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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Philosophy of language
Howard Pattee is a physicist who for many years has taken his own path in studying the physics of symbols, which is now a foundation for biosemiotics. By extending von Neumann's logical requirements for self-replication, to the physical requirements of symbolic instruction at the molecular level, he concludes that a form of quantum measurement is necessary for life. He explains why all non-dynamic symbolic and informational controls act as special (allosteric) constraints on dynamical systems. Pattee also points out that symbols do not exist in isolation but in coordinated symbol systems we call languages. Such insights turn out to be necessary to situate biosemiotics as an objective scientific endeavor. By proposing a way to relate quiescent symbolic constraints to dynamics, Pattee's work builds a bridge between physical, biological, and psychological models that are based on dynamical systems theory. Pattee's work awakes new interest in cognitive scientists, where his recognition of the necessary separation-the epistemic cut-between the subject and object provides a basis for a complementary third way of relating the purely symbolic, computational models of cognition and the purely dynamic, non-representational models. This selection of Pattee's papers also addresses several other fields, including hierarchy theory, artificial life, self-organization, complexity theory, and the complementary epistemologies of the physical and biological sciences.
Language carries more than meanings; language conveys a means of conceiving the world. In this sense, national legal systems expressed through national languages organize the Law based on their own understanding of reality. International Law becomes, in this context, the meeting point where different legal cultures and different views of world intersect. The diversity of languages and legal systems can enrich the possibilities of understanding and developing international law, but it can also represent an instability and unsafety factor to the international scenario. This multilegal-system and multilingual scenario adds to the complexity of international law and poses new challenges. One of them is legal translation, which is a field of knowledge and professional skill that has not been the subject of theoretical thinking on the part of legal scholars. How to negotiate, draft or interpret an international treaty that mirrors what the parties, who belong to different legal cultures and who, on many occasions, speak different mother tongues, want or wanted to say? By analyzing the decision-making process and the legal discourse adopted by the WTO s Appellate Body, this book highlights the active role of language in diplomatic negotiations and in interpreting international law. In addition, it also shows that the debate on the effectiveness and legitimacy of International Law cannot be separated from the linguistic issue."
Every two years since 1989, an international colloquium on cognitive science is held in Donostia - San Sebastian, attracting the most important researchers in that field. This volume is a collection of the invited papers to the Sixth International Colloquium on Cognitive Science (ICCS-99), written from a multidisciplinary, cognitive perspective, and addressing various essential topics such as self-knowledge, intention, consciousness, language use, learning and discourse. This collection reflects not only the various interdisciplinary origins and standpoints of the participating researchers, but also the richness, fruitfulness, and exciting state of research in the field of cognitive science today. A must-read for anyone interested in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and computer science, and in the perception of these topics from the perspective of cognitive science.
In Rediscovering Colors: A Study in Pollyanna Realism, Michael Watkins endorses the Moorean view that colors are simple, non-reducible, properties of objects. Consequently, Watkins breaks from what has become the received view that either colors are reducible to certain properties of interest to science, or else nothing is really colored. What is novel about the work is that Watkins, unlike other Mooreans, takes seriously the metaphysics of colors. Consequently, Watkins provides an account of what colors are, how they are related to the physical properties on which they supervene, and how colors can be causally efficacious without the threat of causal overdetermination. Along the way, he provides novel accounts of normal conditions and non-human color properties. The book will be of interest to any metaphysician and philosopher of mind interested in colors and color perception.
(1) Beliefs are involuntary, and not nonnally subject to direct voluntary control. For instance I cannot believe at will that my trousers are on fire, or that the Dalai Lama is a living God, even if you pay me a large amount of money for believing such things. (2) Beliefs are nonnally shaped by evidence for what is believed, unless they are, in some sense, irrational. In general a belief is rational if it is proportioned to the degree of evidence that one has for its truth. In this sense, one often says that "beliefs aim at truth" . This is why it is, on the face of it, irrational to believe against the evidence that one has. A subject whose beliefs are not shaped by a concern for their truth, but by what she wants to be the case, is more or less a wishful thinker or a self-deceiver. (3) Beliefs are context independent, in the sense that at one time a subject believes something or does not believe it; she does not believe it relative to one context and not relative to another. For instance if I believe that Paris is a polluted city, I cannot believe that on Monday and not on Tuesday; that would be a change of belief, or a change of mind, but not a case of believing one thing in one context and another thing in another context. If I believe something, the belief is more or 4 less pennanent across various contexts.
The primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of language are speech acts of the type called illocutionary acts. In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic John Searle and Daniel Vanderveken presented the first formalized logic of a general theory of speech acts. In Meaning and Speech Acts Daniel Vanderveken further develops the logic of speech acts and the logic of propositions to construct a general semantic theory of natural languages. Volume I, Principles of Language Use, explains the general principles that connect meaning, reason, thought and speech acts in the semantic structure of language. It presupposes no detailed knowledge of logical formalism, and will be accessible to a large readership of students and scholars from philosophy, lingustics, cognitive psychology and computer science. Volume II, Formal Semantics of Success and Satisfaction uses the resources of philosophical and mathematical logics to develop a formalization of the laws of the semantic theory advanced in Volume I. It will be of interest to theoretical linguists and those involved in mathematical logic and artificial intelligence.
The primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of language are speech acts of the type called illocutionary acts. In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic John Searle and Daniel Vanderveken presented the first formalized logic of a general theory of speech acts. In Meaning and Speech Acts Daniel Vanderveken further develops the logic of speech acts and the logic of propositions to construct a general semantic theory of natural languages. Volume I, Principles of Language Use, explains the general principles that connect meaning, reason, thought and speech acts in the semantic structure of language. It presupposes no detailed knowledge of logical formalism, and will be accessible to a large readership of students and scholars from philosophy, lingustics, cognitive psychology and computer science. Volume II, Formal Semantics of Success and Satisfaction uses the resources of philosophical and mathematical logics to develop a formalization of the laws of the semantic theory advanced in Volume I. It will be of interest to theoretical linguists and those involved in mathematical logic and artificial intelligence.
This is a book about the concept of a physical thing and about how the names of things relate to the things they name. It questions the prevalent view that names 'refer to' or 'denote' the things they name. Instead it presents a new theory of proper names, according to which names express certain special properties that the things they name exhibit. This theory leads to some important conclusions about whether things have any of their properties as a matter of necessity. This will be an important book for philosophers in metaphysics and the philosophy of language, though it will also interest linguists concerned with the semantics of natural language.
Wittgenstein's philosophy is a puzzling subject mainly because Wittgenstein himself does not appear to have given a full, explicit account of what he means by his phenomenology', phenomenological language' or phenomenological problems'. This book examines the idea of phenomenology throughout the different stages of Wittgenstein's philosophical development. The author argues that Wittgenstein's entire philosophical life was mainly concerned with what is immediately given in one's experience. Early interpretations of the phenomenological elements in Wittgenstein's philosophy usually emphasized the unique nature of his later work. However, the author here convincingly makes the case that Wittgenstein's concern with immediate experience and the way we describe it guided his philosophical journey through the phenomenological problems that pervade his work. The author offers many intriguing ideas and philosophical insights for Wittgenstein scholars and students, and philosophers interested in phenomenology who wish to study one of the most distinguished but least understood philosophers of the twentieth century. Audience: Philosophers, philosophers interested in phenomenology, Wittgenstein scholars.
The most recent version of the "linguistic turn," the revolution in
language theory shaped by Saussure's structural linguistics and
realized in a sweeping revision of investigations throughout the
humanities and social sciences, has rushed past the most basic
"fact" that there is language. What has been lost? Almost
everything of what Heidegger tried to approach under the name of
"ontology" until the word proved too laden by common
misapprehension to be of use. Most immediately, this is everything
of language that exceeds the order of signification, together with
the subject's engagement with this "excess" that is the (non)ground
of history and the material site of all relationality, beginning
with that unthought that is widely termed "culture."
This work is in two parts. It began as a general investigation of vagueness in natural languages. The Sorites Paradox came to dominate the work however, and the second part of the book consists in an discussion ofthat puzzle and related problems. The first part contains a general discussion ofthe nature ofvagueness and its sources. I discuss various conceptions of vagueness in chapter 1 and outline some of the problems to do with the conception of vagueness as a linguistic phenomenon. The most interesting of these is the Sorites paradox, which occurs where natural languages exhibit a particular variety of borderline case vagueness. I discuss some sources of vagueness of the borderline case variety, and views of the relation between linguistic behaviour and languages which are vague in this sense. I argue in chapter 2 that these problems are not to be easily avoided by statistical averaging techniques or attempts to provide a mathematical model of consensus in linguistic usage. I also consider in chapter 3 various approaches to the problem of providing an adequate logic and semantics for vague natural languages, and argue against two currently popular approaches to vagueness. These are supervaluation accounts which attempt to provide precise semantic models for vague languages based on the notion of specification spaces, and attempts to replace the laws ofclassical logic with systems offuzzy logic.
