Russell's Theory of Descriptions
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
The Meaning of Language
01:615:201 Introduction to Linguistic Theory Adam Szczegielniak The Meaning of Language Copyright in part: Cengage learning The Meaning of Language • When you know a language you know: • When a word is meaningful or meaningless, when a word has two meanings, when two words have the same meaning, and what words refer to (in the real world or imagination) • When a sentence is meaningful or meaningless, when a sentence has two meanings, when two sentences have the same meaning, and whether a sentence is true or false (the truth conditions of the sentence) • Semantics is the study of the meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences – Lexical semantics: the meaning of words and the relationships among words – Phrasal or sentential semantics: the meaning of syntactic units larger than one word Truth • Compositional semantics: formulating semantic rules that build the meaning of a sentence based on the meaning of the words and how they combine – Also known as truth-conditional semantics because the speaker’ s knowledge of truth conditions is central Truth • If you know the meaning of a sentence, you can determine under what conditions it is true or false – You don’ t need to know whether or not a sentence is true or false to understand it, so knowing the meaning of a sentence means knowing under what circumstances it would be true or false • Most sentences are true or false depending on the situation – But some sentences are always true (tautologies) – And some are always false (contradictions) Entailment and Related Notions • Entailment: one sentence entails another if whenever the first sentence is true the second one must be true also Jack swims beautifully. -
David Lewis on Convention
David Lewis on Convention Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone Center for Cognitive Science Rutgers University David Lewis’s landmark Convention starts its exploration of the notion of a convention with a brilliant insight: we need a distinctive social competence to solve coordination problems. Convention, for Lewis, is the canonical form that this social competence takes when it is grounded in agents’ knowledge and experience of one another’s self-consciously flexible behavior. Lewis meant for his theory to describe a wide range of cultural devices we use to act together effectively; but he was particularly concerned in applying this notion to make sense of our knowledge of meaning. In this chapter, we give an overview of Lewis’s theory of convention, and explore its implications for linguistic theory, and especially for problems at the interface of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. In §1, we discuss Lewis’s understanding of coordination problems, emphasizing how coordination allows for a uniform characterization of practical activity and of signaling in communication. In §2, we introduce Lewis’s account of convention and show how he uses it to make sense of the idea that a linguistic expression can come to be associated with its meaning by a convention. Lewis’s account has come in for a lot of criticism, and we close in §3 by addressing some of the key difficulties in thinking of meaning as conventional in Lewis’s sense. The critical literature on Lewis’s account of convention is much wider than we can fully survey in this chapter, and so we recommend for a discussion of convention as a more general phenomenon Rescorla (2011). -
Puzzles About Descriptive Names Edward Kanterian
Puzzles about descriptive names Edward Kanterian To cite this version: Edward Kanterian. Puzzles about descriptive names. Linguistics and Philosophy, Springer Verlag, 2010, 32 (4), pp.409-428. 10.1007/s10988-010-9066-1. hal-00566732 HAL Id: hal-00566732 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00566732 Submitted on 17 Feb 2011 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Linguist and Philos (2009) 32:409–428 DOI 10.1007/s10988-010-9066-1 RESEARCH ARTICLE Puzzles about descriptive names Edward Kanterian Published online: 17 February 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Abstract This article explores Gareth Evans’s idea that there are such things as descriptive names, i.e. referring expressions introduced by a definite description which have, unlike ordinary names, a descriptive content. Several ignored semantic and modal aspects of this idea are spelled out, including a hitherto little explored notion of rigidity, super-rigidity. The claim that descriptive names are (rigidified) descriptions, or abbreviations thereof, is rejected. It is then shown that Evans’s theory leads to certain puzzles concerning the referential status of descriptive names and the evaluation of identity statements containing them. -
Lewis on Conventions and Meaning
