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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Philosophy of language
Charles Travis presents a series of essays in which he has
developed his distinctive view of the relation of thought to
language. The key idea is "occasion-sensitivity": what it is for
words to express a given concept is for them to be apt for
contributing to any of many different conditions of correctness
(notably truth conditions). Since words mean what they do by
expressing a given concept, it follows that meaning does not
determine truth conditions. This view ties thoughts less tightly to
the linguistic forms which express them than traditional views of
the matter, and in two directions: a given linguistic form, meaning
fixed, may express an indefinite variety of thoughts; one thought
can be expressed in an indefinite number of syntactically and
semantically distinct ways. Travis highlights the importance of
this view for linguistic theory, and shows how it gives new form to
a variety of traditional philosophical problems.
by the question in its being an answer, if only in a circumstantial
(i. e. inessential) manner. One indeed must question oneself in
order to remember, says Plato, but the dialectic, which would be
scientific, must be something else even if it remains a play of
question and answer. This contradiction did not escape Aristotle:
he split the scientific from the dialectic and logic from
argumentation whose respective theories he was led to conceive in
order to clearly define their boundaries and specificities. As for
Plato, he found in the famous theory of Ideas what he sought in
order to justify knowledge as that which is supposed to hold its
truth only from itself. What do Ideas mean within the framework of
our approach? In what consists the passage from rhetoric to
ontology which leads to the denaturation of argumentation? When
Socrates asked, for example, "What is virtue?," he thought one
could not answer such a question because the answer refers to a
single proposition, a single truth, whereas the formulation of the
question itself does not indicate this unicity. For any answer,
another can be given and thus continuously, if necessary, until
eventually one will come across an incompatibility. Now, to a
question as to what X, Y, or Z is, one can answer in many ways and
nothing in the question itself prohibits multiplicity. Virtue is
courage, is justice, and so on.
The book provides philosophical interpretations of pragmatic
issues. It concentrates on well-established concepts such as
presupposition, entailment, implicature, speech acts, subsentential
speech acts, different cases of meaning as use, expressive meanings
and expressive commitments, as well as the relation between
knowledge and belief. The discussion goes beyond linguistic
investigations and offers a wide philosophical perspective.
At first blush, phenomenology seems to be concerned preeminently
with questions of knowledge, truth, and perception, and yet closer
inspection reveals that the analyses of these phenomena remain
bound up with language and that consequently phenomenology is,
inextricably, a philosophy of language. Drawing on the insights of
a variety of phenomenological authors, including Husserl,
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, this collection of
essays by leading scholars articulates the distinctively
phenomenological contribution to language by examining two sets of
questions. The first set of questions concerns the relatedness of
language to experience. Studies exhibit the first-person character
of the philosophy of language by focusing on lived experience, the
issue of reference, and disclosive speech. The second set of
questions concerns the relatedness of language to intersubjective
experience. Studies exhibit the second-person character of the
philosophy of language by focusing on language acquisition,
culture, and conversation. This book will be of interest to
scholars of phenomenology and philosophy of language.
This Handbook brings together philosophical work on how language
shapes, and is shaped by, social and political factors. Its 24
chapters were written exclusively for this volume by an
international team of leading researchers, and together they
provide a broad expert introduction to the major issues currently
under discussion in this area. The volume is divided into four
parts: Part I: Methodological and Foundational Issues Part II:
Non-ideal Semantics and Pragmatics Part III: Linguistic Harms Part
IV: Applications The parts, and chapters in each part, are
introduced in the volume's General Introduction. A list of Works
Cited concludes each chapter, pointing readers to further areas of
study. The Handbook is the first major, multi-authored reference
work in this growing area and essential reading for anyone
interested in the nature of language and its relationship to social
and political reality.
Language Use offers a philosophical examination of the basic
conceptual framework of pragmatic theory, and contrasts this
framework with detailed descriptions of our everyday practices of
language use. While the results should be highly relevant to
pragmatics, the investigation is not a contribution to pragmatic
theory. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical
problems, Language Use brings out the relevance of Wittgenstein's
methods to fundamental problems in central pragmatic fields of
research such as deixis, implicatures, speech acts and
presuppositions.
First handbook on the philosophy of implicit mental states Implicit
cognition is at the heart of many unresolved debates about
learning, prediction, memory, the relation between mind and
language and hot issues in applied areas such as implicit bias Very
strong team of international contributors
This volume represents the first attempt in the field of language
pedagogy to apply a systems approach to issues in English language
education. In the literature of language education, or more
specifically, second or foreign language learning and teaching,
each topic or issue has often been dealt with independently, and
been treated as an isolated item. Taking grammar instruction as an
example, grammatical items are often taught in a sequential,
step-by-step manner; there has been no "road map" in which the
interrelations between the various items are demonstrated. This may
be one factor that makes it more difficult for students to learn
the language organically. The topics covered in this volume,
including language acquisition, pedagogical grammar, and teacher
collaboration, are viewed from a holistic perspective. In other
words, language pedagogy is approached as a dynamic system of
interrelations. In this way, "emergent properties" are expected to
manifest. This book is recommended for anyone involved in language
pedagogy, including researchers, teachers, and teacher trainers, as
well as learners.