3 of law as an object that has always already been there, systematic and com plete. Quite the contrary. Some, indeed practically all of us, reject this sort of epistemology of law, and where the hypothesis of the coherence of the legal universe is put forward, this is in order to define it in very noticeably different terms from those traditionally used in legal scholarly accounts. If this referent, the law presented as a full discourses, runs through all of the contributions, this is because reasoning by analogy has to be found its specific place within this legal culture. It is the place to locate the problem of "lacunae" in law, which at bottom allows our various contributions to be classified. With Zaccaria and Maris, the question of lacunae is accepted as such (this is, we might say, the "traditionalist" aspect of these two articles, which is counterbalanced by - keeping to the same terminology - "modernist" emphases, sometimes Dworkinian in nature), and becomes the backdrop for considerations of purely hermeneutic type, in Zaccaria, ex tended in Maris to the field of ethics. The papers from Lenoble and Jackson, the former philosophical and the latter semiological, take as their main tar get this legal knowledge where the theory of lacunae finds its place."
Metaphor lies at the heart of the contemporary debate in aesthetics, semantics and the philosophy of science. It is generally recognised now that metaphor is not an obfuscation of the truth (as so many philosophers since Plato have argued); on the contrary, it is essential that we consider metaphor if we strive for an optimal understanding of how truth is gained both in science and in our everyday dealings with reality. Hence, metaphor is not of interest only for the literary theorists, but for all those who wish to understand science and how to grasp the structure of our social world. This volume presents eleven essays on the role of metaphor in philosophy, poetry, semiotics, art, literary criticism, economics, medical science and in political theory. Through the use of metaphor, the contributors provide a unique and exciting picture of these disciplines.
The present publication forms part of a projected book that F. P. Ramsey drafted but never completed. It survived among his papers and ultimately came into the possession of the University of Pittsburgh in the circumstances detailed in the Editor's Introduction. Our hope in issuing this work at this stage - some sixty years after Ramsey's premature death at the age of 26 - is both to provide yet another token of his amazing philosophical creativity, and also to make available an important datum for the still to be written history of the development of philosophical analysis. This is a book whose appearance will, we hope and expect, be appreciated both by those interested in linguistic philosophy itself and by those concerned for its historical development in the present century. EDITORS'INTRODUCTION 1. THE RAMSEY COLLECTION Frank Plump ton Ramsey (22 February 1903 -19 January 1930) was an extra ordinary scholarly phenomenon. Son of a distinguished mathematician and President of Magdalene College, Cambridge and brother of Arthur Michael, eventual Archbishop of Canterbury, Ramsey was closely connected with Cambridge throughout his life, ultimately becoming lecturer in Mathematics in the University. Notwithstanding his great mathematical talent, it was primarily logic and philosophy that engaged his interests, and he wrote original and important contributions to logic, semantics, epistomology, probability theory, philosophy of science, and economics, in addition to seminal work in the foundations of mathematics."
Alonzo Church was undeniably one ofthe intellectual giants of theTwenti- eth Century . These articles are dedicated to his memory and illustrate the tremendous importance his ideas have had in logic , mathematics, comput er science and philosophy . Discussions of some of thesevarious contributions have appeared in The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, and th e interested reader is invited to seek details there . Here we justtry to give somegener al sense of the scope, depth,and value of his work. Church is perhaps best known for the theorem , appropriately called " C h u r c h ' s Theorem ", that there is no decision procedure forthelogical valid- ity of formulas first-order of logic . A d ecision proce dure forthat part of logic would have come near to fulfilling Leibniz's dream of a calculus that could be mechanically used tosettle logical disputes . It was not to . be It could not be . What Church proved precisely is that there is no lambda-definable function that can i n every case providethe right answer , ' y e s ' or ' n o', tothe question of whether or not any arbitrarily given formula is valid .
Gottlob Frege's UEber Sinn und Bedeutung (`On Sense and Reference'), has come to be seen, in the century since its publication in 1892, as one of the seminal texts of analytic philosophy. It, along with the rest of Frege's writings on logic and mathematics, came to mark out a whole new domain of inquiry. This volume bears witness to the continuing importance and influence of that agenda. It contains original papers written by leading Frege scholars for the conference held in 1992 in Karlovy Vary to celebrate the publication of Frege's essay. The fourteen essays show how the questions Frege discusses in that essay connect intimately with issues much debated in current philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.
