scholarly journals Cortando árboles y relaciones (una reflexión escéptica en torno a un tema de Searle)

1984 ◽  
Vol 16 (46) ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Julio Cabrera Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Literal Meaning ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Theory Of Language

The notion of "literal meaning" can be considered to be a unifying category, "projected" onto the natural differentiation of uses of language. This precludes the usual ontological expressions, in the material mode of speech, such as "There exists a meaning, common to many occurrences of a term ", and the like. Although a certain theory of language allows the employment of such an unifying cathegory, this is not necessary for determining truth-conditions for sentences in which the term appears. These conditions can be determined, in fact, for each "cotext "; that is to say for each linguistic environment oí the tenn. This is an even morc skeptical approach than Searle's criticisms against tendencies in the contemporary philosophy of language in which he attempts to determine truth-conditions independently from contextual considerations. [J.C.A.]

Aboutness

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Library Science ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Major Advance ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Made In

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. However, it has played no real role in philosophical semantics, which is surprising. This is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection—about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. This book maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results—directed content—is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. The book represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.

Borges on Replication and Concept Formation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yemima Ben-Menahem
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Concept Formation ◽  
Jorge Luis Borges ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
The Common

This chapter examines three stories by Jorge Luis Borges: “Funes: His Memory,” “Averroës's Search,” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Each of these highlights the intricate nature of concepts and replication in the broad sense. The common theme running through these three stories is the word–world relation and the problems this relation generates. In each story, Borges explores one aspect of the process of conceptualization, an endeavor that has engaged philosophers ever since ancient Greece and is still at the center of contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Together, Borges's stories present a complex picture of concepts and processes of conceptualization.

Metaphor

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marga Reimer ◽  
Elisabeth Camp
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Conceptual Structures ◽  
Linguistic Phenomenon ◽  
Rule Out

Metaphor has traditionally been construed as a linguistic phenomenon: as something produced and understood by speakers of natural language. So understood, metaphors are naturally viewed as linguistic expressions of a particular type, or as linguistic expressions used in a particular type of way. This linguistic conception of metaphor is adopted in this article. In doing so, the article does not intend to rule out the possibility of non-linguistic forms of metaphor. Many theorists think that non-linguistic objects (such as paintings or dance performances) or conceptual structures (like love as a journey or argument as war) should also be treated as metaphors. Indeed, the idea that metaphors are in the first instance conceptual phenomena, and linguistic devices only derivatively, is the dominant view in what is now the dominant area of metaphor research: cognitive science. In construing metaphor as linguistic, the article merely intends to impose appropriate constraints on a discussion whose focus is the understanding and analysis of metaphor within contemporary philosophy of language.

Imperative logic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Green
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Literal Meaning ◽  
Empty Stomach ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Imperative Logic ◽  
The Status ◽  
Logic Of Imperatives ◽  
Shed Light

Imperatives lie at the heart of both practical and moral reasoning, yet they have been overshadowed by propositions and relegated by many philosophers to the status of exclamations. One reason for this is that a sentence’s having literal meaning seems to require its having truth-conditions and ‘Keep your promises!’ appears to lack such conditions, just as ‘Ouch!’ does. One reductionist attempt to develop a logic of imperatives translates them into declaratives and construes inferential relations among the former in terms of inferential relations among the latter. Since no such reduction seems fully to capture the meaning of imperatives, others have expanded our notion of inference to include not just truth – but also satisfaction – preservation, according to which an imperative is satisfied just in case what it enjoins is brought about. A logic capturing what is distinctive about imperatives may shed light on the question whether an ‘ought’ is derivable from an ‘is’; and may elucidate the claim that morality is, or comprises, a system of hypothetical imperatives. Furthermore, instructions, which are often formulated as imperatives (‘Take two tablets on an empty stomach!’), are crucial to the construction of plans of action. A proper understanding of imperatives and their inferential properties may thus also illuminate practical reasoning.

Dialectics of Internal and External: Structure and Speech Contamination

1998 ◽  
pp. 35-40
Author(s):  
Janna V. Gorbyleva
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Logical Structure ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Language Functioning ◽  
External Structure ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Verbal Thinking ◽  
Linguistic Philosophy

The central topic of this paper is the analysis of the dialectical interdependency of internal and external in the theory of language as a symbolic system. Referring to and analyzing the philosophic legacy of W. von Humboldt, B. Russell, L. Wittgenstein, F. de Saussure and G. Spet, the author concludes that the dialectics of internal and external is not an accidental and episodic phenomenon of language. It rather is an intrinsic, ontological trait apart from which an adequate cognition of the essence of language is impossible. Taking the internal form as a logical structure, it is possible to view it as something "higher and fundamental" in language, something that is attainable more by intuition than by research. The internal intellectual base of this grammatical stability lies in the sphere of purely logical forms. If internal word formulations are related to and governed by the spirit, then the external forms in fact conceal an inner grammatical and syntactic edifice. The laws of external speech functioning are manifested, for example, in bilingualism, which may be viewed either as a social phenomenon related to individual thinking and classificatory abilities or as an evidence of the existence of common verbal structures in human consciousness. The author proposes to transfer such linguistic terms as "bilingualism" and "contamination" into a different context as a way of seeking new topical domains within the linguistic philosophy and the philosophy of language. The empiricism of specific language functioning in the form of bilingual language contamination brings us back to the assumption of the existence of uniform internal metalanguage structures of verbal thinking.

Is Wittgenstein a Contextualist?

