The lectures in this book are immensely Chomskyan in spirit, recursive-syntactic in nature, and tethered to a framework which takes as the null hypothesis the notion that language is an innate, pre-determined biological system-a system which by definition is multi-complex, human-specific, and analogous to a philosophy highly commensurate of Descartes' great proverbial adage which announces the calling for a 'ghost-in-the-machine'. The book begins with a gradual assessment of the kinds of complex constructs students of syntax need to work-up. Leading to the classic 'Four-Sentences'-each of which bears as a kind of post-mark its own decade of Chomskyan analysis-we trace the origins of generative grammar from the fields of child language acquisition (of the 1960s), to psycholinguistics (of the 1970s), to where we stand today within the Minimalist Program. Various spin-off proposals have been spawned by envisioned analyses which treat syntactic movement as the quintessential human processing-a processing which would give rise to human language. Such spin-offs include 'Proto-language' and a new treatment of the so-called morpho-syntactic 'Dual Mechanism Model'.

Fred Stoutland was a major figure in the philosophy of action and philosophy of language. This collection brings together essays on truth, language, action and mind and thus provides an important summary of many key themes in Stoutland's own work, as well as offering valuable perspectives on key issues in contemporary philosophy.

This book presents an interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as a priori psychologism. It groups Kant's philosophy together with those of the British empiricists-Locke, Berkeley, and Hume-in a single line of psychologistic succession and offers a clear explanation of how Kant's psychologism differs from psychology and idealism. The book reconciles Kant's philosophy with subsequent developments in science and mathematics, including post-Fregean mathematical logic, non-Euclidean geometry, and both relativity and quantum theory. It also relates Kant's psychologism to Wittgenstein's later conception of language. Finally, the author reveals the ways in which Kant's philosophy dovetails with contemporary scientific theorizing about the natural phenomenon of consciousness and its place in nature. This book will be of interest to Kant scholars and historians of philosophy working on the British empiricists.

Wilfrid Sellars's ethical theory was rich and deeply innovative. On Sellars's view, moral judgments express a special kind of shared intention. Thus, we should see Sellars as an early advocate of an expressivism of plans and intentions, and an early theorist of collective intentionality. He supplemented this theory with a sophisticated logic of intentions, a robust theory of the categorical validity of normative expressions, a subtle way of reconciling the cognitive and motivating aspects of moral judgment, and much more-all within a strict nominalism that preserves Sellars's commitment to naturalism. The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars offers the first systematic treatment of this sadly-neglected aspect of Sellars's work, and demonstrates that his ethical theory-just like his more widely-discussed epistemology-has much to contribute to current debates.

A complement clause is used instead of a noun phrase; for example one can say either I heard [the result] or I heard [that England beat France]. Languages differ in the grammatical properties of complement clauses, and the types of verbs which take them. Some languages lack a complement clause construction but instead employ other construction types to achieve similar ends; these are called complementation strategies. The book explores the variety of types of complementation found across the languages of the world, their grammatical properties and meanings. Detailed studies of particular languages, including Akkadian, Israeli, Jarawara, and Pennsylvania German, are framed by R. M. W. Dixon's introduction, which sets out the range of issues, and his conclusion, which draws together the evidence and the arguments. This book will interest scholars of typology, language universals, syntax, information structure, and language contact in departments of linguistics and anthropology, as well as advanced and graduate students taking courses in these subjects.

The notion of singular (or de re) thought has become central in philosophy of mind and language, yet there is still little consensus concerning the best way to think about the nature of singular thought. Coinciding with recognition of the need for more clarity about the notion, there has been a surge of interest in the concept of a mental file as a way to understand what is distinctive about singular thought. What isn't always clear, however, is what mental files are meant to be, and why we should believe that thoughts that employ them are singular as opposed to descriptive. This volume brings together original chapters by leading scholars which aim to examine and evaluate the viability of the mental files framework for theorizing about singular thought. The first section of the volume addresses the central issues of the definition and nature of singular thought, as well as how it relates to the notion of a mental file. The second section addresses the legitimacy of the mental files conception of singular thought by assessing the philosophical motivations or the purported empirical support for the view, or by laying out a specific version of it. The third section helps to clarify both the notion of a mental file and the mental files conception of singular thought by focusing on their role in explaining de jure coreference in thought and language. The volume then concludes with a final section that casts doubt on the mental files conception and the legitimacy of the file-theoretic framework more generally.

