Princeton University Press, 984. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (3.9 MB).

We argue that the term “intuition”, as it is used in metaphilosophy, is ambiguous between at least four different senses. In philosophy of language, the relevant “intuitions” are either the outputs of our competence to interpret and produce linguistic expressions, or the speakers’ or hearers’ own reports of these outputs. The semantic facts that philosophers of language are interested in are determined by the outputs of our competence. Hence, philosophers of language should be interested in investigating these, and they do (...) this by testing what we would say or understand in hypothetical communication situations. In the final section of the paper we suggest some methods for investigating these outputs which are independent of whether subjects report them, and hence which might be used as an alternative to the standard use of hypothetical cases. (shrink)

It is a consensus to locate the origin of the reflexive foundations of modern semantics in Frege's work. Since Frege's distinction between two components of meaning (sense and reference), however, semantics has been forced to lead a double life. Among its first receptions, in Russell's famous article (1905), the first unresolved criticism of this solution was that: It is not possible to split semantics into a theory about two classes of objects without their yielding one and the (...) same thing under lower and higher conditions of instantiation (depending on the function used to identify it). But even Russell could not avoid a crisis. It is not possible to reconcile semantic coordination for a set of non-classical extension of instantiation and encoding (possible instances, counterfactual truth values, etc.) while preserving the classical properties of signification. This article covers these moments with a rough diagnosis: modern semantics has a reflexive ceiling. It is unable to model the contingent features of an "object" without oversizing itself to deal with various constraints on that object adapted to various strategies of intensional and modal specification. In order to model idealized conditions of assertability (Putnam), one must filter the sentences that pass Tarskian test using non-sematic parameters – like the parameter of coherence of a scientific paradigm. It cannot keep that model without stopping being semantic. We conclude with a response to attempts to give semantic status to complex scientific reasoning, and a suggestion as to how to locate the philosophical origin of this claim. (shrink)

Philosophical semantics requires an ontology that includes negative as well as positive states of affairs as truth-makers and truth-breakers. Theories that try to do without negative states of affairs while interpreting propositional truth as positive correspondence with existent states of affairs are inherently inadequate and incomplete. A semantics and ontology of negative states of affairs can also do justice to positive states of affairs, since the iterated negative state of affairs that a negative state of affairs exists (...) describes a positive state of affairs, but the iterated positive state of affairs that a positive state of affairs exists never describes a negative state of affairs. Negative states of affairs are not only essential to semantics, but to a complete description of the world; they include phenomena of presence in absence and the metaphysics of gaps, lacks, holes and interstitia. The conceivability of an empty or null universe as consisting of nothing but negative states of affairs recalls a famous problem of Parmenides. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the consequences of two commonsensical premises in semantics and epistemology: (1) natural language is a complex system rooted in the communal life of human beings within a given environment; and (2) linguistic knowledge is essentially dependent on natural language. These premises lead me to emphasize the process-socio-environmental character of linguistic meaning and knowledge, from which I proceed to analyse a number of long-standing philosophical problems, attempting to throw new light upon them on these (...) grounds. In particular, I criticize the use of expressions such as ‘absolute truth’, ‘absolute existence’ and ‘the thing in itself’, arguing that they lead to what I call ‘the ultralinguistic paradox’ (a fatal antinomy). In the same way, I review a number of mainstream topics in philosophical semantics, epistemology and metaphysics, reformulating them in terms much more naturalistic – and less mysterious – than usual. (shrink)

Analogical counterfactuals such as “If I were you, I would do so and so...” create a puzzle for philosophical semantics. Whereas the ‘received view' in philosophical semantics has it that the first person pronoun always refers to its utterer, one may wonder whether this is still the case when the first person pronoun is embedded in analogical counterfactuals such as “If I were you, I would stay away from me”. I suggest that the intelligibility of lies (...) in the fact that the token of the expression ‘I' in the consequent of the counterfactual does not refer to its utterer. Should one then conclude, following the ‘anaphoric theory' that the second occurrence of ‘I' in does refer to its addressee? For the ‘anaphoric theory', ‘I' in ‘I would stay away from me' refers anaphorically, thanks to the linguistic context, to the referent of ‘you' in ‘If I were you'. On the basis of an analysis of the imaginative project involved in uttering a practical advise in the form of, I suggest contra the ‘anaphoric theory' that the first pronoun ‘I' in the consequent of behaves as an indexical and that its content is obtained by the application of its character to a pretend context differing from the context of its utterance. According to the so-called ‘pretence theory', the first person pronoun in its second occurrence in pretends to refer to a fictional composite of the utterer and the addressee. (shrink)

