Our understanding of CS Peirce, and his semiotics, is largely influenced by a twentieth century perspective that prioritizes the sign as a cultural artifact, or as one that that 'distorts', in some way, our understanding of the empirical world. Such a perspective will always undermine appreciation of Peirce as a philosopher who viewed signs as the very mechanisms that enable us to understand reality through concept formation. The key to this repositioning of Peirce is to place his work in the broad frame of Hegelian philosophy. This book evaluates, in detail, the parallels that exist between Peircean and Hegelian thought, highlighting their convergences and also the points at which Peirce departs from Hegel's position. It also considers the work of Vygotsky on concept formation showing that both are, in fact, working within the same Hegelian template. This book, therefore, contributes to our broader understanding of Peircean semiotics. But by drawing in Vygotsky, under the same theoretical auspices, it demonstrates that Peirce has much to offer contemporary educational learning theory.

When we represent the world in language, in thought, or in perception, we often represent it from a perspective. We say and think that the meeting is happening now, that it is hot here, that I am in danger and not you; that the tree looks larger from my perspective than from yours. The Inessential Indexical is an exploration and defense of the view that perspectivality is a philosophically shallow aspect of the world. Cappelen and Dever oppose one of the most entrenched and dominant trends in contemporary philosophy: that perspective (and the perspective of the first person in particular) is philosophically deep and that a proper understanding of it is important not just in the philosophies of language and mind, but throughout philosophy. They argue that there are no such things as essential indexicality, irreducibly de se attitudes, or self-locating attitudes. Their goal is not to show that we need to rethink these phenomena, to explain them in different ways. Their goal is to show that the entire topic is an illusion-there's nothing there. 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).

Together with the first volume "Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments," this book collects contributions that represent the state of the art on the interconnection between pragmatics and philosophy. While the first volume presents the philosophical dimension of pragmatics, showing the path from theoretical advances to practical uses and approaches, this second volume offers a specular view on this discipline. Instead of adopting the top-down view of the first volume, this collection of eleven chapters starts from the analysis of linguistic data - which include texts and discourses in different languages, different types of dialogues, different types of interactions, and different modes for expressing meaning - looking for the regularities that govern our production and processing. The chapters are ordered according to their relationship with the themes and methods that define the field of pragmatics. The more explored and classical linguistic issues such as prototype-based generalizations, scalar implicatures, and temporal ordering, lead gradually to the more recent and debated topic of slurs and pejorative language, and finally to the interdisciplinary and more pioneering works addressing specific context of language use, such as marketplace interactions, courtroom speeches, schizophrenic discourse, literary texts for children, and multimedia communication. Chapter 12 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Our conception of logical space is the set of distinctions we use to navigate the world. In The Construction of Logical Space Agustin Rayo defends the idea that one's conception of logical space is shaped by one's acceptance or rejection of 'just is'-statements: statements like 'to be composed of water just is to be composed of H2O', or 'for the number of the dinosaurs to be zero just is for there to be no dinosaurs'. The resulting picture is used to articulate a conception of metaphysical possibility that does not depend on a reduction of the modal to the non-modal, and to develop a trivialist philosophy of mathematics, according to which the truths of pure mathematics have trivial truth-conditions.

Impassioned Belief presents an original expressivist theory of normative judgments. According to his Ecumenical Expressivism normative judgements are hybrid states partly constituted by ordinary beliefs and partly constituted by desire-like states. Michael Ridge builds on a series of articles in which he has developed this theory, but moves beyond them in the following key respects. First, Ridge now more sharply distinguishes semantics from meta-semantics, situating Ecumenical Expressivism firmly on the meta-semantic side of this divide, thus enabling Ecumenical Expressivism to accommodate a fully truth-conditional approach to first-order semantics. Second, this distinction allows Ridge to offer a distinctive contextualist semantic framework for normative discourse. Contra orthodox presuppositions, a contextualist semantics does not entail cognitivism-at least not if we carefully heed the semantics/meta-semantics distinction. Third, because this contextualist framework is couched in terms of standards, Ridge now rejects his previous 'ideal advisor' approach and instead adopts a theory couched in terms of acceptable standards of practical reasoning. This has interesting consequences for longstanding debates over the context-sensitivity of reasons, the so-called 'buck-passing' theory of value, and the role of principles in normative thought ('particularism' versus 'generalism'). Fourth, drawing on the work of Scott Soames, Ridge develops a novel theory of normative propositions, according to which they are a certain kind of cognitive event type. Somewhat surprisingly, this conception allows that there can be irreducible normative propositions, even given expressivism. Fifth, Ridge offers a novel approach to talk of truth which enables expressivists to accommodate truth-aptness without committing themselves to deflationism about truth. In fact, the theory is flexible enough that it can elegantly be combined even with a robust correspondence conception of truth. In addition, Ridge offers an improved solution to the dreaded 'Frege-Geach' problem (one which better preserves the formal nature of logic than his previous account), a novel theory of disagreement itself, a rather different sort of 'hybrid' treatment of rationality discourse, and an independently useful taxonomy and critical survey of the bewildering variety of other 'hybrid' approaches in the literature.