Lewis on conventions and meaning phil 93914 Jeff Speaks April 3, 2008 Lewis (1975) takes the conventions in terms of which meaning can be analyzed to be conventions of truthfulness and trust in a language. His account may be adapted to state an analysis of a sentence having a given meaning in a population as follows: x means p in a population G≡df (1a) ordinarily, if a member of G utters x, the speaker believes p, (1b) ordinarily, if a member of G hears an utterance of x, he comes to believe p, unless he already believed this, (2) members of G believe that (1a) and (1b) are true, (3) the expectation that (1a) and (1b) will continue to be true gives members of G a good reason to continue to utter x only if they believe p, and to expect the same of other members of G, (4) there is among the members of G a general preference for people to continue to conform to regularities (1a) and (1b) (5) there is an alternative regularity to (1a) and (1b) which is such that its being generally conformed to by some members of G would give other speakers reason to conform to it (6) all of these facts are mutually known by members of G Some objections: • Clause (5) should be dropped, because, as Burge (1975) argued, this clause makes Lewis's conditions on linguistic meaning too strong. Burge pointed out that (5) need not be mutually known by speakers for them to speak a meaningful language. Consider, for example, the case in which speakers believe that there is no possible language other than their own, and hence that there is no alternative regularity to (1a) and (1b). -
The Theory of Descriptions 1. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970): Mathematician, Logician, and Philosopher
Louis deRosset { Spring 2019 Russell: The Theory of Descriptions 1. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970): mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He's one of the founders of analytic philosophy. \On Denoting" is a founding document of analytic philosophy. It is a paradigm of philosophical analysis. An analysis of a concept/phenomenon c: a recipe for eliminating c-vocabulary from our theories which still captures all of the facts the c-vocabulary targets. FOR EXAMPLE: \The Name View Analysis of Identity." 2. Russell's target: Denoting Phrases By a \denoting phrase" I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England, the present King of France, the centre of mass of the Solar System at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round the earth. (479) Includes: • universals: \all F 's" (\each"/\every") • existentials: \some F " (\at least one") • indefinite descriptions: \an F " • definite descriptions: \the F " Later additions: • negative existentials: \no F 's" (480) • Genitives: \my F " (\your"/\their"/\Joe's"/etc.) (484) • Empty Proper Names: \Apollo", \Hamlet", etc. (491) Russell proposes to analyze denoting phrases. 3. Why Analyze Denoting Phrases? Russell's Project: The distinction between acquaintance and knowledge about is the distinction between the things we have presentation of, and the things we only reach by means of denoting phrases. [. ] In perception we have acquaintance with the objects of perception, and in thought we have acquaintance with objects of a more abstract logical character; but we do not necessarily have acquaintance with the objects denoted by phrases composed of words with whose meanings we are ac- quainted. -
A New Logic for Uncertainty
A New Logic for Uncertainty ∗ LUO Maokang and HE Wei† Institute of Mathematics Institute of Mathematics Sichuan University Nanjing Normal University Chengdu, 610064 Nanjing, 210046 P.R.China P.R.China Abstract Fuzziness and randomicity widespread exist in natural science, engineering, technology and social science. The purpose of this paper is to present a new logic - uncertain propositional logic which can deal with both fuzziness by taking truth value semantics and randomicity by taking probabilistic semantics or possibility semantics. As the first step for purpose of establishing a logic system which completely reflect the uncertainty of the objective world, this logic will lead to a set of logical foundations for uncertainty theory as what classical logic done in certain or definite situations or circumstances. Keywords: Fuzziness; randomicity; UL-algebra; uncertain propositional logic. Mathematics Subject Classifications(2000): 03B60. 1 Introduction As one of the most important and one of the most widely used concepts in the whole area of modern academic or technologic research, uncertainty has been involved into study and applications more than twenty years. Now along with the quickly expanding requirements of developments of science and technology, people are having to face and deal with more and more problems tangled with uncertainty in the fields of natural science, engineering or technology or even in social science. To these uncertain prob- arXiv:1506.03123v1 [math.LO] 9 Jun 2015 lems, many traditional theories and methods based on certain conditions or certain circumstances are not so effective and powerful as them in the past. So the importance of research on uncertainty is emerging more and more obviously and imminently. -
