Attitudes de Se


Book Description

"De se statements are emphatic assertions in which speakers make fundamental claims about either themselves or others. In English, they are usually conveyed via "I" statements or third person reflexive pronouns, e.g. "she herself," "he himself." De seattitudes appear often in our day-to-day lives, but they also pose a series of challenging problems for both linguists and philosophers. This interdisciplinary volume teases out what de se attitudes connote linguistically and also what these statements reveal about how humans think about themselves and how they understand the world around them. "--




Expressing Our Attitudes


Book Description

Expressing Our Attitudes pulls together over a decade of work by Mark Schroeder, one of the leading figures in contemporary metaethics. He weaves treatments of propositions, truth, and the attitudes together within an expressivist framework. Two of the essays are new, and the introduction provides a map to reading the volume as a unified argument.




A Companion to the Philosophy of Language


Book Description

“Providing up-to-date, in-depth coverage of the central question, and written and edited by some of the foremost practitioners in the field, this timely new edition will no doubt be a go-to reference for anyone with a serious interest in the philosophy of language.” Kathrin Glüer-Pagin, Stockholm University Now published in two volumes, the second edition of the best-selling Companion to the Philosophy of Language provides a complete survey of contemporary philosophy of language. The Companion has been greatly extended and now includes a monumental 17 new essays – with topics chosen by the editors, who curated suggestions from current contributors – and almost all of the 25 original chapters have been updated to take account of recent developments in the field. In addition to providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts, and debates, each essay introduces new and original contributions to ongoing debates, as well as addressing a number of new areas of interest, including two-dimensional semantics, modality and epistemic modals, and semantic relationism. The extended “state-of-the-art” chapter format allows the authors, all of whom are internationally eminent scholars in the field, to incorporate original research to a far greater degree than competitor volumes. Unrivaled in scope, this volume represents the best contemporary critical thinking relating to the philosophy of language.




Language, Mind, and Knowledge


Book Description

Language, Mind, and Knowledge was first published in 1975. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This is Volume VII of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, a series published in cooperation with the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota and edited by Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell. Professor Maxwell is the present director of the Center. Some of the papers in this volume were presented at or grew out of a conference on the philosophy of language which was held at the Center under the direction of Professor Gunderson. Others were written independently. The aim of the book, like that of the conference, is to assemble a wide variety of approaches to issues in the philosophy of language with emphasis on the ways in which the issues involved have bearing on other matters such as linguistic theory, cognitive psychology, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology. There are twelve papers by eleven contributors: "Languages and Language" by David Lewis; "Logic and Language: An Examination of Recent Criticisms of Internationalism" by Jerrold J. Katz; "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" by Hilary Putnam; "Reference and Context" by Charles Chastain; "Language, Thought, and Communication" by Gilbert Harman; "Knowledge of Language" by Noam Chomsky; "Language, Rules, and Complex Behavior" by Michael D. Root; "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts" by John R. Searle; "On What We Know" by Zeno Vendler; "Vendler on Knowledge and Belief" by Bruce Aune; "Reply to Professor Aune" by Zeno Vendler; "Brain Writing and Mind Reading" by D.C. Dennett.




Assessment Sensitivity


Book Description

John MacFarlane debates how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative, and how we might use this idea to give satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis. Although there is a substantial philosophical literature on relativism about truth, going back to Plato's Theaetetus, this literature (both pro and con) has tended to focus on refutations of the doctrine, or refutations of these refutations, at the expense of saying clearly what the doctrine is. In contrast, Assessment Sensitivity begins with a clear account of what it is to be a relativist about truth, and uses this view to give satisfying accounts of what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do. The book seeks to provide a richer framework for the description of linguistic practices than standard truth-conditional semantics affords: one that allows not just standard contextual sensitivity (sensitivity to features of the context in which an expression is used), but assessment sensitivity (sensitivity to features of the context from which a use of an expression is assessed). The Context and Content series is a forum for outstanding original research at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. The general editor is Francois Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris).




Reference and Representation in Thought and Language


Book Description

This volume offers novel views on the precise relation between reference to an object by means of a linguistic expression and our mental representation of that object, long a source of debate in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and cognitive science. Chapters in this volume deal with our devices for singular reference and singular representation, with most focusing on linguistic expressions that are used to refer to particular objects, persons, or places. These expressions include proper names such as Mary and John; indexicals such as I and tomorrow; demonstrative pronouns such as this and that; and some definite and indefinite descriptions such as The Queen of England or a medical doctor. Other chapters examine the ways we represent objects in thought, particularly the first-person perspective and the self, and one explores a notion common to reference and representation: salience. The volume includes the latest views on these complex topics from some of the most prominent authors in the field and will be of interest to anyone working on issues of reference and representation in thought and language.




Mental Actions


Book Description

This volume investigates the neglected topic of mental action, and shows its importance for the metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology of mind. Twelve specially written essays address such questions as the following: Which phenomena should we count as mental actions — imagining, remembering, judging, for instance? How should we explain our knowledge of our mental actions, and what light does that throw on self-knowledge in general? What contributions do mental actions make to our consciousness? What is the relationship between the voluntary and the active, in the mental sphere? What are the similarities and differences between mental and physical action, and what can we learn about each from the other?




Mental Files


Book Description

François Recanati presents his theory of mental files, a new way of understanding reference in language and thought. Linguistic expressions inherit their reference from the files that we associate with them, which are classified according to their function, which is to store information derived through certain types of relation to objects.




Beyond Meaning: A Journey Across Language, Perception and Experience


Book Description

Natural languages – idioms such as English and Cantonese, Zulu and Amharic, Basque and Nicaraguan Sign Language – allow their speakers to convey meaning and transmit meaning to one another. But what is meaning exactly? What is this thing that words convey and speakers communicate? Few questions are as elusive as this. Yet, few features are as essential to who we are and what we do as human beings as the capacity to convey meaning through language. In this book, Gaetano Fiorin and Denis Delfitto disclose a notion of linguistic meaning that is structured around three distinct, yet interconnected dimensions: a linguistic dimension, relating meaning to the linguistic forms that convey it; a material dimension, relating meaning to the material and social conditions of its environment; and a psychological dimension, relating meaning to the cognitive lives of its users. By paying special attention to the puzzle surrounding first-person reference – the way speakers exploit language to refer to themselves – and by capitalizing on a number of recent findings in the cognitive sciences, Fiorin and Delfitto develop the original hypothesis that meaningful language shares the same underlying logical and metaphysical structure of sense perception, effectively acting as a system of classification and discrimination at the interface between cognitive agents and their ecologies.




The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Reference


Book Description

This Handbook offers students and more advanced readers a valuable resource for understanding linguistic reference; the relation between an expression (word, phrase, sentence) and what that expression is about. The volume’s forty-one original chapters, written by many of today’s leading philosophers of language, are organized into ten parts: I Early Descriptive Theories II Causal Theories of Reference III Causal Theories and Cognitive Significance IV Alternate Theories V Two-Dimensional Semantics VI Natural Kind Terms and Rigidity VII The Empty Case VIII Singular (De Re) Thoughts IX Indexicals X Epistemology of Reference Contributions consider what kinds of expressions actually refer (names, general terms, indexicals, empty terms, sentences), what referring expressions refer to, what makes an expression refer to whatever it does, connections between meaning and reference, and how we know facts about reference. Many contributions also develop connections between linguistic reference and issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.