Is truth objective or relative? What exists independently of our
minds? This book is about these two questions. The essays in its
pages variously defend and critique answers to each, grapple over
the proper methodology for addressing them, and wonder whether
either question is worth pursuing. In so doing, they carry on a
long and esteemed tradition - for our two questions are among the
oldest of philosophical issues, and have vexed almost every major
philosopher, from Plato, to Kant to Wittgenstein. Fifteen eminent
contributors bring fresh perspectives, renewed energy and original
answers to debates which have been the focus of a tremendous amount
of interest in the last three decades both within philosophy and
the culture at large.
The volume is dedicated to the German linguist Wolfgang Ullrich a
oeGustava Wurzel (1940-2001), who has influenced linguistic thought
in his work on paradigm-based morphology. All contributors to the
volume deal with Wurzela (TM)s work and thinking, who in his
theoretical writings focused on the concepts of naturalness,
markedness and complexity in human language. The authors discuss
diachronic and typological aspects of morphology, i.e. the nature
of paradigms, the rise and fall of inflectional morphology, and the
development and systems of gender marking, also in regard to the
interface with phonology and syntax.
A comprehensive collection which contains essays from thirteen
international contributors. Provides a fresh engagement with the
ideas of two figureheads in philosophy - Kant and Wittgenstein - by
putting them in touch with contemporary debates that are shaped by
their legacy. The contributors draw upon ideas in phenomenology,
dialetheism, and metamathematics to interrogate the ideas of two of
the most important thinkers in modern philosophy.
This book explores the growing tension between multilingualism and
monolingualism in the European Union in the wake of Brexit,
underpinned by the interplay between the rise of English as a
lingua franca and the effacement of translations in EU
institutions, bodies and agencies. English and Translation in the
European Union draws on an interdisciplinary approach, highlighting
insights from applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, translation
studies, philosophy of language and political theory, while also
looking at official documents and online resources, most of which
are increasingly produced in English and not translated at all -
and the ones which are translated into other languages are not
labelled as translations. In analysing this data, Alice Leal
explores issues around language hierarchy and the growing
difficulty in reconciling the EU's approach to promoting
multilingualism while fostering monolingualism in practice through
the diffusion of English as a lingua franca, as well as questions
around authenticity in the translation process and the boundaries
between source and target texts. The volume also looks ahead to the
implications of Brexit for this tension, while proposing potential
ways forward, encapsulated in the language turn, the translation
turn and the transcultural turn for the EU. Offering unique
insights into contemporary debates in the humanities, this book
will be of interest to scholars in translation studies, applied
linguistics and sociolinguistics, philosophy and political theory.
Mapping Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art defines a new
cartographic aesthetic, or what Simonetta Moro calls
carto-aesthetics, as a key to interpreting specific phenomena in
modern and contemporary art, through the concept of poetic
cartography. The problem of mapping, although indebted to the
"spatial turn" of poststructuralist philosophy, is reconstructed as
hermeneutics, while exposing the nexus between topology,
space-time, and memory. The book posits that the emergence of
"mapping" as a ubiquitous theme in contemporary art can be
attributed to the power of the cartographic model to constitute
multiple worldviews that can be seen as paradigmatic of the
post-modern and contemporary condition. This book will be of
particular interest to scholars in art history, art theory,
aesthetics, and cartography.
Professor Donald Davidson is one of the most innovative and
influential recent philosophers. Ranging over a variety of topics
in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and epistemology,
his system of thought is unified by his inquiries into the nature
of interpretation and understanding the speech and behavior of
others. Together with its introduction, Language, Mind and
Epistemology examines Davidson's unified stance towards philosophy
by joining American and European authors within a collection of
essays, published here for the first time. The authors discuss the
central topics in Davidson's latest philosophy: his holistic
truth-theoretic stance towards meaning and understanding, the
epistemology of interpretation and translation, the externalist
viewpoint in epistemology, the anti-Cartesian approach in
accounting for first person authority, the thesis of anomalous
monism, and the holistic conception of the mental.