What Is Philosophy.Pdf
I N T R O D U C T I O N What Is Philosophy? CHAPTER 1 The Task of Philosophy CHAPTER OBJECTIVES Reflection—thinking things over—. [is] the beginning of philosophy.1 In this chapter we will address the following questions: N What Does “Philosophy” Mean? N Why Do We Need Philosophy? N What Are the Traditional Branches of Philosophy? N Is There a Basic Method of Philo- sophical Thinking? N How May Philosophy Be Used? N Is Philosophy of Education Useful? N What Is Happening in Philosophy Today? The Meanings Each of us has a philos- “having” and “doing”—cannot be treated en- ophy, even though we tirely independent of each other, for if we did of Philosophy may not be aware of not have a philosophy in the formal, personal it. We all have some sense, then we could not do a philosophy in the ideas concerning physical objects, our fellow critical, reflective sense. persons, the meaning of life, death, God, right Having a philosophy, however, is not suffi- and wrong, beauty and ugliness, and the like. Of cient for doing philosophy. A genuine philo- course, these ideas are acquired in a variety sophical attitude is searching and critical; it is of ways, and they may be vague and confused. open-minded and tolerant—willing to look at all We are continuously engaged, especially during sides of an issue without prejudice. To philoso- the early years of our lives, in acquiring views phize is not merely to read and know philoso- and attitudes from our family, from friends, and phy; there are skills of argumentation to be mas- from various other individuals and groups. -
Florensky and Frank
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE Po zn ań skie Studia Teologiczne Tom 22, 2008 ADAM DROZDEK Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Defying Rationality: Florensky and Frank Przezwyciężyć racjonalność: Fiorenski i Frank What should be the basis of knowledge in theological matters? The question has been pondered upon by theologians for centuries and not a few proposals were made. One of these was made by the Orthodox priest and scientist Pavel Florensky in The pillar and ground of the truth (1914) considered to be the most original and influen tial work of the Russian religious renaissance1, marking “the beginning of a new era in Russian theology”2 and even “one of the most significant accomplishments of ec clesiastical thinking in the twentieth century”3. Proposals made in a work deemed to be so important certainly arrest attention. I. THE LAW OF IDENTITY A centerpiece of rationalism, according to Florensky, is the law of identity, A = A, which is the source of powerlessness of rational reasoning. “The law A = A be comes a completely empty schema of self-affirmation” so that “I = I turns out to be ... a cry of naked egotism: ‘I!’ For where there is no difference, there can be no con- 1 R. Slesinski, Pavel Florensky: a metaphysics o f love, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press 1984, 22. 2 N. Zernov, The Russian religious renaissance of the twentieth century, London: Darton, Longman & Todd 1963, 101. 3 M. Silberer, Die Trinitatsidee im Werk von Pavel A. Florenskij: Versuch einer systematischen Darstellung in Begegnung mit Thomas von Aquin, Wtirzburg: Augustinus-Verlag 1984, 254. -
Russell's Theory of Descriptions
Russell’s theory of descriptions September 23, 2004 1 Propositions and propositional functions . 1 2 Descriptions and names . 3 2.1 Indefinite descriptions do not stand for particular objects in the same waynamesdo ............................... 3 2.2 Three puzzles caused by the assimilation of definite descriptions to names . 4 2.2.1 The problem of negative existentials . 4 2.2.2 Substitution failures . 5 2.2.3 The law of the excluded middle . 5 2.3 The distinction between primary and secondary occurrence . 5 3 Russell’s theory of descriptions . 6 3.1 Indefinite descriptions . 6 3.2 Definite descriptions . 6 3.3 ‘Everyone’, ‘someone’ . 7 3.4 Strengths of Russell’s theory . 7 4 Objections to Russell’s theory . 7 4.1 Incomplete definite descriptions . 7 4.2 Other uses of ‘the’: generics . 7 4.3 The view that sentences containing descriptions say something about propositional functions . 8 5 Russell’s view of names . 8 6 The metaphysical importance of Russell’s theory . 8 1 Propositions and propositional functions Russell (unlike contemporary theorists) means by ‘proposition’, as he puts it, “pri- marily a form of words which expresses what is either true or false.” Roughly, then, ‘propositions’ in Russell refers to ‘declarative sentences.’ Propositional functions are something else: “A ‘propositional function,’ in fact, is an expression containing one or more undetermined constituents, such that, when values are assigned to 1 these constituents, the expression becomes a proposition. Examples of propositional functions are easy to give: “x is human” is a propositional function; so long as x remains undetermined, it is neither true nor false, but when a value is assigned to x it becomes a true or false proposition.” (An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, pp. -