Shows that the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) forms a philosophy of dialogue and communication that is crucially relevant to contemporary debates in the Humanities. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) is the progenitor of modern linguistics and the originator of the modern teaching and research university. However, his work has received remarkably little attention in the English-speaking world. Humboldt conceives language as the source of cognition as well as communication, both rooted in the possibility of human dialogue. In the same way, his idea of the university posits the free encounter between radically different personalities as the source of education for freedom. For Humboldt, both linguistic and intellectual communication are predicated firstly on dialogue between persons, which is the prerequisite for all intercultural understanding. Linking Humboldt's concept of dialogue to his idea of translation between languages, persons, and cultures, this book shows how Humboldt's thought is of great contemporary relevance. Humboldt shows a way beyond the false alternatives of "culturalism" (the demand that a plurality of cultural and faith-based traditions be recognized as sources of ethical and political legitimacy in the modern world) and "universalism" (the assertion of the primacy of a universal culture of human rights and the renewal of the European Enlightenment project). John Walker explains how Humboldt's work emerges from the intellectual conflicts of his time and yet directly addresses the concerns of our own post-secular and multicultural age.

Peter Hanks defends a new theory about the nature of propositional content. According to this theory, the basic bearers of representational properties are particular mental or spoken actions. Propositions are types of these actions, which we use to classify and individuate our attitudes and speech acts. Hanks abandons several key features of the traditional Fregean conception of propositional content, including the idea that propositions are the primary bearers of truth-conditions, the distinction between content and force, and the concept of entertainment. The main difficulty for this traditional conception is the problem of the unity of the proposition, the problem of explaining how propositions have truth conditions and other representational properties. The new theory developed here, in its place,explains the unity of propositions and provides new solutions to a long list of puzzles and problems in philosophy of language.

Henrik Ibsen's plays have long beguiled philosophically-oriented readers. From Nietzsche to Adorno to Cavell, philosophers have drawn inspiration from Ibsen. But what of Ibsen's own philosophical orientation? As part of larger European movements to reinvent drama, Ibsen and fellow playwrights grappled with contemporary philosophy. Philosophy of drama found a central place with figures such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Gottfried Herder, but reached its mature form, in Ibsen's time, in the works of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. Kristin Gjesdal reveals the centrality of philosophy of theater in nineteenth-century philosophy and shows how drama, as an art form, offers insight into human historicity and the conditions of modern life. The Drama of History deepens and actualizes the relationship between philosophy and drama-not by suggesting that either philosophy or drama should have the upper hand, but rather by indicating how a sustained dialogue between them brings out the meaning and intellectual power of each. Her study reveals underappreciated aspects of Hegel's and Nietzsche's works through their reception in European art and investigates the philosophical dimensions of Ibsen's drama. At the heart of this interrelation between philosophy and drama is a shared interest in exploring the existential condition of human life as lived and experienced in history.