How we understand, protect, and discharge our rights and responsibilities as citizens in a democratic society committed to the principle of political equality is intimately connected to the standards and behaviour of our media in general, and our news media in particular. However, the media does not just stand between the citizenry and their leaders, or indeed between citizens and each other. The media is often the site where individuals attempt to realise some of the most fundamental democratic liberties, including the right to free speech. Media Ethics, Free Speech, and the Requirements of Democracy explores the conflict between the rights that people exercise in, and through, the modern media and the responsibilities that accrue on account of its awesome and increasing power. The individual chapters-written by leading scholars from the US, UK, and Australia-address several recent events and controversial developments in the media, including Brexit, the rise of Trump, Lynton Crosby, Charlie Hebdo, dog-whistle politics, fake news, and political correctness. This much-needed philosophical treatment is a welcome addition to the recent literature in media ethics. It will be of interest to scholars across political and social philosophy, applied ethics, media and communication studies, and political science who are interested in the important issues surrounding the media and free speech and democracy.

Recent years have seen a great revival of interest in Wittgenstein's early masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The Enchantment of Words is a study of that book, offering novel readings of all its major themes and shedding light on issues in metaphysics, ethics and the philosophies of mind, language, and logic. McManus argues that Wittgenstein's aim in this deeply puzzling work is to show that the 'intelligibility of thought' and the 'meaningfulness of language', which logical truths would delimit and metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and language would explain, are issues constituted by confusions. What is exposed is a mirage of a kind of self-consciousness, a misperception of the ways in which we happen to think, talk and act as reasons why we ought to think, talk and act as we do. The root of that misperception is our confusedly endowing words with a life of their own: we 'enchant', and are 'enchanted by', words, colluding in a confusion that transposes on to them, and the world which we then see them as 'fitting', responsibilities that are actually ours to bear. Such words promise to spare us the trouble, not only of thinking, but of living. In presenting this view, McManus offers readings of all of the major themes of the Tractatus, including its discussion of logical truth, objects, names, inference, subjectivity, solipsism and the ineffable; McManus offers novel explanations of what is at stake in Wittgenstein's comparison of propositions with pictures, of why Wittgenstein declared the point of the Tractatus to be ethical, of how a bookwhich infamously declares itself to be nonsensical can both clarify our thoughts and require of us that we exercise our capacity to reason in reading it, and of how Wittgenstein later came to re-evaluate the achievement of the Tractatus.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics are branches of philosophy concerned with questions about how to assess and ameliorate our representational devices (such as concepts and words). It's a part of philosophy concerned with questions about which concepts we should use (and why), how concepts can be improved, when concepts should be abandoned, and how proposals for amelioration can be implemented. Central parts of the history of philosophy have engaged with these issues, but the focus of this volume is on applications to work in contemporary philosophy of language and mind, epistemology, gender and race theory, ethics, philosophy of science, and philosophical logic. This is the first volume devoted entirely to conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. The volume explores the possibilities, benefits, problems, and applications of conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. It consists of twenty chapters written by leading philosophers.

This book, originally published in 1991, sets forth the assumptions about thought and language that made falsehood seem so problematic to Plato and his contemporaries, and expounds the solution that Plato finally reached in the Sophist. Free from untranslated Greek, the book is accessible to all studying ancient Greek philosophy. As a well-documented case study of a definitive advance in logic, metaphysics and epistemology, the book will also appeal to philosophers generally.

