First volume on mental fictionalism, a hot topic in philosophy of mind Great line of up contributors, including a chapter by Daniel Dennett Strong international potential due to contributors from UK, USA and eastern and western Europe

This book proposes a novel theory of truth and falsity. It argues that truth is a form of reference and falsity is a form of reference failure. Most of the philosophical literature on truth concentrates on certain ontological and epistemic problems. This book focuses instead on language. By utilizing the Fregean idea that sentences are singular referring expressions, the author develops novel connections between the philosophical study of truth and falsity and the huge literature in in the philosophy of language on the notion of reference. The first part of the book constructs the author's theory and argues for it in length. Part II addresses the ways in which the theory relates to, and is different from, some of the basic theories of truth. Part III takes up how to account for the truth of sentences with logical operators and quantifiers. Finally, Part IV discusses the applications and implications of the theory for longstanding problems in philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. A Referential Theory of Truth and Falsity will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and linguistics.

The elaboration of linguistic theories depends on the existence of adequate descriptions of particular languages; otherwise theories will be poorly grounded on empirical data. This book starts from theoretical points of wide acceptance among linguists and goes on to present a descriptive metalanguage, able to express the facts of verb valency, which constitute one of the core areas in linguistic description. Most of the data come from an extensive survey under way of the valency of Portuguese verbs; but the present work's relevance goes well beyond that, and incorporates a proposal applicable to other European languages, illustrated by the wealth of English examples included in the exposition. Among the topics discussed are the syntactic component of constructions (following here a proposal recently published in Culicover and Jackendoff's Simpler Syntax); delimitation and definition of semantic roles; the role of linking rules and their relation to prototypes; and the connection between linguistic expressions and cognitive units such as frames and schemata. The result is a notational system flexible and robust enough to describe all aspects of verb valency.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's works encompass a huge number of published philosophical manuscripts, notebooks, lectures, remarks, and responses, as well as his unpublished private diaries. The diaries were written mainly in coded script to interpolate his writings on the philosophy of language with autobiographic passages, but were previously unknown to the public and impossible to decode without learning the coding system. This book deciphers the cryptography of the diary entries to examine what Wittgenstein's personal idiom reveals about his public and private identities. Employing the semiotic doctrine of Charles S. Peirce, Dinda L. Gorlee argues that the style of writing reflects the variety of Wittgenstein's emotional moods, which were profoundly affected by his medical symptoms. Bringing Peirce's reasoning of abduction together with induction and deduction, the book investigates how the semiosis of the emotional, energetic, and logical interpretations of signs and objects reveal Wittgenstein's psychological states in the coded diaries.

There are arguably moral, legal, and prudential constraints on behavior. But are there epistemic constraints on belief? Are there any requirements arising from intellectual considerations alone? This volume includes original essays written by top epistemologists that address this and closely related questions from a variety of new, sometimes unexpected, angles. It features a wide variety of positions, ranging from arguments for and against the existence of purely epistemic requirements, reductions of epistemic requirements to moral or prudential requirements, the biological foundations of epistemic requirements, extensions of the scope of epistemic requirements to include such things as open-mindedness, eradication of implicit bias and interpersonal duties to object, to new applications such as epistemic requirements pertaining to storytelling, testimony, and fundamentalist beliefs. Anyone interested in the nature of responsibility, belief, or epistemic normativity will find a range of useful arguments and fresh ideas in this cutting-edge anthology.

Addressing objective and subjective views of the self and the world in philosophy and poetry, this collection brings together a chronology of John Koethe's thoughts on the connections between the two forms and makes a significant contribution to unsettling the oppositions that separate them. The essays traverse the philosophical conception of the self in modern poetry and locate connections between poets including William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery alongside philosophers including Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. Koethe pays special attention to romantic poetry and notions of the sublime, which he maps onto subjective individual experience and the objective perspective on the natural world. Koethe further explores this theme in a new essay on romanticism and the sublime in relation to the mind-body problem. Using an associative and impressionistic style to write philosophically about poetry, Koethe defends his own approach that such writing cannot and should not aim for the rigor of philosophical argumentation.

Interrogating the much-cherished concept of "poetic thinking," this book focusses on what interview and draft materials reveal of how poets think while in the act of writing. With findings from the cognitive tradition, this book uses performance theory and philosophy to examine this brief, creative window of conscious attention. Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought draws out the implications of this radically curtailed view of consciousness on the poems and other texts we compose. Henrich von Kleist's assertion that "it is not we, but a certain condition of ours which knows" emerges as central to this analysis of the thinking we perform in the very moments of composition. Employing an extensive archive of interview materials with major Anglophone poets, discussing how they think in the moments of composition, the book also provides a lucid account of the links between poetic composition and live performative thinking in the context of the early (pre)textual history of the Ancient Greeks. A transdisciplinary study at the crossroads of philosophy, cognitive psychology, literary studies and linguistics, this book reconceptualizes the wellsprings of new thought in poems and advances our understanding of thinking's complex but vital link to the moment of utterance.