For the first time in English, this anthology offers a comprehensive selection of primary sources in the history of philosophy of language. Beginning with a detailed introduction contextualizing the subject, the editors draw out recurring themes, including the origin of language, the role of nature and convention in fixing form and meaning, language acquisition, ideal languages, varieties of meanings, language as a tool, and the nexus of language and thought, linking them to representative texts. The handbook moves on to offer seminal contributions from philosophers ranging from the pre-Socratics up to John Stuart Mill, preceding each major historical section with its own introductory assessment. With all of the most relevant primary texts on the philosophy of language included, covering well over two millennia, this judicious, and generous, selection of source material will be an indispensable research tool for historians of philosophy, as well as for philosophers of language, in the twenty-first century. A vital tool for researchers and contemporary philosophers, it will be a touchstone for much further research, with coverage of a long and varied tradition that will benefit today's scholars and enhance their awareness of earlier contributions to the field.

Logical consequence is the relation that obtains between premises and conclusion(s) in a valid argument. Orthodoxy has it that valid arguments are necessarily truth-preserving, but this platitude only raises a number of further questions, such as: how does the truth of premises guarantee the truth of a conclusion, and what constraints does validity impose on rational belief? This volume presents thirteen essays by some of the most important scholars in the field of philosophical logic. The essays offer ground-breaking new insights into the nature of logical consequence; the relation between logic and inference; how the semantics and pragmatics of natural language bear on logic; the relativity of logic; and the structural properties of the consequence relation.

The book explores Peirce's non standard thoughts on a synthetic continuum, topological logics, existential graphs, and relational semiotics, offering full mathematical developments on these areas. More precisely, the following new advances are offered: (1) two extensions of Peirce's existential graphs, to intuitionistic logics (a new symbol for implication), and other non-classical logics (new actions on nonplanar surfaces); (2) a complete formalization of Peirce's continuum, capturing all Peirce's original demands (genericity, supermultitudeness, reflexivity, modality), thanks to an inverse ordinally iterated sheaf of real lines; (3) an array of subformalizations and proofs of Peirce's pragmaticist maxim, through methods in category theory, HoTT techniques, and modal logics. The book will be relevant to Peirce scholars, mathematicians, and philosophers alike, thanks to thorough assessments of Peirce's mathematical heritage, compact surveys of the literature, and new perspectives offered through formal and modern mathematizations of the topics studied.

Two of Chomsky's most famous and accessible works available in an affordable and attractive edition.
Described by the "New York Times" as "arguably the most important intellectual alive," Noam Chomsky is known throughout the world for his highly influential writings on language and politics. Featuring two of Chomsky's most popular and enduring books in one omnibus volume, "On Language" contains some of the noted linguist and political critic's most informal and accessible work to date, making it an ideal introduction to his thought.
In Part I, "Language and Responsibility" (1979), Chomsky presents a fascinating self-portrait of his political, moral, and linguistic thinking through a series of interviews with Mitsou Ronat, the noted French linguist. In Part II, "Reflections on Language" (1975), Chomsky explores the more general implications of the study of language and offers incisive analyses of the controversies among psychologists, philosophers, and linguists over fundamental questions of language.

The theory of value structure concerns the meaning of "better than" and "good," as well as the way in which values serve as a basis for rational decision making. Drawing methodologically from economics and theories of decision making, the aim of serious axiology in metaethics is to do justice to problems that have puzzled philosophers of value for centuries. Can value comparisons be cyclic? Are all values comparable with each other and can decision makers just add up different aspects of an evaluation to determine the best course of action? A Theory of Value Structure: From Values to Decisions starts with a thorough introduction to the modeling of "better than" comparisons from a normative perspective. In the philosophical part of the book, Erich H. Rast argues that aspects of "better than" comparisons can differ qualitatively so much that one aspect may outrank another. Consequently, the classical weighted sum aggregation model fails. Values cannot always be summed up and comparisons may be fundamentally noncompensatory, an indeterminacy that explains problems like the apparent nontransitivity of "better than" and hard cases in decision making. Using a lexicographic method of value comparisons, Rast develops a multidimensional theory of "better than" and shows how and to which extent it can be combined with standard methods of decision making under uncertainty by using rank-dependent utility theory.

It is commonplace to regard many great works of literature-poems, dramas, works of fiction-as in some sense philosophical, yet ever since Plato, there has been a tension between the kind of abstract theorizing that goes on in philosophy and the focus on concrete particulars that occurs in poetry and fiction. Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable elaborates on and addresses this Platonic tension, asking in what sense, if any, literature in the form of poetry, drama, short stories, and novels can contribute significantly to our philosophical understanding. Timothy Cleveland suggests there is something in certain poems, novels, and stories that makes them especially, perhaps even best, suited to expanding our awareness and understanding into the nature of things otherwise unsayable and unconceived. Such literary works do philosophy, showing us something that a theoretical-scientific or philosophical-discourse cannot literally say.

