This book provides a fascinating analysis of the idea of what can't be said. As the author states, he cannot tell us directly what it is that can't be said, but he can tell us a lot about what can't be said. The book ascertains whether the notion of there being a truth, or a state of affairs, or knowledge that can't be expressed linguistically is a coherent notion and the author distinguishes different senses in which it might be said that something can't be said. The first part looks at the question of whether ineffability is a coherent idea. Part two evaluates two families of arguments regarding whether ineffable states of affairs actually exist: the argument from mysticism and the argument from epistemic boundedness. Part three looks more closely at the relation between mystic and non-mystic stances. In the fourth and final part the author distinguishes five qualitatively different types of ineffability. Ineffability and Philosophy is a significant contribution to this area of research and will be essential reading for philosophers and those researching and studying the philosophy of language.

Is it possible to quantify over absolutely all there is? Or must all of our quantifiers range over a less-than-all-inclusive domain? It has commonly been thought that the question of absolute generality is intimately connected with the set-theoretic antinomies. But the topic of absolute generality has enjoyed a surge of interest in recent years. It has become increasingly apparent that its ramifications extend well beyond the foundations of set theory. Connections include semantic indeterminacy, logical consequence, higher-order languages, and metaphysics. Rayo and Uzquiano present for the first time a collection of essays on absolute generality. These newly commissioned articles - written by an impressive array of international scholars - draw the reader into the forefront of contemporary research on the subject. The volume represents a variety of approaches to the problem, with some of the contributions arguing for the possibility of all-inclusive quantification and some of them arguing against it. An introduction by the editors draws a helpful map of the philosophical terrain.

Ecological thinking has in recent years come a long way from its origins in biology, to become a new paradigm within many disciplines. Its approach is holistic, and focuses on dynamic, interactive systems and the interrelationships between the object of study and its context. The author demonstrates how adopting such an ecological perspective fundamentally changes our understanding of human language, and calls into question a number of assumptions: that language is rule-governed, for example, or that it represents a distinctive form of knowledge. From an ecological point of view, language is inseparable from all expressions of human sociality, such as communication, culture, and community. Arising from this perspective are key concepts, such as patterning, predictability, and creativity, which the author suggests as the basis of a very different approach to linguistics. Linguists, along with everyone interested in the many facets of meaningful human behavior, will find the ideas presented here both stimulating and challenging. Furthermore, an ecological framework supersedes the distinction between theoretical and applied linguistics, and the book is specifically addressed to language practitioners of all kinds, for whom an ecological view of language is particularly relevant.

This book explores the gap that has developed between two sides in linguistics: the formal tradition and the functional tradition. It discusses fundamental issues such as tense, aspect and action by examining and comparing insights from the two traditions with a view to determining whether there are any possibilities of future bride-building between the two approaches. This study focuses on comparing the actual output of different linguistic approaches and examines their 'usefulness'. A major aim is, therefore, to evaluate and identify the most useful approach.

"Meaning" brings together some of the most significant philosophical work on linguistic representation and understanding, presenting canonical essays on core questions in the philosophy of language.

This anthology includes classic articles by key figures such as Frege, Quine, Putnam, Kripke, and Davidson; and recent reactions to this work by philosophers including Mark Wilson, Scott Soames, James Higginbotham, and Frank Jackson. Topics discussed include analyticity; translational indeterminacy; theories of reference; meaning as use; the nature of linguistic competence; truth and meaning; and relations between semantics and metaphysics. An extensive introduction gives an overview and detailed critical evaluation of the seminal views and arguments represented in the anthology. Meaning is an ideal text for courses in philosophy of language and semantics.

Die behoefte aan 'n publikasie soos die het voortgekom vanuit 'n besef van die omvang van die geknelde situasie waarin Afrikaans hom op die oomblik bevind as gevolg van die drastiese verkleining van sy gebruiksfeer. Van 'n taal wat byvoorbeeld 'n dekade gelede nog een van twee amptelike tale van die land was, met al die ontwikkelingsgeleenthede wat normaalweg tot 'n amptelike taal se beskikking is as gevolg van die blootstelling daarvan aan telkens nuwe situasies waarvoor nuwe terminologie en taalregisters geskep moet word, het dit een van die elf amptelike tale geword, 'n geselskap waarin hy hom prakties in 'n tweede liga saam met nege ander tale bevind ("die inheemses"), terwyl sy voormalige kollega, Engels ("die internasionale"), oor 'n liga van sy eie beskik, een waarin dit die leeueaandeel van die staatlike funksies behartig, met al die ontwikkelingsmoontlikhede wat daarmee gepaard gaan.