This book introduces generative grammar as an area of study and
asks what it tells us about the human mind. Wolfram Hinzen lays the
foundation for the unification of modern generative linguistics
with the philosophies of mind and language. He introduces Chomsky's
program of a "minimalist"
syntax as a novel explanatory vision of the human mind. He explains
how the Minimalist Program originated in work in cognitive science,
biology, linguistics, and philosophy, and examines its implications
for work in these fields. He considers the way the human mind is
designed when seen as an
arrangement of structural patterns in nature, and argues that its
design is the product not so much of adaptive evolutionary history
as of principles and processes that are ahistorical and internalist
in character. Linguistic meaning, he suggests, arises in the mind
as a consequence of structures
emerging on formal rather than functional grounds. From this he
substantiates an unexpected and deeply unfashionable notion of
human nature.
Clearly written in nontechnical language and assuming a limited
knowledge of the fields it examines and links, Minimal Mind Design
will appeal to a wide range of scholars in linguistics, philosophy,
and cognitive science. It also provides an exceptionally clear
insight into the nature and aims of
Chomsky's Minimalist Program.
The book ranges widely through eight different keywords in current
Translation Studies: Agency, Difference (the ethics of),
Eurocentrism (attitudes toward), Hermeneutics, Language, Norms,
Rhetoric, and World Literature. It features an expanded
behavioral-economic exploration of attitudes of and toward
Masculine and Feminine Econs, Masculine and Feminine Humans, and
Queer Humans. It draws heavily on crip-queer disability studies,
especially autists/allists as translators. It features literary
case studies that complicate the main arguments in each keyword.
In Contradiction advocates and defends the view that there are true
contradictions (dialetheism), a view that flies in the face of
orthodoxy in Western philosophy since Aristotle. The book has been
at the center of the controversies surrounding dialetheism ever
since its first publication in
1987. This second edition of the book substantially expands upon
the original in various ways, and also contains the author's
reflections on developments over the last two decades. Further
aspects of dialetheism are discussed in the companion volume, Doubt
Truth to be a Liar, also published by
Oxford University Press in 2006.
Studies on the nature of quotation have become a topic of growing
interest among linguists and philosophers of language. What is the
function and logical status of quotations? How can an analysis of
quotation help to develop a general theory of the
semantics-pragmatics interface? This volume is a collection of
original papers by leading researchers in the field on such issues
and related linguistic and philosophical aspects of quotations.
Paul Horwich's main aim in Reflections on Meaning is to explain how
mere noises, marks, gestures, and mental symbols are able to
capture the world--that is, how words and sentences (in whatever
medium) come to mean what they do, to stand for certain things, to
be true or false of reality. His
answer is a groundbreaking development of Wittgenstein's idea that
the meaning of a term is nothing more than its use. While the
chapters here have appeared as individual essays, Horwich has
edited them to make a continuous argument, focused on articulating
and developing an important new conception
of language.
This book argues that traditions in philosophy of language have
mistakenly focused on highly idealized linguistic contexts.
Instead, it presents a non-idealcfoundational theory of language
that contends that the essential function of language is to direct
attention for the purpose of achieving diverse social and political
goals.
Moral realists maintain that morality has a distinctive subject
matter. Specifically, realists maintain that moral discourse is
representational, that moral sentences express moral propositions -
propositions that attribute moral properties to things.
Noncognitivists, in contrast, maintain that the realist imagery
associated with morality is a fiction, a reification of our
noncognitive attitudes. The thought that there is a distinctively
moral subject matter is regarded as something to be debunked by
philosophical reflection on the way moral discourse mediates and
makes public our noncognitive attitudes. The realist fiction might
be understood as a philosophical misconception of a discourse that
is not fundamentally representational but whose intent is rather
practical. There is, however, another way to understand the realist
fiction. Perhaps the subject matter of morality is a fiction that
stands in no need of debunking, but is rather the means by which
our attitudes are conveyed. Perhaps moral sentences express moral
propositions, just as the realist maintains, but in accepting a
moral sentence competent speakers do not believe the moral
proposition expressed but rather adopt the relevant non-cognitive
attitudes. Noncognitivism, in its primary sense, is a claim about
moral acceptance: the acceptance of a moral sentence is not moral
belief but is some other attitude. Standardly, non-cognitivism has
been linked to non-factualism - the claim that the content of a
moral sentence does not consist in its expressing a moral
proposition. Indeed, the terms 'noncognitivism' and 'nonfactualism'
have been used interchangeably. But this misses an important
possibility, since moral content may be representational but the
acceptance of moral sentences might not be belief in the moral
proposition expressed. This possibility constitutes a novel form of
noncognitivism, moral fictionalism. Whereas nonfactualists seek to
debunk the realist fiction of a moral subject matter, the moral
fictionalist claims that that fiction stands in no need of
debunking but is the means by which the noncognitive attitudes
involved in moral acceptance are conveyed by moral utterance. Moral
fictionalism is noncognitivism without a non-representational
semantics.
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