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Voltolini ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Family Resemblance ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Truth Conditions

There is definitely a family resemblance between what contemporary contextualism maintains in philosophy of language and some of the claims about meaning put forward by the later Wittgenstein. Yet the main contextualist thesis, namely that linguistic meaning undermines truth-conditions, was not defended by Wittgenstein. If a claim in this regard can be retrieved in Wittgenstein despite his manifest antitheoretical attitude, it is instead that truth-conditions trivially supervene on linguistic meaning. There is, however, another Wittgensteinian claim that truly has a contextualist flavour, namely that linguistic meaning is itself wide-contextual. To be sure, this claim does not lead to the eliminativist/intentionalist conception of linguistic meaning that radical contextualists have recently developed. Rather, it goes together with a robust conception of linguistic meaning as intrinsically normative. Yet it may explain why Wittgenstein is taken to be a forerunner of contemporary contextualism.

Pragmatics

Philosophy ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Green
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Literal Meaning ◽  
Communicative Interaction ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Circular Argument ◽  
Grammatical Mood ◽  
Sense And Reference

Pragmatics is a branch of the philosophy of language as well as a field of linguistics. Pragmatics is to be distinguished from pragmatism, which is a doctrine concerning the nature of truth and knowledge. Whereas proponents of pragmatism are pragmatists, students of pragmatics are pragmaticists. Imagine a communicative interaction among two or more parties. Pragmaticists generally study that part of what is communicated that is left over after the conventionally determined, literal meaning of any words used has been subtracted out. (This is in contrast to what remains after the conventionally permitted, literal meaning has been subtracted out—see The Pragmatic Determination of What is Said) In part because pragmatics falls within the ambit of linguistics, it has an empirical, indeed an experimental dimension. Topics comprising pragmatics include speech acts (a special case of which are performatives), implicature, indexicals, presupposition, speaker meaning, and the pragmatic determination of what is said. A topic that has recently received intensive discussion and is of obvious importance to pragmatics is the very delineation of semantics from pragmatics. Other topics that have received less extensive scrutiny include expression and expressiveness and the relation of illocutionary force to semantic content and grammatical mood. In addition to the topics comprising the field, the value of pragmatics as an explanatory enterprise may be gauged by its ability to illuminate familiar communicative phenomena: among these are metaphor, irony, the significance of epithets and other “charged” language, the distinction between lying to and misleading an audience, facial expression, communicative properties of intonation, and so-called pragmatic paradoxes. Theoretical discussions of pornography have also been influenced by pragmatics. Aside from linguistics, logical theory also has a stake in pragmatics insofar as the notion of good reasoning cannot be captured simply with the notion of soundness. (A circular argument, for instance, can be sound.) Further, on the strength of certain ways of drawing the pragmatics/semantics boundary, some phenomena traditionally in the purview of semantics have been construed as pragmatic instead: among these are Frege’s distinction between sense and reference and the phenomenon of non-referring proper names. Certain semantic strategies, then, have a stake in pragmatics.

»Die durch das Bild angegebene Regel«. Die Ersetzung des Schemas durch das Symbol in der Sprachphilosophie der Reden an die deutsche Nation

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 90-108
Author(s):  
Tamás Hankovszky ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
German Nation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Theory Of Language

According to the early Fichte, designation of mental concepts and highly abstract concepts happens by means of ‘schemata’. Through an unconscious mechanism, we transfer the name of a sensible thing into a supersensible object. Fichte looked upon this process as a source of mistakes. In Addresses to the German Nation, he changes his conception and puts symbols or actual images in the place of schemata. These images don’t unify sensible and supersensible notions as schemata do, rather they draw an analogy between these notions. This analogy guides the subject in creating a notion. The word initiates and inspires the process for creating a notion. Furthermore, the word shows through the image, in what way we should set in motion our capacity of representation. So the word does not offer abstract rules for the reason but gives an image which contains the rules of procedure.From my point of view, Fichte modified his theory of language not only to deal with problems immanent to the philosophy of language. He aimed to construct a philosophy of language which was much more consistent with the view of the human being and the conception of intersubjectivity according to the Wissenschaftslehre. The modified philosophy of language proves more convincingly that basically when we understand speeches of others we neither apprehend perfect meanings nor receives ideas of others more or less passively but we re-create or re-produce thoughts of the speakers.Nach dem frühen Fichte bezeichnet die Sprache die „geistigen“ und die „sehr abstrakten“ Begriffe mit Hilfe von Schemata. Ein unbewusster Mechanismus überträgt den Namen sinnlicher Gegenstände auf übersinnliche. In diesem Verfahren sah Fichte eine Quelle von Fehlern. Die Reden modifizieren diese Theorie so, dass die Schemata durch Symbole bzw. Bilder ersetzt werden. Sie vereinigen nicht wie die Schemata sinnliche und übersinnliche Vorstellungen, sondern stellen eine Analogie zwischen ihnen her. Diese Analogie weist darauf hin, welche Vorstellung ein Subjekt bilden muss. Das Wort gibt einen Anlass und eine Anleitung zur Vorstellungsbildung und die von ihm bereitgestellte Information zeigt zugleich, wie wir unser Vorstellungsvermögen in Bewegung setzen müssen. Es teilt dabei keine abstrakten Regeln mit, sondern bietet in einem Bild Anweisung für das Gemüt. Nach meiner These änderte Fichte seine Sprachlehre nicht nur, um ein immanentes sprachphilosophisches Problem lösen zu können. Sein Ziel war es wohl auch, eine Sprachphilosophie zu schaffen, die besser dem Menschenbild der Wissenschaftslehre und ihrer Intersubjektivitätslehre entspricht, als die frühere. Die revidierte Sprachphilosophie kann überzeugender belegen, dass wir beim Verstehen der Sprache anderer Menschen nicht ausgemachte Bedeutungseinheiten begreifen und nicht Gedanken von außen aufnehmen, sondern diejenigen Gedanken re-produzieren und re-konstruieren, die auch der Redner gedacht und ausgesprochen hat.

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