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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
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Minimal Semantics (Hardcover, New)
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Minimal Semantics (Hardcover, New)
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Minimal Semantics asks what a theory of literal linguistic meaning
is for--if you were to be given a working theory of meaning for a
language right now, what would you be able to do with it? Emma Borg
sets out to defend a formal approach to semantic theorizing from a
relatively new type of opponent--advocates of what she calls "dual
pragmatics." According to dual pragmatists, rich pragmatic
processes play two distinct roles in linguistic comprehension: as
well as operating in a post-semantic capacity to determine the
implicatures of an utterance, they also operate prior to the
determination of truth-conditional content for a sentence. That is
to say, they have an integral role to play within what is usually
thought of as the semantic realm.
Borg believes dual pragmatic accounts constitute the strongest
contemporary challenge to standard formal approaches to semantics
since they challenge the formal theorist to show not merely that
there is some role for formal processes on route to determination
of semantic content, but that such processes are sufficient for
determining content. Minimal Semantics provides a detailed
examination of this school of thought, introducing readers who are
unfamiliar with the topic to key ideas like relevance theory and
contextualism, and looking in detail at where these accounts
diverge from the formal approach.
Borg's defense of formal semantics has two main parts: first, she
argues that the formal approach is most naturally compatible with
an important and well-grounded psychological theory, namely the
Fodorian modular picture of the mind. Then she argues that the main
arguments adduced by dual pragmatists against formal
semantics--concerning apparent contextual intrusions into semantic
content--can in fact be countered by a formal theory. The defense
holds, however, only if we are sensitive to the proper conditions
of success for a semantic theory. Specifically, we should reject a
range of onerous constraints on semantic theorizing (e.g., that it
answer epistemic or metaphysical questions, or that it explain our
communicative skills) and instead adopt a quite minimal picture of
semantics.
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