Overturning the Paradigm of Identity with Gilles Deleuze's Differential
A Thesis entitled Difference Over Identity: Overturning the Paradigm of Identity With Gilles Deleuze’s Differential Ontology by Matthew G. Eckel Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy Dr. Ammon Allred, Committee Chair Dr. Benjamin Grazzini, Committee Member Dr. Benjamin Pryor, Committee Member Dr. Patricia R. Komuniecki, Dean College of Graduate Studies The University of Toledo May 2014 An Abstract of Difference Over Identity: Overturning the Paradigm of Identity With Gilles Deleuze’s Differential Ontology by Matthew G. Eckel Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy The University of Toledo May 2014 Taking Gilles Deleuze to be a philosopher who is most concerned with articulating a ‘philosophy of difference’, Deleuze’s thought represents a fundamental shift in the history of philosophy, a shift which asserts ontological difference as independent of any prior ontological identity, even going as far as suggesting that identity is only possible when grounded by difference. Deleuze reconstructs a ‘minor’ history of philosophy, mobilizing thinkers from Spinoza and Nietzsche to Duns Scotus and Bergson, in his attempt to assert that philosophy has always been, underneath its canonical manifestations, a project concerned with ontology, and that ontological difference deserves the kind of philosophical attention, and privilege, which ontological identity has been given since Aristotle. -
Why Major in Linguistics (And What Does a Linguist Do)? by Monica Macaulay and Kristen Syrett
1 Why Major in Linguistics (and what does a linguist do)? by Monica Macaulay and Kristen Syrett What is linguistics? Speakers of all languages know a lot about their languages, usually without knowing that they know If you are considering becoming a linguistics it. For example, as a speaker of English, you major, you probably know something about the possess knowledge about English word order. field of linguistics already. However, you may find Perhaps without even knowing it, you understand it hard to answer people who ask you, "What that Sarah admires the teacher is grammatical, exactly is linguistics, and what does a linguist do?" while Admires Sarah teacher the is not, and also They might assume that it means you speak a lot of that The teacher admires Sarah means something languages. And they may be right: you may, in entirely different. You know that when you ask a fact, be a polyglot! But while many linguists do yes-no question, you may reverse the order of speak multiple languages—or at least know a fair words at the beginning of the sentence and that the bit about multiple languages—the study of pitch of your voice goes up at the end of the linguistics means much more than this. sentence (for example, in Are you going?). Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and However, if you speak French, you might add est- many topics are studied under this umbrella. At the ce que at the beginning, and if you know American heart of linguistics is the search for the unconscious knowledge that humans have about language and how it is that children acquire it, an understanding of the structure of language in general and of particular languages, knowledge about how languages vary, and how language influences the way in which we interact with each other and think about the world. -
Totalitarian (In)Experience in Literary Works and Their Translations
Totalitarian (In)Experience in Literary Works and Their Translations Totalitarian (In)Experience in Literary Works and Their Translations: Between East and West By Bartłomiej Biegajło Siedlce University, Faculty of Humanities Totalitarian (In)Experience in Literary Works and Their Translations: Between East and West By Bartłomiej Biegajło This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Bartłomiej Biegajło All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-1184-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-1184-2 To my wife Joanna for her boundless patience TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Preface ......................................................................................................... x Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Introductory Preliminaries 1.1 Why ‘attention’ matters? ................................................................. 3 1.2 The importance of linguistic universalism .................................... 10 1.3 NSM explications