This book offers a sustained, interdisciplinary examination of taste. It addresses a range of topics that have been at the heart of lively debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. We are quick to offer familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter-what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad taste, why it is valuable to make and evaluate judgments about matters of taste, and what, exactly, we mean in speaking about these matters. The essays in this volume open up new, intersecting lines of research about these questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. They address the notion of aesthetic taste; connections between taste and the natures of truth, disagreement, assertion, belief, retraction, linguistic context-sensitivity, and the semantics/pragmatics interface; experimental inquiry about taste; and metaphysical questions underlying ongoing discussions about taste. Perspectives on Taste will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy.

The Language of Surrealism explores the revolutionary experiments in language and mind undertaken by the surrealists across Europe between the wars. Highly influential on the development of art, literary modernism, and current popular culture, surrealist style remains challenging, striking, resonant and thrilling - and the techniques by which surrealist writing achieves this are set out clearly in this book. Stockwell draws on recent work in cognitive poetics and literary linguistics to re-evaluate surrealism in its own historical setting. In the process, the book questions later critical theoretical views of language that have distorted our ideas about both surrealism and language itself. What follows is a piece of literary criticism that is fully contextualised, historically sensitive, and textually driven, and which sets out in rich and readable detail this most intriguing and disturbing literature.

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.

Merleau-Ponty's status as a philosopher of perception is well-established, but his distinctive contributions to the philosophy and phenomenology of language have yet to be fully appreciated. Through detailed, clear, and accessible analyses of Merleau-Ponty's views of linguistic meaning, expression, and understanding, and by tracing the evolution and development of these views throughout the course of his philosophical career, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Language offers a global and comprehensive picture of his engagement with the philosophy of language. This book demonstrates that the phenomenology of language is essential for grasping the meaning and motivations behind some of Merleau-Ponty's most celebrated philosophical contributions. It argues that his philosophy of language should take on a central role in our appraisal of the development and basic goals of his thought. And it suggests that the success of phenomenology's return to the 'things themselves' must be judged not only by the evidence of intuition, but also by the labour of expression.

Through his innovative study of language, noted Heidegger scholar Lawrence Hatab offers a proto-phenomenological account of the lived world, the "first" world of factical life, where pre-reflective, immediate disclosiveness precedes and makes possible representational models of language. Common distinctions between mind and world, fact and value, cognition and affect miss the meaning-laden dimension of embodied, practical existence, where language and life are a matter of "dwelling in speech." In this second volume, Hatab supplements and fortifies his initial analysis by offering a detailed treatment of child development and language acquisition, which exhibit a proto-phenomenological world in the making. He then takes up an in-depth study of the differences between oral and written language (particularly in the ancient Greek world) and how the history of alphabetic literacy shows why Western philosophy came to emphasize objective, representational models of cognition and language, which conceal and pass over the presentational domain of dwelling in speech. Such a study offers significant new angles on the nature of philosophy and language.

In 1973 a workshop was held at The University of Western Ontario on topics of common interest to philosophers and linguists. This volume con tains most of the papers presented at the workshop. Also included are previously unpublished essays by R. Dougherty and H. Lasnik as well as a comment on G. Lakoff's paper by B. van Fraassen. K. Donnellan's paper was presented at the workshop and subsequently appeared in The Philosophical Review. We thank the editors of this journal for permission to publish the paper here. The papers by D. Lewis, R. Stalnaker, G. Lakoff, B. Partee and H. Herzberger appeared earlier in Journal of Philosophical Logic by arrangement of the editors with B. van Fraassen and D. Reidel Publishing Company. The editors thank the officers of The University of Western Ontario for making the workshop possible and Pauline Campbell for making the workshop work. THE EDITORS DAVID LEWIS COUNTERFACTUALS AND COMPARATIVE POSSIBILITY* In the last dozen years or so, our understanding of modality has been much improved by means of possible-world semantics: the project of analyzing modal language by systematically specifying the conditions under which a modal sentence is true at a possible world. I hope to do the same for counterfactual conditionals. I write A 0-C for the counter factual conditional with antecedent A and consequent C. It may be read as 'H it were the case that A, then it would be the case that C' or some more idiomatic paraphrase thereof."

