient for their coming to compose a larger whole. The first 72 pages of the book contain a short history of attempts to answer the first question, and a brief presentation of the analysis the authors defend at length in (...) their earlier book, Substance Among Other Categories. In the remaining 119 pages, the authors take up the second question. This order of presentation makes sense; but it may help to create a false impression in those who only glance at the first few pages—that this book is just a simplified version of the earlier one, with a little bit of history thrown in. It would be quite unfortunate, however, if very many potential readers get this impression; for it might discourage them from looking closely at the bulk of the book, which is new. The issues discussed in the later chapters are at the center of one of the most lively debates in contemporary metaphysics; and the position Hoffman and Rosenkrantz stake out is appealing and carefully articulated. Their views deserve careful attention from philosophers working on the metaphysics of persistence through time, personal identity, artifact identity, and mereology. (shrink)

No word in English is shorter than the word I.' And yet no word is more important in philosophy. When Descartes said I think therefore I am' he produced something that was both about himself and a universal formula. The word I' is called an indexical' because its meaning always depends on who says it. Other examples of indexicals are you,' here,' this' and now.' John Perry discusses how these kinds of words work, and why they express important (...) class='Hi'>philosophical thoughts. He shows that indexicals pose a challenge to traditional assumptions about language and thought. Over the years a number of these papers, now included in this book, have sparked lively debates and have been influential in philosophy, linguistics and other areas of cognitive science. With seven new papers, including the previously unpublished What Are Indexicals?,' the present volume expands on an earlier version of this book published in the early nineties. Also included are the well-known papers Frege on Demonstratives,' Cognitive Significance and New Theories of Reference,' Evading the Slingshot,' The Prince and the Phone booth', Fodor on Psychological Explanations', and related papers on situation semantics, direct reference, and the structure of belief. This book also includes afterwords written by the author that discuss responses to his work by Gareth Evans, Robert Stalnaker, Barbara Partee, Howard Wettstein and others. (shrink)

Knowledge and Lotteries is organized around an epistemological puzzle: in many cases, we seem consistently inclined to deny that we know a certain class of propositions, while crediting ourselves with knowledge of propositions that imply them. In its starkest form, the puzzle is this: we do not think we know that a given lottery ticket will be a loser, yet we normally count ourselves as knowing all sorts of ordinary things that entail that its holder will not suddenly acquire a (...) large fortune. After providing a number of specific and general characterizations of the puzzle, Hawthorne carefully examines the competing merits of candidate solutions. In so doing, he explores a number of central questions concerning the nature and importance of knowledge, including the relationship of knowledge to assertion and practical reasoning, the status of epistemic closure principles, the merits of various brands of scepticism, the prospects for a contextualist account of knowledge, and the potential for other sorts of salience-sensitive accounts. Along the way, he offers a careful treatment of pertinent issues at the foundations of semantics. His book will be of interest to anyone working in the field of epistemology, as well as to philosophers of language. (shrink)