The task of the book is not to give a survey of the main theories on truth found in the literature. There are several books available which do this: The one of David for Deflationist (and Disquotational) Theories of Truth; that of Chapuis for Revision Theories of Truth; that of Kirkham for Correspondence Theories and several others; that ofRescher for Coherence Theories of Truth. Moreover the book is not an analy sis just of Tar ski's theory, like that of Moreno or the respective chapters in Kirkham, though Tarski's theory plays an important role in the whole work presented. The task of the book is to give a detailed answer to some basic questions on truth which have been perennial problems through the centuries and are still discussed today. The answer is given in the light of our knowledge today and with the help of modem logic. But the book explicitly aims at connecting recent problems with re lated ones in the whole history of philosophy. The method to incorporate important philosophers of the tradition into the analysis is that of disputation, i. e. of putting some of their main thesis into objections or counterobjections pro or contra a posi tive answer to the respective question. After the pros and cons are given a detailed answer to the question is proposed and finally commentaries and corrections are given to the objections and counterobjections in the light of the proposed answer.
This volume consists of papers delivered at the conference 'The Lvov-Warsaw School and Contemporary Philosophy', organised in celebration of the hun- dredth anniversary ofKazimierz Twardowski's first lecture as Professor of Phi- losophy at Lvov University. This lecture can be regarded as the starting point of the development of analytic philosophy in Poland, which culminated in the Warsaw School of Logic. The conference was held in Lvov (15-17 November) and Warsaw (19-21 November 1995). It was organised jointly by the Ukrainian Academy of Sci- ences and the Polish Academy of Sciences. The general organisation was un- dertaken by Professor Andrzej Grzegorczyk (polish Academy of Sciences) and Professor Marat Vernikov (Ukrainian Academy of Sciences). Professors Jaroslaw Isaievich (Ukrainian Academy of Sciences) and Jan Wolenski (Jagiel- Ionian University) were responsible for the scientific programme. Over 100 philosophers participated in the conference. Papers published in this volume are organised according to the sections of the conference and rep- of the papers delivered. resent a selection The editors would like to express their gratitude to Professor Andrzej Grze- gorczyk, spiritus movens of the conference, who, by including the present vol- ume in a programme of publications connected with the hundredth anniversary of the Lvov-Warsaw School, provided financial support for its preparation. Fi- nally, we express our gratitude to Dr Timothy Childers of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic for correcting the English of the papers.
Thought, Language, and Ontology: An Introduction Francesco Orilia William J. Rapaport Dipartimento di filosofia e scienze umane Department of Computer Science, Universita di Macerata Department of Philosophy, 62100 Macerata, Italy and Center for Cognitive Science orilia@unimc. it State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY 14260-2000, U. S. A. rapaport@cs. buffalo. edu 1 DeRe Hector-Neri Castaneda, the Mahlon Powell Professor of Philosophy at Indiana Univer- sity, died on September?, 1991, at the age of66, after a year-long illness. In his lengthy and intense philosophical career, Castaneda deeply influenced analytic philosophy. In the last part of his life, he was also committed to spreading his views beyond the circle of analytic philosophy and to bridging the gap between analytic and so-called continen- tal philosophy, convinced as he was of the overall unity of good philosophical theoriz- ing. The importance and influence of his work is witnessed by three Festschriften ded- icated to him, which included critical examinations of his theories by leading philoso- phers, along with Castaneda's replies (Tomberlin 1983, 1986; Jacobi & Pape 1980). Castaneda's humanity and devotion to philosophy is evidenced in his fascinating autobiography, contained in Tomberlin 1986. He was also the founding editor of Nous, one of the world's best philosophical journals, now published by Blackwell Publishers. From the beginning, Nous emphasized the analytic tradition in philosophy, but has al- ways been open to all kinds of serious philosophy, as its Latin motto witnessed: Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus.