Translated by:
Sean Ward

Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Assumptions and Methodology
3. Linguistic preliminaries
4. Incongruity and its Resolution
5. Two Models of Incongruity-Resolution
6. The General Theory of Verbal Humour
7. Joke Similarity and Identity
8. Manipulating Interpretations
9. The Structure of Puns
10. Some Computational Studies
11. Pragmatic and Discourse Issues
12. Speculations on Joke Structure
13. Future Directions

What is philosophy about and what are its methods? Philosophy and Ordinary Language is a defence of the view that philosophy is largely about questions of language, which to a large extent means ordinary language. Some people argue that if philosophy is about ordinary language, then it is necessarily less deep and difficult than it is usually taken to be but Oswald Hanfling shows us that this isn't true.
Hanfling, a leading expert in the development of analytic philosophy, covers a wide range of topics, including scepticism and the definition of knowledge, free will, empiricism, folk psychology, ordinary versus artificial logic, and philosophy versus science. Drawing on philosophers such as Austin, Wittgenstein, and Quine, this book explores the nature of ordinary language in philosophy.

This interesting and provocative work develops a new theological approach to language in the light of contemporary critical theory.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203380797

New Media Language brings leading media figures and scholars together to debate the shifting relations between today's media and contemporary language.
From newspapers and television to email, the internet and text messaging, there are ever increasing media conduits for the news. This book investigates how developments in world media have affected, and been affected by, language. Exploring a wide range of topics, from the globalization of communication to the vocabulary of terrorism and the language used in the wake of September 11, New Media Language looks at the important and wide-ranging implications of these changes. From Malcolm Gluck on wine writing to Naomi Baron on email, the authors provide authoritative and engaging insights into the ways in which language is changing, and in turn, changes us.
With a foreword by Simon Jenkins, New Media Language is essential reading for anyone with an interest in today's complex and expanding media.

New Media Language brings leading media figures and scholars together to debate the shifting relations between today's media and contemporary language.
From newspapers and television to email, the internet and text messaging, there are ever increasing media conduits for the news. This book investigates how developments in world media have affected, and been affected by, language. Exploring a wide range of topics, from the globalization of communication to the vocabulary of terrorism and the language used in the wake of September 11, New Media Language looks at the important and wide-ranging implications of these changes. From Malcolm Gluck on wine writing to Naomi Baron on email, the authors provide authoritative and engaging insights into the ways in which language is changing, and in turn, changes us.
With a foreword by Simon Jenkins, New Media Language is essential reading for anyone with an interest in today's complex and expanding media.

In this book Eli Hirsch identifies and explores a `new' philosophical problem. Hirsch calls this new problem `the division problem'. This is defined as the problem of explaining why our language divides up reality in one way rather than another, or what the rational basis is for our language to contain certain kinds of general words rather than others. Hirsch shows that a language can be constructed which describes reality in ways we would find absurdly irrational, for example by classifying normally disparate items under the same general term. Having demonstrated that this newly identified problem is in fact a serious one which cannot be easily solved or brushed aside, Hirsch offers his own suggestions for a possible solution.

Contents:
Introduction. 1. Philosophy of language 2. Formally oriented work in the philosophy of language 3. Metaphysics I (1900-45) 4. Metaphysics II (1945 onwards) 5. Ethics I (1900 - 1945) 6. Ethics II (1945 to the present) 7. Epistemology 8. Wittgenstein's later philosophy 9. Political philosophy 10. Feminist philosophy 11. Philosophy of law 12. Applied ethics 13. Aesthetics 14. Philosophy of religion.

Professor Howard Lasnik is one of the world's leading theoretical linguists. He has produced influential and important work in areas such as syntactic theory, logical form, and learnability. This collection of essays draws together some of his best work from his substantial contribution to linguistic theory.

Starting with its tenth (2000) volume, Philosophical Issues will be a yearly one-volume supplement to Nous. Each year it will be devoted to invited papers and book symposia in a specific area of philosophy.
The yearly has attained distinction through the uniformly high quality of its previous nine volumes and the fact that its authors include many of the most distinguished philosophers active today. The topic of Volume 10 is controversies at the interface of epistemology with philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, including discussion of the sorites paradox and linguistic contextualism on attributions of knowledge.

The aim of this volume is to critically assess the philosophical importance of phenomenology as a method for studying the normativity of meaning and its transcendental conditions. Using the pioneering work of Steven Crowell as a springboard, phenomenologists from all over the world examine the promise of phenomenology for illuminating long-standing problems in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, action theory, the philosophy of religion, and moral psychology. The essays are unique in that they engage with the phenomenological tradition not as a collection of authorities to whom we must defer, or a set of historical artifacts we must preserve, but rather as a community of interlocutors with views that bear on important issues in contemporary philosophy. The book is divided into three thematic sections, each examining different clusters of issues aimed at moving the phenomenological project forward. The first section explores the connection between normativity and meaning, and asks us to rethink the relation between the factual realm and the categories of validity in terms of which things can show up as what they are. The second section examines the nature of the self that is capable of experiencing meaning. It includes essays on intentionality, agency, consciousness, naturalism, and moral normativity. The third section addresses questions of philosophical methodology, examining if and why phenomenology should have priority in the analysis of meaning. Finally, the book concludes with an afterword written by Steven Crowell. Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline.