The linguistic turn provided philosophers with a range of reasons for engaging in careful investigation into the nature and structure of language. However, the linguistic turn is dead. The arguments for it have been abandoned. This raises the question: why should philosophers take an interest in the minutiae of natural language semantics? I’ll argue that there isn’t much of a reason - philosophy of language has lost its way. Then I provide a suggestion for how it can find its (...) way again. (shrink)

This paper challenges the negative attitudes towards labelled proof systems, usually referred to as semantic pollution, by arguing that such critiques overlook the full potential of labelled calculi. The overarching objective is to develop a practice-based philosophical analysis of labelled calculi to provide insightful considerations regarding their proof-theoretic and philosophical value. To achieve this, successful applications of labelled calculi and related results will be showcased, and comparisons with other relevant works will be discussed. The paper ends by advocating (...) for a more practice-based approach towards the philosophical understanding of proof systems and their role in structural proof theory. (shrink)

I provide an analysis of sentences of the form ‘To be F is to be G’ in terms of exact truth-maker semantics—an approach that identifies the meanings of sentences with the states of the world directly responsible for their truth-values. Roughly, I argue that these sentences hold just in case that which makes something F is that which makes it G. This approach is hyperintensional, and possesses desirable logical and modal features. These sentences are reflexive, transitive and symmetric, and, (...) if they are true, then they are necessarily true, and it is necessary that all and only Fs are Gs. I close by defining an asymmetric and irreflexive notion of analysis in terms of the reflexive and symmetric one. (shrink)

I provide an analysis of sentences of the form ‘To be F is to be G’ in terms of exact truth-maker semantics—an approach that identifies the meanings of sentences with the states of the world directly responsible for their truth-values. Roughly, I argue that these sentences hold just in case that which makes something F also makes it G. This approach is hyperintensional and possesses desirable logical and modal features. In particular, these sentences are reflexive, transitive, and symmetric, and (...) if they are true, then they are necessarily true, and it is necessary that all and only Fs are Gs. I motivate my account over Correia and Skiles’ [11] prominent alternative and close by defining an irreflexive and asymmetric notion of analysis in terms of the symmetric and reflexive notion. (shrink)

Standard semantics of proper names assigns them the function of reference to individual things. This presupposes that to understand the meaning of a proper name is to understand what it denotes in the context of its referential use. But unambiguous identification of the referent of a proper name in its normal (referential) use looks like an unsolvable problem. Senses associated with referential uses of such names don't allow ascribing them singular referents in their contexts; and what concerns contexts themselves, (...) they either don't contain proper referents at all or contain more than one, thus being referentially ambiguous. Some philosophers of language believe that the main problem for the standard semantics of proper names is that they assign them referents of wrong kind: that these, for instance, should be rather abstract entities, i.e. sets, than individual things. In this paper I try to argue that the choice of an alternative semantics for proper names does not solve the main problem with their meanings, i.e. that of their referential ambiguity. On the one hand even in the most transparent contexts there is always available an alternative referent to be assigned to the proper name's use along with some standard or default one; the fact that we prefer some standard interpretation (when we actually do) over alternative ones reflects at best that certain semantic theories contribute more substantially to ordinary communication in comparison with others. This does not yet imply that they better explain meanings of proper names. On the other hand there is also no good explanation of a phenomenon of reference to a particular thing as such: we still don't understand how a name may become referring to one and the same particular thing in many different situations for many different agents of its use etc., and how the thing may literally become a bearer of a name. (shrink)

The semantic theory of truth, formulated by Alfred Tarski in the 1939s, is primarily a mathematical theory. On the other hand, it also has a considerable philosophical content. This paper presents the second aspect of this theory. It can be shown that several traditional philosophical issues pertaining to the concept of truth can be illuminated by Tarski’s account of truth. It concerns, for instance, the idea of correspondence, the relation of truth and logic, the problem of the relativity/absoluteness (...) of truth, etc. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that it is the explicativecharacter of Tarski's semantic definition of truth given in his study of 1933 that allows forconsideration of a philosophical background of this definition in the proper sense. Given the explicativecharacter of this definition it is argued that the philosophical tradition that should be taken intoaccount with regard to this philosophical background is the tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw Schoolin its connections with the School of Brentano. As (...) an example of the explanatory power ofconsidering this tradition as far as Tarski's philosophical choices are concerned I use here thenotion of sentence-inscription, i.e., the notion of that entity of which truth is predicated inthe definition in question. One of the consequences of these statements is that philosophicaldiscussions concerning the semantic definition of truth can be regarded from two points ofview. On the one hand, they may take the perspective of its explicational function, i.e., theperspective of its philosophical background. On the other hand, they might consider the philosophicalconsequences of the definition with respect to the goal of the explication, i.e., they may considerits philosophical content independently of its historical background. (shrink)

