This book argues that there is a common cognitive mechanism underlying all indexical thoughts, in spite of their seeming diversity. Indexical thoughts are mental representations, such as beliefs and desires. They represent items from a thinker's point of view or her cognitive perspective. We typically express them by means of sentences containing linguistic expressions such as 'this (F)' or 'that (F)', adverbs like 'here', 'now', and 'today', and the personal pronoun 'I'. While generally agreeing that representing the world from a thinker's cognitive perspective is a key feature of indexical thoughts, philosophers disagree as to whether a thinker's cognitive perspective can be captured and rationalized by semantic content and, if so, what kind of content this is. This book surveys competing views and then advances its own positive account. Ultimately, it argues that a thinker's cognitive perspective - or her indexical point of view - is to be explained in terms of the content that is believed and asserted as the only kind of content that there is which thereby serves as the bearer of cognitive significance. The Indexical Point of View will be of interest to philosophers of mind and language, linguists, and cognitive scientists.

This book is about the idea that some true statements would have been true no matter how the world had turned out, while others could have been false. It develops and defends a version of the idea that we tell the difference between these two types of truths in part by reflecting on the meanings of words. It has often been thought that modal issues-issues about possibility and necessity-are related to issues about meaning. In this book, the author defends the view that the analysis of meaning is not just a preliminary to answering modal questions in philosophy; it is not merely that before we can find out whether something is possible, we need to get clear on what we are talking about. Rather, clarity about meaning often brings with it answers to modal questions. In service of this view, the author analyzes the notion of necessity and develops ideas about linguistic meaning, applying them to several puzzles and problems in philosophy of language. Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic.

This book defends the Direct Reference (DR) thesis in philosophy of language regarding proper names and indexical pronouns. It uniquely draws out the significant consequences of DR when it is conjoined with the fact that these singular terms sometimes fail to refer. Even though DR is widely endorsed by philosophers of language, many philosophically important and radically controversial consequences of the thesis have gone largely unexplored. This book makes an important contribution to the DR literature by explicitly addressing the consequences that follow from DR regarding failure of reference. Michael McKinsey argues that only a form of neutral free logic can capture a revised concept of logical truth that is consistent with the fact that any sentence of any form that contains a directly referring genuine term can fail to be either true or false on interpretations where that term fails to refer. He also explains how it is possible for there to be true (or false) sentences that contain non-referring names, even though this possibility seems inconsistent with DR. Consequences of Reference Failure will be of interest to philosophers of language and logic and linguists working on Direct Reference.

This Handbook offers students and more advanced readers a valuable resource for understanding linguistic reference; the relation between an expression (word, phrase, sentence) and what that expression is about. The volume's forty-one original chapters, written by many of today's leading philosophers of language, are organized into ten parts: I Early Descriptive Theories II Causal Theories of Reference III Causal Theories and Cognitive Significance IV Alternate Theories V Two-Dimensional Semantics VI Natural Kind Terms and Rigidity VII The Empty Case VIII Singular (De Re) Thoughts IX Indexicals X Epistemology of Reference Contributions consider what kinds of expressions actually refer (names, general terms, indexicals, empty terms, sentences), what referring expressions refer to, what makes an expression refer to whatever it does, connections between meaning and reference, and how we know facts about reference. Many contributions also develop connections between linguistic reference and issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.

This book engages with a range of questions about the nature of faith. The authors defend a distinctive conception of faith involving resistance to psychological, practical and epistemic challenges, from which a novel account of the psychology and epistemology of faith is developed.

This book presents a new nominalistic philosophy of mathematics: semantic conventionalism. Its central thesis is that mathematics should be founded on the human ability to create language - and specifically, the ability to institute conventions for the truth conditions of sentences. This philosophical stance leads to an alternative way of practicing mathematics: instead of "building" objects out of sets, a mathematician should introduce new syntactical sentence types, together with their truth conditions, as he or she develops a theory. Semantic conventionalism is justified first through criticism of Cantorian set theory, intuitionism, logicism, and predicativism; then on its own terms; and finally, exemplified by a detailed reconstruction of arithmetic and real analysis. Also included is a simple solution to the liar paradox and the other paradoxes that have traditionally been recognized as semantic. And since it is argued that mathematics is semantics, this solution also applies to Russell's paradox and the other mathematical paradoxes of self-reference. In addition to philosophers who care about the metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics or the paradoxes of self-reference, this book should appeal to mathematicians interested in alternative approaches.