This book brings together, in a novel way, an account of the structure of time with an account of our language and thought about time. Joshua Mozersky argues that it is possible to reconcile the human experience of time, which is centred on the present, with the objective conception of time, according to which all moments are intrinsically alike. He defends a temporally centreless ontology along with a tenseless semantics that is compatible with - and indeed helps to explain the need for - tensed language and thought. This theory of time also, it is argued, helps to elucidate the nature of change and temporal passage, neither of which need be denied nor relegated to the realm of subjective experience only. The book addresses a variety of topics including whether the past and future are real; whether temporal passage is a genuine phenomenon or merely a subjective illusion; how the asymmetry of time is to be understood; the nature of representation; how something can change its properties yet retain its identity; and whether objects are three-dimensional or four-dimensional. It is a wide-ranging examination of recent issues in metaphysics, philosophy of language and the philosophy of science and presents a compelling picture of the relationship of human beings to the spatiotemporal world.

Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn, an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree, some people have the potential to run a mile in less than four minutes. Barbara Vetter provides a systematic investigation into the metaphysics of such potentials, and an account of metaphysical modality based on them. In contemporary philosophy, potentials have been recognized mostly in the form of so-called dispositions: solubility, fragility, and so on. Vetter takes dispositions as her starting point, but argues for and develops a more comprehensive conception of potentiality. She shows how, with this more comprehensive conception, an account of metaphysical modality can be given that meets three crucial requirements: (1) Extensional correctness: providing the right truth-values for statements of possibility and necessity; (2) formal adequacy: providing the right logic for metaphysical modality; and (3) semantic utility: providing a semantics that links ordinary modal language to the metaphysics of modality. The resulting view of modality is a version of dispositionalism about modality: it takes modality to be a matter of the dispositions of individual objects (and, crucially, not of possible worlds). This approach has a long philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle, but has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy. In recent years, it has become a live option again due to the rise of anti-Humean, powers-based metaphysics. The aim of Potentiality is to develop the dispositionalist view in a way that takes account of contemporary developments in metaphysics, logic, and semantics.

This book focuses on the semantic phenomenon of evaluativity and its consequences across constructions. Evaluativity has traditionally been associated exclusively with the positive construction, a term for sentences with a gradable adjective but with no overt degree morphology. John is tall is evaluative because it entails that John is tall relative to a contextually valued standard. John is taller than Sue and John is as tall as Sue are not evaluative because both could be used even if John and Sue were short. Previous accounts of evaluativity have assumed that it is not part of the inherent meaning of adjectives, but is contributed by a null morpheme. Jessica Rett argues against this analysis, proposing that no null morpheme is required. Instead, evaluativity is explained on the basis of assumptions that speakers and hearers make about the relationship between the simplicity of a situation and the simplicity of the language used to describe that situation; the analysis is couched in recent approaches to Gricean conversational implicature.

This book brings together research on the topic of causation from experts in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. It seeks to arrive at a more sophisticated understanding both of how causal concepts are expressed in causal meanings, and how those meanings in turn are organized into structures. Chapters address some of the most exciting current issues in the field, including the relata of causal relations; the representation of defeasible causation within verb phrases and at the level of modality; the difference between direct and indirect causal chains; and the representation of these chains in syntax. The book examines data from a wide variety of languages, such as Tohono O'odham, Finnish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Hindi, and Karachay-Balkar, and will be of interest to syntacticians and semanticists, as well as psycholinguists and philosophers, from graduate level upwards.