"Abelard composed four works on logic: (1) Introductiones Parvulorum, which consists of short glosses on Porphyry Eisagoge and Aristotle Categories and De Interpretatione; (2) Logica Ingredientibus (so called because ingredientibus is the first word of its text), which consists of longer glosses on the texts covered by the previous work together with Boethius' De Differentiis Topicis and was probably written while Abelard was teaching in Paris before 1120; (3) Logica Nostrorum Petitioni (so called because nostrorum petitioni are the first words (...) of its text), which consists of longer glosses on the Eisagoge and may date from the time of his teaching at the hermitage of the Paraclete; (4) Dialectica, which has the form of an independent work about the subjects covered by Boethius' logical writings and Victorinus' treatise De Definitionibus and seems to contain materials from different periods of Abelard's life but probably did not reach its final form until a late date, perhaps the time of his stay at Cluny shortly before his death. Of these the second and the fourth are the most valuable. The Dialectica indeed, though based, like that of Garland, chiefly on the works of Boethius and written with the prolixity which was all too common among medieval authors, is an original composition of great importance for the development of logic. Abelard's mind was the keenest (though not in all respects the most admirable) that had been devoted to the subject for more than a thousand years, and he approached his task with the belief that it was still possible to make discoveries: 'Non enim tanta fuit antiquorum scriptorum perfectio ut non et nostro doctrina indigeat studio, nec tantum in nobis mortalibus scientia potest crescere ut non ultra possit augmentum recipere.' (1) The Dialectica survives in a single manuscript which lacks the opening sections. Excerpts from it were published by Victor Cousin in 1836 in his Ouvrages inédits d' Abelard. But unfortunately the text was not printed in full until 1956, and before that date it was therefore not possible to appreciate the magnitude of Abelard's contribution to the doctrines we regard as characteristically medieval.. (shrink)

Externalist theories in natural language semantics have become the orthodoxy since Kripke is widely thought to have refuted descriptive theories involving internal cognitive representation of meaning. This shift may be seen in developments in philosophy of language of the 1970s – the direct reference “revolution against Frege”. I consider Fodor’s heretical thought that something has gone “awfully wrong” in this philosophical consensus, perhaps confirming Chomsky’s view that the whole field of philosophical semantics is “utterly wrongheaded” and (...) “crazy” by virtue of its non-naturalist assumptions and “methodological dualism.” Kripke acknowledges that he was led to his views by his “natural intuition”. Accordingly, I take up the aetiological question Chomsky poses, suggesting that we may go beyond the usual analysis of those doctrines that have been assumed too uncritically “to ask why they seem so compelling”. I suggest that the externalist orthodoxy is a kind of cognitive illusion seen elsewhere in philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)

For many years I have maintained that I learned to philosophize by translating Francisco Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputation V from Latin into English. This surely is a claim that must sound extraordinary to the members of this audience or even to most twentieth century philosophers. Who reads Suárez these days? And what could I learn from a sixteenth century scholastic writer that would help me in the twentieth century? I would certainly be surprised if one were to find any references to (...) some of Suárez’s works in any of the works of twentieth-century major philosophers. One of the reasons for my claim is the great difficulty I had in figuring out what Suárez’s text means and how to render it understandable to English readers. Translating the text forced me to think in ways that were quite different from those I was used to think in Spanish, my native tongue, or English, my adoptive tongue. In fact, the translation I produced after having completed many drafts continued, and still continues to this day, to appear to me unsatisfactory, and that dissatisfaction was the key to understanding things I had understood very differently before. I hope to make clear why in what follows. The thesis that I defend is that semantic equivalence between texts of philosophy in different languages is difficult, if not impossible in some cases, to achieve and, therefore, that it is a mistake to restrict doing analytic philosophy to English, as Gustavo Rodríguez-Pereyra argues we should do in a recent article (2013). (shrink)

