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Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference - An Ideational Semantics (Hardcover, New)
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Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference - An Ideational Semantics (Hardcover, New)
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Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference extends Wayne Davis's
groundbreaking work on the foundations of semantics. Davis revives
the classical doctrine that meaning consists in the expression of
ideas, and advances the expression theory by showing how it can
account for standard proper names, and the distinctive way their
meaning determines their reference. He also shows how the theory
can handle interjections, syncategorematic terms, conventional
implicatures, and other cases long seen as difficult for both
ideational and referential theories. The expression theory is
founded on the fact that thoughts are event types with a
constituent structure, and that thinking is a fundamental
propositional attitude, distinct from belief and desire. Thought
parts ('ideas' or 'concepts') are distinguished from both sensory
images and conceptions. Word meaning is defined recursively:
sentences and other complex expressions mean what they do in virtue
of what thought parts their component words express and what
thought structure the linguistic structure expresses; and
unstructured words mean what they do in living languages in virtue
of evolving conventions to use them to express ideas. The
difficulties of descriptivism show that the ideas expressed by
names are atomic or basic. The reference of a name is the extension
of the idea it expresses, which is determined not by causal
relations, but by its identity or content together with the nature
of objects in the world. Hence a name's reference is dependent on,
but not identical to, its meaning. A name is directly and rigidly
referential because the extension of the idea it expresses is not
determined by the extensions of component ideas. The expression
theory thus has the strength of Fregeanism without its
descriptivist bias, and of Millianism without its referentialist or
causalist shortcomings. The referential properties of ideas can be
set out recursively by providing a generative theory of ideas,
assigning extensions to atomic ideas, and formulating rules whereby
the semantic value of a complex idea is determined by the semantic
values of its components. Davis also shows how referential
properties can be treated using situation semantics and possible
worlds semantics. The key is to drop the assumption that the values
of intension functions are the referents of the words whose meaning
they represent, and to abandon the necessity of identity for
logical modalities. Many other pillars of contemporary
philosophical semantics, such as the twin earth arguments, are
shown to be unfounded.
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