First handbook on liberal naturalism Superb line up of international contributors, many of whom are leading names in the field Covers hot topics such as history of philosophical naturalism, key figures from Aristotle to Quine and contemporary issues such as ethical, metaphysical and epistemological naturalism

The study offers an analysis of three grammatical constructions specifically employed in direct performance of directive speech acts in Polish. Constructions of this type have not yet been widely analyzed, as research pertaining to the relation between the grammatical structure of an utterance and its pragmatic effects has focused mainly on indirect speech acts. The study combines a discussion of a wide range of corpus examples with a detailed analysis of hand-picked examples situated in specific contexts. The aim is to show how the grammatical make-up of a construction functions with contextual factors to bring about a range of pragmatic effects pertaining to the speakers' interaction and their interpersonal relation. The framework of the study is the theory of cognitive grammar.

Hellenistic philosophy concerns the thought of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics, the most influential philosophical groups in the era between the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE) and the defeat of the last Greek stronghold in the ancient world (31 BCE). The Routledge Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy provides accessible yet rigorous introductions to the theories of knowledge, ethics, and physics belonging to each of the three schools, explores the fascinating ways in which interschool rivalries shaped the philosophies of the era, and offers unique insight into the relevance of Hellenistic views to issues today, such as environmental ethics, consumerism, and bioethics. Eleven countries are represented among the Handbook's 35 authors, whose chapters were written specifically for this volume and are organized thematically into six sections: The people, history, and methods of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. Earlier philosophical influences on Hellenistic thought, such as Aristotle, Socrates, and Presocratics. The soul, perception, and knowledge. God, fate, and the primary principles of nature and the universe. Ethics, political theory, society, and community. Hellenistic philosophy's relevance to contemporary life. Spanning from the ancient past to the present, this Handbook aims to show that Hellenistic philosophy has much to offer all thinking people of the twenty-first century.

This series provides short, accessible and lively introduction to the major schools, movements and traditions in philosophy and the history of ideas since the beginning of the Enlightenment. All books in the series are written for undergraduates meeting the subject for the first time. Hermeneutics concerns itself with the theory of understanding and the interpretation of language. The question of how to correctly interpret and understand others remains one of the most contested branches of philosophy. In Understanding Hermeneutics Lawrence Schmidt provides an introduction to modern hermeneutics through a systematic examination of the ideas of its key philosophical proponents. Chapter 1 examines the ideas, of the Protestant theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, who argues that misunderstanding is always possible so we must always employ interpretation if we are to understnad correctly. Chapter 2 discusses the ideas of Dilthey, who maintains that understanding in the humanities is fundamentally different from explanation in the natural sciences, and who presents a methodology to judge what another person means or feels by means of their language and also their gestures, facial expressions, and manners of acting. Chapter 3 explores the ideas of Heidegger who radicalizes the concept by shifting its focus from interpreting texts to an existential interpretation of human being. In Chapter 4 the recent ideas of Gadamer are examined, which extend to examining the structures of hermeneutic experience and to question the supremacy of the natural sciences as models for truth. The final chapters consider some of the criticisms and controversies surrounding hermeneutics, including the work of Habermas, Hirsch, Ricoeur and Derrida, and the prospects for the future of hermeneutics.

Metaphors of Multilingualism explores changing attitudes towards multilingualism by focusing on shifts both in the choice and in the use of metaphors. Rainer Guldin uses linguistics, philosophy, literature, literary theory and related disciplines to trace the radical redefinition of multilingualism that has taken place over the last decades. This overall change constitutes a paradigmatic shift. However, despite the emergence of the new paradigm, the traditional monolingual point of view is still significantly influencing present-day attitudes towards multilingualism. Consequently, the emergent paradigm has to be studied in close connection with its predecessor. This book is the first extensive attempt to provide a critical overview of the key metaphors that organize current perceptions of multilingualism. Instead of an exhaustive list of possible metaphors of multilingualism, the emphasis is on three closely interrelated and overlapping clusters that play a central role in both paradigms: organic metaphors of the body, kinship and gender metaphors, as well as spatial metaphors. The examples are taken from different languages, among them French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. This is ground-breaking reading for scholars and researchers in the fields of linguistics, literature, philosophy, media studies, anthropology, history and cultural studies.