Linguistic typology identifies both how languages vary and what they all have in common. This Handbook provides a state-of-the art survey of the aims and methods of linguistic typology, and the conclusions we can draw from them. Part I covers phonological typology, morphological typology, sociolinguistic typology and the relationships between typology, historical linguistics and grammaticalization. It also addresses typological features of mixed languages, creole languages, sign languages and secret languages. Part II features contributions on the typology of morphological processes, noun categorization devices, negation, frustrative modality, logophoricity, switch reference and motion events. Finally, Part III focuses on typological profiles of the mainland South Asia area, Australia, Quechuan and Aymaran, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, the Kampa subgroup of Arawak, Omotic, Semitic, Dravidian, the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian and the Awuyu-Ndumut family (in West Papua). Uniting the expertise of a stellar selection of scholars, this Handbook highlights linguistic typology as a major discipline within the field of linguistics.

Addressing the influential analysis of law and literature, this book offers a new perspective on their relationship. The law and literature movement that has gained global prominence in the course of last decades of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries has provided the research and teaching of law with a considerable body of new and valuable knowledge and understanding. Most of the knowledge and insights generated by the movement concern either a thematic overlap between legal and literary discourses - suggesting they deal with the same moral concerns - or a rhetorical, semiotic or general linguistic comparability or 'sameness' between them - imputing to both the same or very similar narrative structures. The Literary Exception and the Rule of Law recognises the wealth of knowledge generated by this approach to the relationship between law and literature, and acknowledges its debt to this genre of scholarship. It nevertheless also proposes, on the basis of a number of revealing phenomenological inquiries, a different approach to law and literary studies: one that emphasises the irreducible difference between law and literature. It does so with the firm believe that a regard for the very different and indeed opposite discursive trajectories of legal and literary language allows for a more profound understanding of the unique and indeed separate roles that the discourses of law and literature generally play in the sustenance of relatively stable legal cultures. This important rethinking of the relationship between law and literature will appeal to scholars and students of legal theory, jurisprudence, philosophy, politics and literary theory.

What would happen if structures, forms, and other stand-alone entities thought to comprise our intellectual toolkit—words, meanings, signs—were jettisoned? How would a work written in a purportedly dead language, like The Iliad, or penned in a foreign tongue be approached if deemed legible without structures such as meaning-bearing signs or grammatical rules? A New Philosophy of Discourse charts a novel course in response to these questions, coining an original concept of discourse, or talk!, that Joshua Kates presents as more fundamental than language. In Kates’ conception of discourse, writing and speech take shape entirely as events, situated within histories, contexts, and traditions themselves always in the making. Combining literary theory, literary criticism, and philosophy, to reveal a new perspective on discourse, Kates focuses on literary criticism, literary texts by Charles Bernstein and Stanley Elkin, and the philosophical writings of Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson and Martin Heidegger. This ground-breaking study bridges the analytical/continental divide, by working through concrete problems using novel and extended interpretations with wide-ranging implications for the humanities.

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.

This book presents a systematic unifying-pluralist account-a "constructive-engagement" account-of how cross-tradition engagement in philosophy is possible. The goal of this "constructive-engagement" account is, by way of reflective criticism, argumentation, and methodological guiding principles, to inquire into how distinct approaches from different philosophical traditions can talk to and learn from each other for the sake of making joint contributions to the contemporary development of philosophy. In Part I of the book, Bo Mou explores a range of fundamental theoretic and methodological issues in cross-tradition philosophical engagement and philosophical interpretation. In Part II, he analyzes several representative case studies that demonstrate how relevant resources in the Western and Chinese philosophical traditions can constructively engage with each other. These studies cover issues in philosophical methodology, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and logic, and ethics. The book's theoretical and practical approaches expand the vision, coverage, and agenda of doing philosophy comparatively, and promote worldwide joint efforts of cross-tradition philosophical inquiries. Cross-Tradition Engagement in Philosophy will be of interest to graduate students and scholars interested in comparative philosophy and the intersection of Chinese and Western philosophy. It will also appeal to those who are interested in the ways in which cross-tradition philosophical engagement can enhance contemporary philosophical debates in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and logic, and ethics.

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.

Brian Loar (1939-2014) was an eminent and highly respected philosopher of mind and language. He was at the forefront of several different field-defining debates between the 1970s and the 2000s-from his earliest work on reducing semantics to psychology, through debates about reference, functionalism, externalism, and the nature of intentionality, to his most enduringly influential work on the explanatory gap between consciousness and neurons. Loar is widely credited with having developed the most comprehensive functionalist account of certain aspects of the mind, and his 'phenomenal content strategy' is arguably one of the most significant developments on the ancient mind/body problem. This volume of essays honours the entirety of Loar's wide-ranging philosophical career. It features sixteen original essays from influential figures in the fields of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, including those who worked with and were taught by Loar. The essays are divided into three thematic sections covering Loar's work in philosophy of language, especially the relations between semantics and psychology (1970s-80s), on content in the philosophy of mind (1980s-90s), and on the metaphysics of intentionality and consciousness (1990s and beyond). Taken together, this book is a fitting tribute to one of the leading minds of the latter-20th century, and a timely reflection on Loar's enduring influence on the philosophy of mind and language.