Physical boundaries and the earliest topologists. Topology has a relatively short history; but its 19th century roots are embedded in philosophical problems about the nature of extended substances and their boundaries which go back to Zeno and Aristotle. Although it seems that there have always been philosophers interested in these matters, questions about the boundaries of three-dimensional objects were closest to center stage during the later medieval and modern periods. Are the boundaries of an object actually existing, less-than-three-dimensional parts (...) of the object—that is, are solids bounded by two-dimensional surfaces, surfaces by one-dimensional “edges” or “physical lines”, edges by dimensionless “simples”? If not, how does a perfectly spherical object manage to touch a perfectly flat object—what part of the sphere is in immediate contact with the plane, if the sphere has no unextended parts? But if such parts be admitted, are we not then saddled with “actual infinities” of simples, lines, and surfaces spread throughout each continuous object—the boundaries of all the object’s internal parts? Does it help to say that these internal boundaries exist only “potentially”? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 337-338 [Access article in PDF] On Kimura's Écrits de psychopathologie phénomenologique John Cutting This book is a French translation of six articles that the Japanese psychiatrist, Kimura Bin, wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. There is the usual long introduction in such books by the translator. There is also the mandatory explanation of the whole matter as a postface by philosopher Henry (...) Maldiney as if the meaning of anything these days has to be in the form of a sandwich.The first article by Kimura Bin deals with the meaning of certain Japanese words pertaining to self and inter-subjectivity. The critical Japanese word is aida, which means something like interpersonal bonding and is that primordial state of the human being that founds both everyday sociality and the individual self, the latter both in its external and internal composition and orientation: "From time immemorial, the Japanese understood interpersonal social existence, the being between, life in the aida of itself and of others, as the essential trait of an individual human. The interpersonal aida is in some sense the quintessence of known individuality." Schizophrenia, for Kimura, stems from a disturbance in this aida at the most fundamental level, and all its manifestations follow from this.The second article is entitled "Time and Anxiety (Angoisse)." This sets out his major psychopathological thesis—judging from these six articles—which is that schizophrenia and depressive illness differ fundamentally in their temporality. In schizophrenia the subject is geared toward the future: "Subjects with a schizophrenic tendency give sufficient proof in their daily life of a marked inclination to imagine future possibilities or ideas whose feasibility is impossible or implausible." In depressive illness there is a preoccupation with the past: "The lived time of the melancholic type of person has a preponderance towards the past, or, more precisely, towards lived being up to the present."The third article, entitled "Schizophrenic Temporality," amplifies this thesis and introduces his terminology for these, respectively, as the Latin terms, ante festum and post festum. The French translation gives the meaning of the latter as "apres la fête" and "trop tard"—after the holiday, too late. (I shall deal with the potpourri of languages involved below.) This article is the most elaborate, and in it Kimura attempts to derive the core characteristics of the two nosological entities from these two underlying anomalous temporalities.The fourth article is about borderline states, a nosological entity that I have no sympathy for, and I shall not discuss it.The fifth article is entitled "Reflection and Self in Schizophrenia." Again, it concerns a fundamental difference between the mode of reflection in schizophrenia and that in depressive illness, but I cannot say, despite numerous readings, [End Page 337] that I understand it. The reason for this may be my poor French, an inadequate translation, or a confused formulation in the first place, or all three. The gist of it seems to be that in schizophrenia the "other" is a "stranger" projected by the thinking self, whereas in depressive illness the "other" is a "familiar" inhabitant of the sociality adherent to this condition.The sixth article, "Pathology of Immediateness," is an attempt to seek philosophical, theoretical, psychopathological, and even nosological and biological backing for what Kimura has set out earlier, particularly in the third article. Hegel, Lacan, Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida, and Husserl are brought in as philosophical support. Blankenburg and Binswanger provide psychopathological backing. A third prong is the nosological tradition, prevalent in Germany and Japan in the twentieth century, of promoting the concept of an atypical or third type of psychosis with a biological resemblance to epileptic psychosis. All this is then brought together and complicated by a discussion of language and 'mediation' to support the notion that there is a third psychopathological principle—in addition to the ante festum pertaining to schizophrenia and the post festum pertaining to depressive illness—which is that of an intra festum: a preoccupation with the now, characteristic of atypical psychoses with an epileptic basis.These articles tax one's linguistic and conceptual repertoire to the... (shrink)

This is a volume of original essays on key aspects of John Searle's philosophy of language. It examines Searle's work in relation to current issues of central significance, including internalism versus externalism about mental and linguistic content, truth-conditional versus non-truth-conditional conceptions of content, the relative priorities of thought and language in the explanation of intentionality, the status of the distinction between force and sense in the theory of meaning, the issue of meaning scepticism in relation to rule-following, (...) and the proper characterization of ‘what is said’ in relation to the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Written by a distinguished team of contemporary philosophers, and prefaced by an illuminating essay by Searle, the volume aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of Searle's work in philosophy of language, and to suggest innovative approaches to fundamental questions in that area. (shrink)