What is a promise? What are the consequences of the act of promising? In this bold yet subtle meditation, the author contemplates the seductive promise of speech and the seductive promise of love. Imagining an encounter between Moliere's Don Juan and J. L. Austin, between a mythical figure of the French classical theater and a twentieth-century philosopher, she explores the relation between speech and the erotic, using a literary text as the ground for a telling encounter between philosophy, linguistics, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. In the years since the publication of this book (which the author today calls "the boldest, the most provocative, but also the most playful" she has written), speech act theory has continued to play a central and defining role in the theories of sexuality, gender, performance studies, post-colonial studies, and cultural studies. This book remains topical as readers increasingly discover how multiply relevant the speaking body is.
Moving beyond the domain of formal linguistic analysis to address these questions, the author has written a daring and seductive book.

Originally published in 1973, this book shows that methods developed for the semantics of systems of formal logic can be successfully applied to problems about the semantics of natural languages; and, moreover, that such methods can take account of features of natural language which have often been thought incapable of formal treatment, such as vagueness, context dependence and metaphorical meaning. Parts 1 and 2 set out a class of formal languages and their semantics. Parts 3 and 4 show that these formal languages are rich enought to be used in the precise description of natural languages. Appendices describe some of the concepts discussed in the text.

First published in 1990, this book argues that any theory of language constructs its 'object' by separating 'relevant' from 'irrelevant' phenomena - excluding the latter. This leaves a 'remainder' which consists of the untidy, creative part of how language is used - the essence of poetry and metaphor. Although this remainder can never be completely formalised, it must be fully recognised by any true account of language and thus this book attempts the first 'theory of the remainder'. As such, whether it is language or the speaker who speaks is dealt with, leading to an analysis of how all speakers are 'violently' constrained in their use of language by social and psychological realties.

The Essential Davidson compiles the most celebrated papers of one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers. It distills Donald Davidson's seminal contributions to our understanding of ourselves, from three decades of essays, into one thematically organized collection. A new, specially written introduction by Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig, two of the world's leading authorities on his work, offers a guide through the ideas and arguments, shows how they interconnect, and reveals the systematic coherence of Davidson's worldview.
Davidson's philosophical program is organized around two connected projects. The first is that of understanding the nature of human agency. The second is that of understanding the nature and function of language, and its relation to the world. Accordingly, the first part of the book presents Davidson's investigation of reasons, causes, and intentions, which revolutionized the philosophy of action. This leads to his notable doctrine of anomalous monism, the view that all mental events are physical events, but that the mental cannot be reduced to the physical. The second part of the book presents the famous essays in which Davidson set out his highly original and influential philosophy of language, which founds the theory of meaning on the theory of truth.
These fifteen classic essays will be invaluable for anyone interested in the study of mind and language. Fascinating though they are individually, it is only when drawn together that there emerges a compelling picture of man as a rational linguistic animal whose thoughts, though not reducible to the material, are part of the fabric of the world, and whose knowledge of his own mind, the minds ofothers, and the world around him is as fundamental to his nature as the power of thought and speech itself.

This book offers readers a collection of 50 short chapter entries on topics in the philosophy of language. Each entry addresses a paradox, a longstanding puzzle, or a major theme that has emerged in the field from the last 150 years, tracing overlap with issues in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, ethics, political philosophy, and literature. Each of the 50 entries is written as a piece that can stand on its own, though useful connections to other entries are mentioned throughout the text. Readers can open the book and start with almost any of the entries, following themes of greatest interest to them. Each entry includes recommendations for further reading on the topic. Philosophy of Language: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments is useful as a standalone textbook, or can be supplemented by additional readings that instructors choose. The accessible style makes it suitable for introductory level through intermediate undergraduate courses, as well as for independent learners, or even as a reference for more advanced students and researchers. Key Features: Uses a problem-centered approach to philosophy of language (rather than author- or theory-centered) making the text more inviting to first-time students of the subject. Offers stand-alone chapters, allowing students to quickly understand an issue and giving instructors flexibility in assigning readings to match the themes of the course. Provides up-to-date recommended readings at the end of each chapter, or about 500 sources in total, amounting to an extensive review of the literature on each topic.