Jaakko Hintikka proposed treating objectual perception sentences, such as “Alice sees Bob,” as de re propositional perception sentences. Esa Saarinen extended Hintikka’s idea to eventive perception sentences, such as “Alice sees Bob smile.” These approaches, elegant as they may be, are not philosophically neutral, for they presuppose, controversially, that the content of all perceptual experiences is propositional in nature. The aim of this paper is to propose a formal treatment of objectual and eventive perception sentences that builds on Hintikka’s modal (...) approach to propositional attitude ascriptions while avoiding controversial assumptions on the nature of perceptual experiences. Despite being simple and theoretically frugal, our approach is powerful enough to express a variety of interesting philosophical views about propositional, objectual, and eventive perception sentences, thus enabling the study of their inferential relationships. (shrink)

This collection brings together contributions by linguists, philosophers, and logicians, offering interdisciplinary approaches to current research on semantics and meaning. Individual chapters concentrate on different issues and demonstrate that semantics and meaning have remained in the center of research carried out within contemporary linguistics and philosophy, especially the philosophy of language.

Progress in philosophy is difficult to achieve because our methods are evidentially and rhetorically weak. In the last two decades, experimental philosophers have begun to employ the methods of the social sciences to address philosophical questions. However, the adequacy of these methods has been called into question by repeated failures of replication. Experimental philosophers need to incorporate more robust methods to achieve a multi-modal perspective. In this chapter, we describe and showcase cutting-edge methods for data-mining and visualization. Big data (...) is a useful investigatory tool for moral psychology, and it fits well with the Ramsification method the first author advances in a series of recent papers. The guiding insight of these papers is that we can infer the meaning and structure of concepts from patterns of assertions and inferential associations in natural language. (shrink)

The Representational Theory of Measurement (RTM), especially the canonical three volume Foundations of Measurement by Krantz et al., is a landmark accomplishment in our understanding of measurement. Despite this, it has been far from easy to pinpoint what exactly we can learn about measurement from RTM, and who the target audience for RTM’s formal results should be. In what sense does RTM provide foundations of measurement, and what is the philosophical significance of such foundations? I argue that RTM provides (...) semantic foundations of measurement, and that their philosophical significance lies in a shift towards structural representation. (shrink)

Kripke; possible-world semantics; pure and applied semantics; models of modal space; applicability.

Conditional structures lie at the heart of the sciences, humanities, and everyday reasoning. It is hence not surprising that conditional logics – logics specifically designed to account for natural language conditionals – are an active and interdisciplinary area. The present book gives a formal and a philosophical account of indicative and counterfactual conditionals in terms of Chellas-Segerberg semantics. For that purpose a range of topics are discussed such as Bennett’s arguments against truth value based semantics for indicative (...) conditionals. (shrink)

In this paper, I address a series of arguments recently put forward by Cappelen Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8: 743–762 to the effect that philosophers should not do formal semantics or be concerned with the “minutiae of natural language semantics”. He offers two paths for accessing his ideas. I argue that his arguments fail in favour of the first and cast some doubt on the second in so doing. I then proffer an alternative conception of why exactly (...) philosophers should continue to do formal linguistics which includes both semantics and syntax. (shrink)

Presented in this book is a theory of concept formation and understanding that does not make use of a notion of an innate mental language as a means of concept representation. Instead, experimental concepts are treated semantically as stabilising structuring of growing sets of data, which are sets of experienced satisfaction situations for expressions, and theoretical concepts are based on coherent sets of general sentences held true. There are two kinds of structures to be established: general concepts by means of (...) similarity sets under perspectives and historical concepts. This gives rise to a theory of understanding new situations and expressions by integrating new data into established sets of data salva stability, or by extending the conceptual structure in a metaphorical or metonymical way. The theory provides a way to understand what identity between propositional attitudes amounts to, especially how people can have more or less the same belief. (shrink)

In the Reality we know, we cannot say if something is infinite whether we are doing Physics, Biology, Sociology or Economics. This means we have to be careful using this concept. Infinite structures do not exist in the physical world as far as we know. So what do mathematicians mean when they assert the existence of ω? There is no universally accepted philosophy of mathematics but the most common belief is that mathematics touches on another worldly absolute truth. Many mathematicians (...) believe that mathematics involves a special perception of an idealized world of absolute truth. This comes in part from the recognition that our knowledge of the physical world is imperfect and falls short of what we can apprehend with mathematical thinking. The objective of this paper is to present an epistemological rather than an historical vision of the mathematical concept of infinity that examines the dialectic between the actual and potential infinity. (shrink)