Late in his life, Hans-Georg Gadamer was asked to explain what the universal aspect of hermeneutics consisted in, and he replied, enigmatically, “in the _verbum interius_.” Gadamer devoted a pivotal section of his magnum opus, _Truth and Method_, to this Augustinian concept, and subsequently pointed to it as a kind of passkey to his thought. It remains, however, both in its origins and its interpretations, a mysterious concept. From out of its layered history, it remains a provocation to thought, expressing (...) something about the relation of language and understanding that has yet to be fully worked out. The scholastic idea of a word that is fully formed in the mind but not articulated served Augustine as an analogy for the procession of the Trinity, and served Thomas Aquinas as an analogy for the procession between divine ideas and human thought. Gadamer turned the analogy on its head by using the verbum interius to explain the obscure relation between language and human understanding. His learned interpretation of the idea of the inner word through Neoplatonism, Lutheranism, idealism, and historicism may seem nearly as complex as the medieval source texts he consulted and construed in his exegesis, but the profoundity of his insights are unquestioned. In unpacking Gadamer's interpretive feat, John Arthos provides an overview of the philosophy of the logos out of which the _verbum interius_ emerged. He summarizes the development of the _verbum _in ancient and medieval doctrine, traces its path through German thought, and explains its relevance to modern hermeneutic theory. His work unfolds in two parts, as an expansive intellectual history and as a close analysis and commentary on source texts on the inner word, from Augustine to Gadamer. As such, this book serves as an indispensable guide and reference for hermeneutics and the intellectual traditions out of which it arose, as well as an original theoretical statement in its own right. “Consummately researched, lucidly written, and persuasively argued throughout, __The Inner Word_ _succeeds brilliantly in bringing to light this neglected but pivotal matter in Gadamer’s work. Arthos is learned in the best ‘humanist’ way, for he succeeds in creating something new of his own that will speak eloquently to all of us.” —_Walter Jost, University of Virginia_ “Gadamer suggests that the Christian idea of incarnation is a key to his hermeneutics, but does not explain his position in a detailed or systematic manner. Arthos brings his considerable knowledge of hermeneutics and rhetoric to bear on Gadamer's insight, recounting the rich intellectual history to which Gadamer gestures, and providing an extended and detailed exegesis of this pivotal point in the third part of _Truth and Method_. Gadamer's account of 'linguisticality,' Arthos explains, can best be understood through his use of a complex metaphor—the ‘inner word.’ Arthos matches his erudition with clear and clean prose, and his account exemplifies, rather than just describes, Gadamer's hermeneutical philosophy. Any scholar interested in Gadamer's philosophy should have this book on his or her shelf.” —_Francis J. Mootz III, William S. Boyd Professor of Law, William S. Boyd School of Law_ “Arthos's strength lies for me in his careful reading of the sources. He effectively commands the literature on the subject. This work shows in a sophisticated way the legacy of trinitarian theology for philosophical hermeneutics. The very complex task of illuminating the phenomenon of the _verbum interius _and indicating its centrality for philosophical hermeneutics is accomplished by John Arthos with great sensitivity to the subject matter.” —_Andrzej Wiercinski, The International Institute for Hermeneutics_. (shrink)

The syllogistic figures and moods can be taken to be argument schemata as can the rules of the Stoic propositional logic. Sentence schemata have been used in axiomatizations of logic only since the landmark 1927 von Neumann paper [31]. Modern philosophers know the role of schemata in explications of the semantic conception of truth through Tarski’s 1933 Convention T [42]. Mathematical logicians recognize the role of schemata in first-order number theory where Peano’s second-order Induction Axiom is approximated by Herbrand’s Induction-Axiom (...) Schema [23]. Similarly, in first-order set theory, Zermelo’s second-order Separation Axiom is approximated by Fraenkel’s first-order Separation Schema [17]. In some of several closely related senses, a schema is a complex system having multiple components one of which is a template-text or scheme-template, a syntactic string composed of one or more “blanks” and also possibly significant words and/or symbols. In accordance with a side condition the template-text of a schema is used as a “template” to specify a multitude, often infinite, of linguistic expressions such as phrases, sentences, or argument-texts, called instances of the schema. The side condition is a second component. The collection of instances may but need not be regarded as a third component. The instances are almost always considered to come from a previously identified language (whether formal or natural), which is often considered to be another component. This article reviews the often-conflicting uses of the expressions ‘schema’ and ‘scheme’ in the literature of logic. It discusses the different definitions presupposed by those uses. And it examines the ontological and epistemic presuppositions circumvented or mooted by the use of schemata, as well as the ontological and epistemic presuppositions engendered by their use. In short, this paper is an introduction to the history and philosophy of schemata. (shrink)

This paper examines the mind and language of an omniscient being from a supervaluationist perspective. Two questions hall receive special attention. How ought the supervaluationist explicate the concept of omniscience? And what ought the supervaluationist expect an omniscient speaker to say about a Sorites series?

The five English words—sentence, proposition, judgment, statement, and fact—are central to coherent discussion in logic. However, each is ambiguous in that logicians use each with multiple normal meanings. Several of their meanings are vague in the sense of admitting borderline cases. In the course of displaying and describing the phenomena discussed using these words, this paper juxtaposes, distinguishes, and analyzes several senses of these and related words, focusing on a constellation of recommended senses. One of the purposes of this paper (...) is to demonstrate that ordinary English properly used has the resources for intricate and philosophically sound investigation of rather deep issues in logic and philosophy of language. No mathematical, logical, or linguistic symbols are used. Meanings need to be identified and clarified before being expressed in symbols. We hope to establish that clarity is served by deferring the extensive use of formalized or logically perfect languages until a solid “informal” foundation has been established. Questions of “ontological status”—e.g., whether propositions or sentences, or for that matter characters, numbers, truth-values, or instants, are “real entities”, are “idealizations”, or are “theoretical constructs”—plays no role in this paper. As is suggested by the title, this paper is written to be read aloud. -/- I hope that reading this aloud in groups will unite people in the enjoyment of the humanistic spirit of analytic philosophy. (shrink)