'Brilliant. Searching and profound' E.H. Carr, Times Literary Supplement 'When reading Isaiah Berlin we breathe an altogether different air' New York Review of Books 'Beautifully written' W. H. Auden, New Yorker 'Ingenious. Exactly what good critical writing should be' Max Beloff, Guardian The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. For Isaiah Berlin, there is a fundamental distinction in mankind: those who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things - foxes - and those who relate everything to a central all-embracing system - hedgehogs. It can be applied to the greatest creative minds: Dante, Ibsen and Proust are hedgehogs, while Shakespeare, Aristotle and Joyce are foxes. Yet when Berlin reaches the case of Tolstoy, he finds a fox by nature, but a hedgehog by conviction; a duality which holds the key to understanding Tolstoy's work, illuminating a paradox of his philosophy of history and showing why he was frequently misunderstood by his contemporaries and critics. With a foreword by Michael Ignatieff A W&N Essential

In this book, Bradley Armour-Garb and James A. Woodbridge distinguish various species of fictionalism, locating and defending their own version of philosophical fictionalism. Addressing semantic and philosophical puzzles that arise from ordinary language, they consider such issues as the problem of non-being, plural identity claims, mental-attitude ascriptions, meaning attributions, and truth-talk. They consider 'deflationism about truth', explaining why deflationists should be fictionalists, and show how their philosophical fictionalist account of truth-talk underwrites a dissolution of the Liar Paradox and its kin. They further explore the semantic notions of reference and predicate-satisfaction, showing how philosophical fictionalism can also resolve puzzles that these notions appear to present. Their critical examination of fictionalist approaches in philosophy, together with the development and application of their own brand of philosophical fictionalism, will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophical logic, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and linguistics.

'Perhaps because he is a good novelist himself, Mr Lodge's subjection of various writers to detailed linguistic analysis is illuminating and exciting.' - Daily Telegraph

'Something of a milestone in English criticism. an important addition to English critical writing about the genre of the novel' - Tony Tanner, The Modern Language Review

God is infinite, but language finite; thus speech would seem to condemn Him to finitude. In speaking of God, would the theologian violate divine transcendence by reducing God to immanence, or choose, rather, to remain silent? At stake in this argument is a core problem of the conditions of divine revelation. How, in terms of language and the limitations of human understanding, can transcendence ever be made known? Does its very appearance not undermine its transcendence, its condition of unknowability? Speech and Theology posits that the paradigm for the encounter between the material and the divine, or the immanent and transcendent, is found in the Incarnation: God's voluntary self-immersion in the human world as an expression of His love for His creation. By this key act of grace, hinged upon Christs condescension to human finitude, philosophy acquires the means not simply to speak of perfection, which is to speak theologically, but to bridge the gap between word and thing in general sense.

God is infinite, but language finite; thus speech would seem to condemn Him to finitude. In speaking of God, would the theologian violate divine transcendence by reducing God to immanence, or choose, rather, to remain silent? At stake in this argument is a core problem of the conditions of divine revelation. How, in terms of language and the limitations of human understanding, can transcendence ever be made known? Does its very appearance not undermine its transcendence, its condition of unknowability?
Speech and Theology posits that the paradigm for the encounter between the material and the divine, or the immanent and transcendent, is found in the Incarnation: God's voluntary self-immersion in the human world as an expression of His love for His creation. By this key act of grace, hinged upon Christs condescension to human finitude, philosophy acquires the means not simply to speak of perfection, which is to speak theologically, but to bridge the gap between word and thing in general sense.

This collection suggests that the disciplines of literature and anthropology are not static entities but instead fluid sites of shifting cultural currents and academic interests. The essays conclude that the origins, sources, and intersections of the two disciplines are constantly being revised, and reconceived, leading to new possibilities of understanding texts.
The authors address the ways in which the language of social science fuses with that of the literary imagination. The essays fit excellently with the current interest in interdisciplinary studies and challenge students to see texts as parts of a larger global and cultural matrix.


eBook available with sample pages: 0203218051

One of the most influential contemporary philosophers, Hilary Putnam's involvement in philosophy spans philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, ontology and epistemology and logic.
This specially commissioned collection discusses his contribution to the realist and pragmatist debate. Hilary Putnam comments on the issues raised in each article, making it invaluable for any scholar of his work.

Creolization of Language and Culture is the first, fully revised, English edition of Robert Chaudenson's landmark text Des îles, des hommes, des langues.
Referring to the main varieties of creole French, Chaudenson argues against the traditional account of the origins of creoles for a more sophisticated view which takes account of the peculiar linguistic and social factors at play in colonial societies.
This is an accessible book which makes an important contribution to the study of pidgin and creole language varieties, as well as to the development of contemporary European languages outside Europe.
Key features include:
*Analysis of current debates on the development of creoles
*Discussion of many aspects of human culture including music, medicine, cooking, magic and folklore
*Translation into English of all French sources from which Chaudenson quotes extensively