Deflationist accounts of truth are widely held in contemporary philosophy: they seek to show that truth is a dispensable concept with no metaphysical depth. However, logical paradoxes present problems for deflationists that their work has struggled to overcome. In this volume of fourteen original essays, a distinguished team of contributors explore the extent to which, if at all, deflationism can accommodate paradox. The volume will be of interest to philosophers of logic, philosophers of language, and anyone working on truth.
Contributors include Bradley Armour-Garb, Jody Azzouni, JC Beall, Hartry Field, Christopher Gauker, Michael Glanzberg, Dorothy Grover, Anil Gupta, Volker Halbach, Leon Horsten, Paul Horwich, Graham Priest, Greg Restall, and Alan Weir

This dictionary provides a full and authoritative guide to the meanings of the terms, concepts, and theories employed in pragmatics, the study of language in use.
Pragmatics is a central subject in linguistics and philosophy and an increasingly important topic in fields such as cognitive science, informatics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and pathology. Its rapid development has produced new theories, methods, approaches, and schools of thought. These in turn have resulted in a vast vocabulary of new terms and in modified meanings for existing terms. Such terms help advance research and facilitate discussion, but they can also cause confusion and act as barriers to understanding and communication. Yan Huang defines and explains them all, from the most traditional to the most recent. Covering every branch of research and all theoretical approaches and with the needs of students and researchers firmly in mind he writes each entry in the simplest possible terms for the subject in question, gives references to relevant seminal and recent work, provides numerous cross-references to related entries, and shows how each term and concept is applied and used in different contexts.
Written by one of the leading experts in the field, Professor Huang's dictionary, the first of its kind ever published, will be a much valued resource for students and researchers in every aspect of the field.

This book focuses on the semantic phenomenon of evaluativity and its consequences across constructions. Evaluativity has traditionally been associated exclusively with the positive construction, a term for sentences with a gradable adjective but with no overt degree morphology. John is tall is evaluative because it entails that John is tall relative to a contextually valued standard. John is taller than Sue and John is as tall as Sue are not evaluative because both could be used even if John and Sue were short. Previous accounts of evaluativity have assumed that it is not part of the inherent meaning of adjectives, but is contributed by a null morpheme. Jessica Rett argues against this analysis, proposing that no null morpheme is required. Instead, evaluativity is explained on the basis of assumptions that speakers and hearers make about the relationship between the simplicity of a situation and the simplicity of the language used to describe that situation; the analysis is couched in recent approaches to Gricean conversational implicature.

'Linguistic' theories in the eighteenth-century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as 'aesthetic' theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question 'what is beauty?' Edward Nye charts the way in which a wide range of language theorists answer this question, and how their ideas complement contemporary literary debates about poetry, prose, preciosity, style, and artistic representation in general.

This book presents a radical reconceptualization of the nature of linguistic knowledge. John Taylor challenges the conventional notion that a language can be understood in terms of the interaction of syntax with a lexicon, the second listing the words and the first the rules for combining them. He proposes instead that an individual's knowledge of a language can be thought of as a repository of memories of linguistic experience. Each encounter with the language, he argues, leaves a trace in our minds. We record the forms of utterances, the concepts and interpretations associated with them, and the contexts in which they were heard or seen. Features of incoming language - a word, a phrase, a meaning, a voice quality, an interactional situation - resonate with items already stored. Similarities between stored items give rise to generalizations of varying degrees of certainty and precision, which in turn are able to sanction new and innovative expressions. John Taylor writes with conviction, clarity, and wit, illustrating every stage of his argument with arresting examples. His account makes a profound and original contribution to understanding the nature of language and the operations of the mind and brain. His book will appeal in equal measure to linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists.

Metasemantics comprises new work on the philosophical foundations of linguistic semantics, by a diverse group of established and emerging experts in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the theory of content. The science of semantics aspires to systematically specify the meanings of linguistic expressions in context. The paradigmatic metasemantic question is accordingly: what more basic or fundamental features of the world metaphysically determine these semantic facts? Efforts to answer this question inevitably raise others. Where are the boundaries of semantics? What is the essence of the meaning relation? Which framework should we use for semantic theorizing? What are the intrinsic natures of semantic values? Are the semantic facts metaphysically determinate? What is semantic competence? Metasemantic inquiry has long been recognized as a central part of the philosophy of language, but recent developments in metaphysics and semantics itself now allow us to approach these classic questions with an unprecedented degree of precision. The essays collected here provide promising new perspectives on old problems, pose questions that suggest novel research projects, and taken together, greatly sharpen our understanding of linguistic representation.