Read and Download eBook Full
Author: Robin Jeshion
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-05-27
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 0199567883
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLeading philosophers present essays on an issue central to philosophy of mind, language, and perception: the nature of our thought about the external world. The essays explore directions for future research, an important resource for anyone working at the interface of semantics and mental representation.
Author: Rachel Goodman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2020-01-30
Total Pages: 279
ISBN-13: 0198746881
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe notion of singular (or de re) thought has become central in philosophy of mind and language, yet there is still little consensus concerning the best way to think about the nature of singular thought. Coinciding with recognition of the need for more clarity about the notion, there has been a surge of interest in the concept of a mental file as a way to understand what is distinctive about singular thought. What isn't always clear, however, is what mental files are meant to be, and why we should believe that thoughts that employ them are singular as opposed to descriptive. This volume brings together original chapters by leading scholars which aim to examine and evaluate the viability of the mental files framework for theorizing about singular thought. The first section of the volume addresses the central issues of the definition and nature of singular thought, as well as how it relates to the notion of a mental file. The second section addresses the legitimacy of the mental files conception of singular thought by assessing the philosophical motivations or the purported empirical support for the view, or by laying out a specific version of it. The third section helps to clarify both the notion of a mental file and the mental files conception of singular thought by focusing on their role in explaining de jure coreference in thought and language. The volume then concludes with a final section that casts doubt on the mental files conception and the legitimacy of the file-theoretic framework more generally.
Author: Guy Stock
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 1998-02-26
Total Pages: 250
ISBN-13: 0191589020
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAppearance versus Reality is a collection of new studies of the work of F. H. Bradley, a leading British philosopher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and one of the key figures in the emergence of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In recent years there has been a widespread revaluation of Bradley's philosophy: it has been found to offer alternative approaches to those inherited from Frege, Descartes, the British Empiricists, and Quinean naturalism, which have dominated analytic philosophy for some time. The nine well-known contributors to this volume, from Britain, North America, and Australia, focus on Bradley's views on truth, meaning, knowledge, and reality. These essays show that his work not only was crucial to the development of twentieth-century philosophy, but can illuminate contemporary debates in metaphysics, logic, and epistemology.
Author: Alex Grzankowski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2024-03-29
Total Pages: 345
ISBN-13: 1003855121
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe work of Mark Sainsbury has made a significant and challenging contribution to several central areas of philosophy, especially philosophy of language and logic. He has made significant contributions to puzzles concerning the nature of thought and language and pioneered research in the philosophical theory known as fictionalism. In this outstanding volume, 20 contributors engage with Sainsbury’s work but also go beyond it, exploring fundamental problems in the philosophy of language, mind, and logic. Topics covered include propositional thought, intentionality, the mind-body problem, singular thoughts, the individuation of concepts, nominalisation, logical form, non-existent objects, and vagueness. Thought: Its Origin and Reach will be of interest to professional philosophers and students working in philosophy of mind, language, epistemology, and metaphysics.
Author: Stephen Biggs
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-12-24
Total Pages: 789
ISBN-13: 1000226786
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis 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.
Author: Kenneth A. Taylor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021
Total Pages: 313
ISBN-13: 0195144740
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOur words and ideas refer to objects and properties in the external world; this phenomenon is central to thought, language, communication, and science. But great works of fiction are full of names that don't seem to refer to anything! In this book Kenneth A. Taylor explores the myriad of problems that surround the phenomenon of reference. How can words in language and perturbations in our brains come to stand for external objects? Reference is essential to truth, but which is more basic: reference or truth? How can fictional characters play such an important role in imagination and literature, and how does this use of language connect with more mundane uses? Taylor develops a framework for understanding reference, and the theories that other thinkers-past and present-have developed about it. But Taylor doesn't simply tell us what others thought; the book is full of new ideas and analyses, making for a vital final contribution from a seminal philosopher.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2024-02-26
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9004693610
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat is the relationship between the concept of person and the concept of intentionality? Is the phenomenological notion of essence somehow related to that of medieval philosophies? What kind of entity is the person understood in her irreducible singularity? These are some of the questions that the chapters in this book seek to address and develop by focusing on the thought of Aquinas, Scotus and Edith Stein. Indeed, the editors of the book are led by the conviction that a fruitful dialogue between medieval philosophy and 20th century phenomenology may prove useful in addressing questions and problems that are still relevant in contemporary debates. The book is divided into three sections, devoted respectively to medieval philosophy, phenomenology and some of the possible systematic and historical intersections between them. Contributors are Sarah Borden Sharkey, Antonio Calcagno, Therese Cory, Daniele De Santis, Andrew LaZella, Dominik Perler, Giorgio Pini, Francesco Valerio Tommasi, Anna Tropia, and Ingrid Vendrell Ferran.
Author: Manuel García-Carpintero
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-08-14
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 0191502588
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIt is the linguistic job of singular terms to pick out the objects that we think or talk about. But what about singular terms that seem to fail to designate anything, because the objects they refer to don't exist? We can employ these terms in meaningful thought and talk, which suggests that they are succeeding in fulfilling their representational task. A team of leading experts presents new essays on the much-debated problem of empty reference and thought. In the 1960s and 1970s Keith Donnellan, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam initiated a revolution in the then standard conception of reference—a concept at the core of philosophical inquiry. The repercussions of the revolution, particularly felt in metaphysics and epistemology, were soon refined by other influential writers such as Tyler Burge, Gareth Evans, and John Perry. They argued that some linguistic and mental representations have contents individuated by what they are about—by ordinary referents of expressions such as proper names, indexicals, definite descriptions and common nouns, i.e. by planets, people or natural kinds. The view was at odds with a central philosophical presumption at that time: that cognitive and linguistic access to objective reality is indirect and accidental, mediated by general descriptive characterizations, the only constitutive semantic feature of the expressions; hence its ontological and epistemological repercussions. A turning-point in the debate about how linguistic and mental representation reach external contents concerned the nature of empty mental and linguistic representations, framed by means of the very same expressions crucially invoked in the Donnellan-Kaplan-Kripke-Putnam arguments. The papers in this volume address different aspects of reference and thought about the (apparently) non-existent.
Author: Vojislav Bozickovic
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-10-22
Total Pages: 165
ISBN-13: 1000206947
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis 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.
Author: Imogen Dickie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 0198755619
DOWNLOAD EBOOKImogen Dickie develops an account of aboutness-fixing for thoughts about ordinary objects, and of reference-fixing for the singular terms we use to express them. Extant discussions of this topic tread a weary path through descriptivist proposals, causalist alternatives, and attempts to combine the most attractive elements of each. The account developed here is a new beginning. It starts with two basic principles. The first connects aboutness and truth: a belief is about the object upon whose properties its truth or falsity depends. The second connects truth and justification: justification is truth conducive; in general and allowing exceptions, a subject whose beliefs are justified will be unlucky if they are not true, and not merely lucky if they are. These principles--one connecting aboutness and truth; the other truth and justification--combine to yield a third principle connecting aboutness and justification: a body of beliefs is about the object upon which its associated means of justification converges; the object whose properties a subject justifying beliefs in this way will be unlucky to get wrong and not merely luck to get right. The first part of the book proves a precise version of this principle. Its remaining chapters use the principle to explain how the relations to objects that enable us to think about them--perceptual attention; understanding of proper names; grasp of descriptions--do their aboutness-fixing and thought-enabling work. The book includes discussions of the nature of singular thought and the relation between thought and consciousness.