The thirty-two papers in this collection are offered to Professor S.-Y. Kuroda by his friends, as a ge sture of their deep respect and enduring affection. One of the many ways in which Professor Kuroda has impressed us all is in the breadth of his interests and areas of expertise. He is one of those rare scholars whose work and interests span the whole range of his discipline. He is a figure of such intellectual stature that he has inspired, influenced, and encouraged researchers in an astonishing variety of projects. He continues to do so at an unslackened pace today, just as his own productivity remains vigorous. But mention of Yuki's inspiration and influence is inadequate without mention of his special humorousness, his mischievous wit, his charm and as a friend, has added a unique warmth. Knowing Yuki, and counting him quality to our lives. We who have contributed to this collection have done so in partial acknowledgement of, and gratitude for, this benign and masterful influence. The contributions to the collection reflect the range of Yuki's own interests, and cover a rich variety of approaches to the analysis of natural language. These include papers in philosophy, psychology, computer sciencel artificial intelligence, and linguistics, and, within linguistics, the entire breadth of the field: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and computation. Though diverse in their themes, language areas, and foci, the papers are bound by their authors' common bond to Yuki.
The editors of the Applied Logic Series are happy to present to the reader the fifth volume in the series, a collection of papers on Logic, Language and Computation. One very striking feature of the application of logic to language and to computation is that it requires the combination, the integration and the use of many diverse systems and methodologies - all in the same single application. The papers in this volume will give the reader a glimpse into the problems of this active frontier of logic. The Editors CONTENTS Preface IX 1. S. AKAMA Recent Issues in Logic, Language and Computation 1 2. M. J. CRESSWELL Restricted Quantification 27 3. B. H. SLATER The Epsilon Calculus' Problematic 39 4. K. VON HEUSINGER Definite Descriptions and Choice Functions 61 5. N. ASHER Spatio-Temporal Structure in Text 93 6. Y. NAKAYAMA DRT and Many-Valued Logics 131 7. S. AKAMA On Constructive Modality 143 8. H. W ANSING Displaying as Temporalizing: Sequent Systems for Subintuitionistic Logics 159 9. L. FARINAS DEL CERRO AND V. LUGARDON 179 Quantification and Dependence Logics 10. R. SYLVAN Relevant Conditionals, and Relevant Application Thereof 191 Index 245 Preface This is a collection of papers by distinguished researchers on Logic, Lin guistics, Philosophy and Computer Science. The aim of this book is to address a broad picture of the recent research on related areas. In particular, the contributions focus on natural language semantics and non-classical logics from different viewpoints."
Speakers can get to know the meaning of any of indefinitely many sentences that they have never heard before. This statement encapsulates the problem of linguistic creativity, which lies at the core of philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has also sparked off a considerable amount of work on the philosophy of mind. After establishing the failure of the familiar compositional approach to the problem, the book adopts a radically new start. It develops core elements of the later Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, putting them to work todissolve' the problem, proving it ill-framed by clarifying the questions posing it and breaking the spell of mistaken analogies that inform it. This sharply focused monograph thus has a dual aim: coping with a crucial problem that turns out to be a lot tougher than is generally supposed, and presenting a precise and rigorous demonstration of an unfamiliar and exciting philosophical approach. Audience: Clearly written and lucidly structured, the book addresses professional philosophers and advanced undergraduates alike.
According to the received tradition, the language used to to refer to natural kinds in scientific discourse remains stable even as theories about these kinds are refined. In this illuminating book, Joseph LaPorte argues that scientists do not discover that sentences about natural kinds, like 'Whales are mammals, not fish', are true rather than false. Instead, scientists find that these sentences were vague in the language of earlier speakers and they refine the meanings of the relevant natural-kind terms to make the sentences true. Hence, scientists change the meaning of these terms, This conclusions prompts LaPorte to examine the consequences of this change in meaning for the issue of incommensurability and for the progress of science. This book will appeal to students and professional in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of language.
This book discusses three linguistic projects carried out in the seventeenth century: the artificial languages created by Dalgamo and Wilkins, and Leibniz's uncompleted scheme. It treats each of the projects as self contained undertakings, which deserve to be studied and judged in their own right. For this reason, the two artificial languages, as well as Leib niz's work in this area, are described in considerable detail. At the same time, the characteristics of these schemes are linked with their intellectual context, and their multiple interrelations are examined at some length. In this way, the book seeks to combine a systematical with a historical ap proach to the subject, in the hope that both approaches profit from the combination. When I first started the research on which this book is based, I intended to look only briefly into the seventeenth-century schemes, which I assumed represented a typical universalist approach to the study of lan guage, as opposed to a relativistic one. The authors of these schemes thought, or so the assumption was, that almost the only thing required for a truly universal language was the systematic labelling of the items of an apparently readily available, universal catalogue of everything that exists." |
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