Jerry Fodor presents a new development of his famous Language of Thought hypothesis, which has since the 1970s been at the centre of interdisciplinary debate about how the mind works. Fodor defends and extends the groundbreaking idea that thinking is couched in a symbolic system realized in the brain. This idea is central to the representational theory of mind which Fodor has established as a key reference point in modern philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. The foundation stone of our present cognitive science is Turing's suggestion that cognitive processes are not associations but computations; and computation requires a language of thought.
So the latest on the Language of Thought hypothesis, from its progenitor, promises to be a landmark in the study of the mind. LOT 2 offers a more cogent presentation and a fuller explication of Fodor's distinctive account of the mind, with various intriguing new features. The central role of compositionality in the representational theory of mind is revealed: most of what we know about concepts follows from the compositionality of thoughts. Fodor shows the necessity of a referentialist account of the content of intentional states, and of an atomistic account of the individuation of concepts. Not least among the new developments is Fodor's identification and persecution of pragmatism as the leading source of error in the study of the mind today.
LOT 2 sees Fodor advance undaunted towards the ultimate goal of a theory of the cognitive mind, and in particular a theory of the intentionality of cognition. No one who works on the mind can ignore Fodor's views, expressed in the coruscating and provocative style which has delighted and disconcerted countless readers over the years.

The Performativity of Value: On the Citability of Cultural Commodities addresses the increased commodification of language in the U.S. cultural economy. The marketing of cultural commodities in formats such as websites, videos, movies, books, online games, or television episodes-as distributed across a wide range of technological devices-means that language is moving across situational contexts to an unprecedented degree. Just as authors quote or paraphrase sources in the construction of a text, subjects "cite" the commodified words, images, and works of others as they construct their social identities. Steve Sherlock discusses how consumer citational practices generate demand for those cultural commodities which align the self with particular subcultural groups. By "re-citing" the exchange value frame within which language itself has acquired an economic worth, consumer citational practices have become performative of the U.S. cultural economy. In order to describe this process, the book extends the work of Judith Butler on the performativity of gender to the performativity of exchange value, as well as to the performativity of subcultural values. The book also develops a critique of the increasing commodification of language in the contemporary economy. Sherlock follows Butler in developing a model of performativity based on Jacques Derrida's work, particularly regarding the citability of language into new situational contexts. Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence in Western philosophy and culture is extended toward a critique of the assumed presence of exchange value in the cultural marketplace. The book also incorporates the work of the Bakhtin Circle into this framework-especially their insight into how everyday utterances, which "report on" the words of others, become a site for the re-negotiation of values between self and others. The re-citational process used in contemporary identity construction can thus either re-cite the current cultural economy, or resist it. The Performativity of Value contributes to themes examined in social theory, social psychology, literary theory, continental philosophy, and cultural studies, and thus will be of interest to students and scholars working in those areas.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty explores a myriad of new and important ideas regarding our notions of belief, knowledge, skepticism, and certainty. During the course of his exploration, Wittgenstein makes a fascinating new discovery about certitude, namely, that it is categorically distinct from knowledge. As his investigation advances, he recognizes that certainty must be non-propositional and non-ratiocinated; borne out not in the things we say, but in our actions, our deeds. Many philosophers working outside of epistemology recognized Wittgenstein's insights and determined that his work's abrupt end might serve as an excellent launching point for still further philosophical expeditions. In Exploring Certainty: Wittgenstein and Wide Fields of Thought, Robert Greenleaf Brice surveys some of this rich topography. Wittgenstein's writings serve as a point of departure for Brice's own ideas about certainty. He shows how Wittgenstein's rough and unpolished notion of certitude might be smoothed out and refined in a way to benefit studies of morality, aesthetics, cognitive science, philosophy of mathematics. Brice's work opens new avenues of thought for scholars and students of the Wittgensteinian tradition, while introducing original philosophies concerning issues central to human knowledge and cognition.