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.

Pragmatics - the study of language in context, and of how we understand what other people say - is a core subject in English language, linguistics, and communication studies. This textbook introduces the key topics in this fast-moving field, including metaphor, irony, politeness, disambiguation, and reference assignment. It walks the reader through the essential theories in pragmatics, including Grice, relevance theory, speech act theory, and politeness theory. Each chapter includes a range of illustrative examples, guiding readers from the basic principles to a thorough understanding of the topics. A dedicated chapter examines how research is conducted in pragmatics, providing students with resources and ideas for developing their own projects. Featuring exercises, a comprehensive glossary, and suggestions for further reading, this book is accessible to beginner undergraduates, including those with no prior knowledge of linguistics. It is an essential resource for courses in English language, English studies, and linguistics.

This book defends a version of linguistic idealism, the thesis that the world is a product of language. In the course of defending this radical thesis, Gaskin addresses a wide range of topics in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and syntax theory. Starting from the context and compositionality principles, and the idea of a systematic theory of meaning in the Tarski-Davidson tradition, Gaskin argues that the sentence is the primary unit of linguistic meaning, and that the main aspects of meaning, sense and reference, are themselves theoretical posits. Ontology, which is correlative with reference, emerges as language-driven. This linguistic idealism is combined with a realism that accepts the objectivity of science, and it is accordingly distinguished from empirical pragmatism. Gaskin contends that there is a basic metaphysical level at which everything is expressible in language; but the vindication of linguistic idealism is nuanced inasmuch as there is also a derived level, asymmetrically dependant on the basic level, at which reality can break free of language and reach into the realms of the unnameable and indescribable. Language and World will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and linguistics.

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 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

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

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.

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.

A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 'I can't stop talking about this book' Jamie Klingler, co-founder #ReclaimTheseStreets 'What a gem. ... Makes you look at the world, and yourself, afresh.' Minna Salami, author of Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone 'A generous combination of passion and practicality that is not easily resisted. A rare book that might actually change our minds' Daniel Hahn OBE 'A book at once vigorous and generous, pleasurable and galvanising' Sophie Hughes, International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator What does it really mean to speak freely? A wise, beautifully written book that explores the way language shapes our lives and how we see the world - and what happens when we learn new words, and new ways of speaking to each other. Language opens up our world, and in the same instant, limits it. What does it mean to exist in a language that was never meant for you to speak? Why are we missing certain words? How can we talk about our communal problems without fuelling them? What does it actually mean to speak freely? As a writer and activist fighting for equality, Kubra Gumusay has been thinking about these questions for many years. In this book she explores how language shapes our thinking and determines our politics. She shows how people become invisible as individuals when they are always seen as part of a group, and the way those in the minority often have to expend energy cleaning up the messy thinking of others. But she also points to how we might shape conversations to allow for greater ambiguity and individuality, how arguments might happen in a space of learning and vulnerability without sacrificing principles - how we might all be able to speak freely.

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.

This book deals with matters of embodiment and meaning-in other words, the essential components of what Continental thought, since Heidegger, has come to consider as "communication." A critical theme of this book concerns the basic tenet that consciousness of one's Self and one's body is only possible through human relationship. This is, of course, the phenomenological concept of intersubjectivity. But rather than let this concept remain an abstraction by discussing it as merely a function of language and signs, this work attempts to explicate it empirically. That is, it discusses the manner in which-from infancy to childhood and adolescence (and the dawning of our sexual identities) through physical maturity and old age-we come to experience the ecstasy of what Merleau-Ponty has so poetically termed "flesh." It is rarely clear what someone means when she or he uses the word "communication." An important objective of this book is, thus, to advance understanding of what communication is. In academic discourse, "communication" has come to be understood in a number of contexts-some conflicting and overlapping-as a process, a strategy, an event, an ethic, a mode or instance of information, or even a technology. In virtually all of these discussions, the concept of communication is discussed as though the term's meaning is well known to the reader. When communication is described as a process, the meaning of the term is held at an operational level-that is, in the exchange of information between one person and another, what must unambiguously be inferred is that "communication" is taking place. In this context, information exchange and communication become functionally synonymous. But as a matter of embodied human psychological experience, there is a world of difference between them. As such, this book attempts to fully consider the question of how we experience the event of human communication. The author offers a pioneering study that advances the raison d'etre of the emergent field of "communicology," while at the same time offering scholars of the human sciences a new way of thinking about embodiment and relational experience.

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.