This innovative and interdisciplinary work brings together six essays which explore the complex relationship between linguistic translation and spatial translation and argue for an understanding of linguistic translation as an embodied phenomenon. Integrating perspectives from philosophy, multilingual poetry and literature, as well as science and geometry, the book begins with a reading of translators Donald A. Landes' and Richard Howard's own notes on the translation and interpretation of the French words sens and langue. In the essays that follow, Rabourdin intertwines insights from both phenomenology and translation studies, engaging in notions of space, body, sense, and language as filtered through a multilingual lens and drawing on a diversity of sources, including work from such figures as Jacques Derrida, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Poincare, Michel Butor, Caroline Bergvall, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Louis Wolfson and Lisa Robertson. This interdisciplinary thematic perspective highlights the need for an understanding of the experience of translation as neither distinctly linguistic or spatial but one which fluidly allows for the bilingual body to sense and make sense. This book offers a unique contribution to translation studies, comparative literature, French studies, and philosophy of language and will be of particular interest to students and scholars in these fields.

This book argues that Sellars' theory of intentionality can be understood as an advancement of a transcendental philosophical approach. It shows how Sellars develops his theory of intentionality through his engagement with the theoretical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The book delivers a provocative reinterpretation of one of the most problematic and controversial concepts of Sellars' philosophy: the picturing-relation. Sellars' theory of intentionality addresses the question of how to reconcile two aspects that seem opposed: the non-relational theory of intellectual and linguistic content and a causal-transcendental theory of representation inspired by the philosophy of the early Wittgenstein. The author explains how both parts cohere in a transcendental account of finite knowledge. He claims that this can only be achieved by reading Sellars as committed to a transcendental methodology inspired by Kant. In a final step, he brings his interpretation to bear on the contemporary metaphilosophical debate on pragmatism and expressivism. Intentionality in Sellars will be of interest to scholars of Sellars and Kant, as well as researchers working in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy.

This book is about supporting students in Higher Education using language, and specifically using a combination of written text based linguistic approaches alongside and with other non-text related languages. The authors call this a beyond-text subject based approach and argue that this can more effectively help students. The book first outlines and describes a 'paradigm of linguistics' that sees support as being only possible through linguistics written text approaches. It then describes how the authors have found through their own research studies that such approaches do not go far enough to best support students. They offer alternatives and justify them theoretically and empirically, and also suggest ways in which others can use similar approaches to best support students in HE. This book will be of interest to practitioners, students, teachers and researchers in the fields of Applied Linguistics, TESOL, English Medium Instruction (EMI), EAP and language education policy.

This volume advances discussion between critics and defenders of the force-content distinction and opens up new ways of thinking about force and speech acts in relation to the unity problem. The force-content dichotomy has shaped the philosophy of language and mind since the time of Frege and Russell. Isn't it obvious that, for example, the clauses of a conditional are not asserted and must therefore be propositions and propositions the forceless contents of forceful acts? But, others have recently asked in response, how can a proposition be a truth value bearer if it is not unified through the forceful act of a subject that takes a position regarding how things are? Can we not instead think of propositions as being inherently forceful, but of force as being cancelled in certain contexts? And what do assertoric, but also directive and interrogative force indicators mean? Force, Content and the Unity of the Proposition will be of interest to researchers working in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, philosophy of mind and linguistics.

Donald Davidson has made enormous contributions to the philosophy of action, epistemology, semantics and philosophy of mind and today is recognized as one of the most important analytical philosophers of the late twentieth century.
Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge addresses
* Davidson's writings on epistemology and theory of language with their implications of ontology and philosophy of mind
* the central issue of whether truth is the ultimate goal of enquiry, challenged by contributions from Richard Rorty and Paul Horwich
* Davidson's approach to semantics and applied linguistics as addressed by Kirk Ludwig, Gabriel Segal, Peter Pagin, Stephen Neale, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore and Reinaldo Elugardo
* Davidson's advances in the philosophy of mind in relation to the views of Williard V. Quine, John McDowell and Peter F. Strawson, in essays by Roger Gibson and Anita Avramides

This book examines the philosophical and scientific achievements of Sir Kenelm Digby, a successful English diplomat, privateer and natural philosopher of the mid-1600s. Not widely remembered today, Digby is one of the most intriguing figures in the history of early modern philosophers. Among scholars, he is known for his attempt to reconcile what perhaps seem to be irreconcilable philosophical frameworks: Aristotelianism and early modern mechanism. This contributed volume offers the first full-length treatment of Digby's work and of the unique position he occupied in early modern intellectual history. It explores key aspects of Digby's metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical method, and offers a new appraisal of his contributions to early modern natural philosophy and mathematics. A dozen contributors offer their expert insight into such topics as Body, quantity, and measures in Digby's natural philosophy Ecumenism and common notions in Digby Aristotelianism and accidents in Digby's philosophy Digby on body and soul Digby on method and experiments This book volume will be of benefit to a broad audience of scholars, educators, and students of the history of early modern science and philosophy.