The purpose of this research paper is to semantically analyze the concept of transhumanism in the publications of Russian scientists, as well as to study the influence of the idea of transhumanism as the leading philosophy of human improvement on the global differentiation of the world through a comparative analysis of the level of life expectancy in the Russian Federation, the USA, and China. Findings indicate that, in general, when setting the right goals based on the Russian cosmism and transhumanism (...) concepts can and should bring certain positive benefits to humanity. First of all, this involves treatment of incurable and complex diseases and enhancement of human capabilities in space expansion. The scientific contribution and practical significance of the research lie in the development of three exponential models of life expectancy growth in accordance with the indicator of economic development that is based on the gross domestic product per capita level. (shrink)

When in 1980, on the Third Amsterdam Colloquium, Johan van Benthem read a paper with the title ‘Why is Semantics What?’ (cf. [1]), I was puzzled: Wasn’t it obvious what semantics is? Why did our concept of it stand in need of justification? Later, much later, I came to appreciate what Van Benthem was doing in this paper (and in some others). Questioning the ‘standard model’, the assumptions on which the working semanticists silently agree, Van Benthem opened up (...) a space of issues to be discussed, questions to be asked, routes to be explored, that had been hidden from view by the unreflective endorsement of just one possible, albeit fruitful way of doing semantics. History, by the way, has proven him right on many points: the monolithic approach that dominated formal semantics of natural language in the seventies, and which relied heavily on Montague’s seminal papers, has given way to a multitude of different ways of tackling semantic issues, using different formal techniques. Some limitations, in particular the almost exclusive focus on sentences as the primary units of analysis, have been overcome. In another respect, however, I feel that the message of Van Benthem’s paper has not caught on sufficiently. He urges semanticists to take more interest in the properties of their tools, arguing that such questions are important if we are to come to a real, deep understanding of what semantics is. Such ‘meta-level’ considerations, although certainly less scarce than they used to be, are still not an everyday concern of the working semanticist. (shrink)

Here, we discuss historical, philosophical and technical problems associated with relating logic and relating semantics. To do so, we proceed in three steps. First, Section 1 is devoted to providing an introduction to both relating logic and relating semantics. Second, we address the history of relating semantics and some of the main research directions and their philosophical applications. Third, we discuss some technical problems related to relating semantics, particularly whether the direct incorporation of the (...) relation into the language of relating logic is needed. The starting point for our considerations presented here is the 1st Workshop On Relating Logic and the selected papers for this issue. (shrink)

Human language has the characteristic of being open and in some cases polysemic. The word “infinite” is used often in common speech and more frequently in literary language, but rarely with its precise meaning. In this way the concepts can be used in a vague way but an argument can still be structured so that the central idea is understood and is shared with to the partners. At the same time no precise definition is given to the concepts used and (...) each partner makes his own reading of the text based on previous experience and cultural background. In a language dictionary the first meaning of “infinite” agrees with the etymology: what has no end. We apply the word infinite most often and incorrectly as a synonym for “very large” or something that we do not perceive its completion. In this context, the infinite mentioned in dictionaries refers to the idea or notion of the “immeasurably large” although this is open to what the individual’s means by “immeasurably great.” Based on this linguistic imprecision, the authors present a non Cantorian theory of the potential and actual infinite. For this we have introduced a new concept: the homogon that is the whole set that does not fall within the definition of sets established by Cantor. (shrink)

This contributed volume includes both theoretical research on philosophical logic and its applications in artificial intelligence, mostly employing the concepts and techniques of modal logic. It collects selected papers presented at the Second Asia Workshop on Philosophical Logic, held in Guangzhou, China in 2014, as well as a number of invited papers by specialists in related fields. The contributions represent pioneering philosophical logic research in Asia.

Gyula Klima’s distinctive work recovering medieval philosophy has inspired a generation of scholars. Klima’s attention to the distinctive terms, problems, and assumptions that constitute alternative historical conceptual frameworks has informed work in philosophy of language and logic, cognition and philosophical psychology, and metaphysics and theology. This volume celebrates Klima’s project by collecting new essays by colleagues, collaborators, and former students. Covering a wide range of thinkers (Plotinus, Anselm, Aquinas, Buridan, Ockham, and others) and various specifc questions (e.g., about language, (...) cognition, the soul, and God), it is unifed by a common interest in applying historically sensitive, hermeneutically sophisticated, and logically rigorous philosophical interpretation to recover, and appreciate, lost perspectives. (shrink)