First published in 1983, the aim of this book is to diagnose linguists' failure to advance satisfactory theories of lexical meaning, then to propose the requirements that such a theory should meet and, drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, to take the first steps towards satisfying these requirements. It begins by discussing the work of Quine on the indeterminacy of translation and it is shown that attempts by linguists to answer Quine's arguments by proposing universal 'semantic primitives' or their equivalents is unsatisfactory. The relation between the theory of word meaning and the theory of categorisation is explored, and an alternative to Rosch's 'family resemblance' account of the 'prototype' effect in both nouns and verbs is provided. The author argues that identification of certain implicit categories like 'action' and 'event' can be related to principles of individuation, and builds on the work of Kripke and Putnam on proper names and natural kind terms. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics and the philosophy of language.

First published in 1982, this book looks at a wide variety of issues concerning the vast field of study that is 'semiotics. It begins by tracing the beginnings of modern semiotics in the works two pioneering figures - Saussure and Peirce - in order to present fundamental assumptions, notions and distinctions which provide an essential background to the more recent developments. The author then goes on to look at Behavioural Semiotics, Luis Prieto's idea of "l'Acte Semique", Austin's theory of 'Speech Acts' and Searle's elaborations, Barthes' move away from philosophical and scientific approaches in his ideology of Socio-Cultural Signification, Functionalism and Axiomatic Functionalism, style as a form of communication, semiotics of the cinema, and communicative behaviour in non-human species.

First published in 1983, this book represents an effort to lay the groundwork for a general approach to lexical semantics that pays heed to the needs of a theory of discourse interpretation, a theory of compositional semantics, and a theory of lexical rules. The first chapter proposes a basic framework in which to undertake lexical description and a lexical semantic analogue to the classical syntactic distinction between subcategorized for complement and adjunct. This apparatus for lexical description is expanded in the second chapter. A theory of the semantics of nuclear terms along with a proposed implementation is presented in chapter three. The fourth chapter argues that a number of regular, semantically governed valence alternations could be captured in frame representations that give rise to various kinds of realisation options. The final chapter examines interaction of these phenomena with a general account of prediction or control along with the general framework of lexical representation.

First published in 1997, this book focuses on the semantics of definite and indefinite descriptions - taking the presuppositional theory of definiteness and indefiniteness proposed by Heim as a starting point. It seeks to show that there exists a special type of indefinites that have an interpretation commonly associated with definites. It further argues that the felicity conditions associated with indefinite NP's can vary and develops a more fine-grained theory of novelty within the framework of File Change Semantics. More generally, this work can be seen as providing an empirical argument in favour of a dynamic theory of meaning and against the more traditional truth-conditional theory.

Addresses a central problem in cognitive science, concerning the learning procedures through which humans acquire and represent natural language. Brings together world leading scholars from a range of disciplines, includingcomputational linguistics, psychology, behavioural science, and mathematical linguistics. Will appeal to researchers in computational and mathematical linguistics, psychology and behavioral science, AI and NLP. Represents a wide spectrum of perspectives

Between the beginnings of European lexicography and 1700, many glossaries and dictionaries were arranged not according to the alphabet, but in a topical order which followed the influential paradigms of theology, philosophy, and natural history at that time. Together with related text genres like treatises on terminology, didactic dialogues, and thesauri, they constitute the topical (or onomasiological) tradition which is an important lexicographical tradition in its own right. This book discusses the tradition's principles and origins, and by way of illustration draws upon early glossaries, treatises for the learning of foreign languages, and didactic dialogues. Later comprehensive works are presented as detailed in-depth studies. Professor Hullen demonstrates that the English tradition is embedded in a complex Continental tradition whose important representatives, such as Adrianus Junius and Comenius, had a great influence on the English scene.