Philosophical enquiry stands to benefit from the inclusion of methods from the digital humanities to study language use. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities have the potential to contribute to both conceptual analysis and intuition-based enquiry, two important approaches in contemporary philosophy. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities can also provide valuable metaphilosophical insights into the nature of philosophical methods themselves. The use of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy should (...) be expected to follow a similar trajectory to another attempt to introduce empirical methods in philosophy. Experimental philosophers use empirical methods from the cognitive sciences to bear on philosophical questions. At first, we should expect the main contribution of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy to be at the metaphilosophical level. Then, given the right impetus and support, we are optimistic that methods from the digital humanities can make important and sustained contributions to first-order philosophical enquiry. This chapter gives two case studies of recent studies in which methods from the digital humanities are used to address metaphilosophical questions about the use of the word ‘intuition’ and the methods of philosophy and physics. It gives three examples of contemporary first-order philosophical debates to which methods fromthe digital humanities could make an important contribution in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. The chapter discusses some methodological challenges and limitations which are of particular importance when considering the application of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy, including concerns about the demographic representativeness of widely available corpora. (shrink)

Duality in Logic and Language [draft--do not cite this article] Duality phenomena occur in nearly all mathematically formalized disciplines, such as algebra, geometry, logic and natural language semantics. However, many of these disciplines use the term ‘duality’ in vastly different senses, and while some of these senses are intimately connected to each other, others seem to be entirely … Continue reading Duality in Logic and Language →.

These essays are intended to illustrate various ways in which ideas about language may be used to clarify philosophic problems. They contain careful interpretations and criticisms of theories of language.

This book offers a systematic framework for thinking about the relationship between language and technology and an argument for interweaving thinking about technology with thinking about language. The main claim of philosophy of technology—that technologies are not mere tools and artefacts not mere things, but crucially and significantly shape what we perceive, do, and are—is re-thought in a way that accounts for the role of language in human technological experiences and practices. Engaging with work by Wittgenstein, (...) Heidegger, McLuhan, Searle, Ihde, Latour, Ricoeur, and many others, the author critically responds to, and constructs a synthesis of, three "extreme", idealtype, untenable positions: only humans speak and neither language nor technologies speak, only language speaks and neither humans nor technologies speak, and only technology speaks and neither humans nor language speak. The construction of this synthesis goes hand in hand with a narrative about subjects and objects that become entangled and constitute one another. Using Words and Things thus draws in central discussions from other subdisciplines in philosophy, such as philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics, to offer an original theory of the relationship between language and technology centered on use, performance, and narrative, and taking a transcendental turn. (shrink)

Completely revised and updated in its Second Edition, Language and Reality provides students, philosophers and cognitive scientists with a lucid and provocative introduction to the philosophy of language.

Preoccupation with language is a notable feature of modern philosophy. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the influence of language on thought, and particularly its influence on philosophical thought, is a leading topic of philosophical discussion in this century. Every philosopher of any note, no matter what his general interests may be, has found it necessary to define his attitude to this problem. The attitude usually adopted consists of an admission that language does (...) have a great influence on thought, and on philosophical thought in particular. More accurately, it is claimed that the structure and grammatical categories, and perhaps the vocabulary, natural to a particular language, determine the lines of thought and speculation open to any thinker who uses that language .This determination is unimportant in many cases, because the results of our thinking are usually subject to check by appeal to empirical facts. In philosophical thinking, however, no such check is available by the very nature of the case. Accordingly, we cannot tell if the difficulty or apparent insolubility of a philosophical problem is due to the problem itself, or simply due to inadequacies in our language. In a different language, so it is suggested, the problem which is difficult for us might very easily be solved. Indeed, there might not then be any such problem, or its solution might be self-evident in this other language. This is the moderate attitude to the language difficulty in philosophy, and it is fair to say that it is almost universally adopted at the present day. In some circles it has acquired the prestige of an indisputable dogma. (shrink)

Silence is reserved for what cannot be verbally expressed. The well-known Wittgensteinian quote summarizes an established understanding of the relationship between language and silence: because language is not enough to account for reality and thinking, it must be transcended by other means of expression, like music or silence. But what if the opposite is the case and silence is not the extension but the precondition of language, the ultimate source of meaning? This paper explores how this is (...) the phenomenological and Derridean philosophical framework of Coetzee’s novels, a literary universe created from the will to signify and build singular meanings. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "Language and Philosophy".

An analysis of the structural properties of collections or pluralities, homogeneous objects like water, and the semantics and philosophy of events.

Based on the Mahlon Powell lectures given at Indiana University, this slim, well translated book is surprisingly rich and visionary in its pursuit of a metaphysics of language. Dufrenne, a phenomenologist, argues that positivistic and syntactical linguistics wrongly ignore the phenomenon of living speech, while formal logic, seeking to rid itself of its natural and intuitive origins, is necessarily rooted in them. What is needed is a phenomenology of human speech which would lead to a metaphysics of man's spoken (...) intercourse with the world. In the end, poetry has the last word.--A. B. D. (shrink)

This book aims to show that recent developments in neuroscience permit a defense of free will. Through language, human beings can escape strict biological determinism.

Modern philosophy's fascination with language - for the last century, its obsession- may illustrate the axiom that we love to talk about what we desire and we desire what we don't have. From the perspective of traditional Judaism, philosophic obsession with language reflects the modern philosopher's dislocation from those speech communities in which, alone, language has meaning. Natural speech communities, meaning those whose origins are either unknown or referred to an indefinite past, are characterized by inherent (...) semiotic norms: rules for transforming elements of the natural world into meaningful signs (morphology), for determining relations among those signs (syntax), for determining relations between signs and intended objects (semantics), and for determining relations between signs and the actual behavior which they recommend (what the American philosopher Charles Peirce calls pragmatics). For the traditional Jew, these norms are collected in what is called Torah: God's speech to Israel and the literary and behavioral history of Israel's attempts to interpret what that speech means. For this Jew, dislocation from the speech community of Israel would imply dislocation from Torah, and, thereby, from the possibility of meaningful speech and controlled behavior. Jewish philosophy is the attempt to find means of reintegrating dislocated persons into appropriate speech communities: in particular of reintegrating Jews into the speech community of Israel. On the following pages, I describe what modern philosophy looks like in terms set by Torah. Without apology, the Jewish philosopher first defines the non-problematic (the language of Torah), then the problematic (the enterprise of modern philosophy), then suggests means of placing the two in dialogue. (shrink)

"Neuroscience and Philosophy" begins with an excerpt from "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience," in which Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker question the ...

Montaigne chooses to write the Essays in French, the vulgar language, rather than in Latin, the language of the learned. He uses only the words that areheard in the streets, markets, and taverns of France. And he speaks about the body and the sexual in a manner that goes beyond the limits of propriety. The language of the Essays perfectly reflects Montaigne’s philosophical project, the re-ordering of philosophy to the lowest rather than the highest, to the (...) ordinary rather than the extraordinary. By bringing the private into the public, he frees the private from shame and creates the new, modern public space, i.e., society. The invention of the essay is the invention of society. (shrink)

Montaigne chooses to write the Essays in French, the vulgar language, rather than in Latin, the language of the learned. He uses only the words that areheard in the streets, markets, and taverns of France. And he speaks about the body and the sexual in a manner that goes beyond the limits of propriety. The language of the Essays perfectly reflects Montaigne’s philosophical project, the re-ordering of philosophy to the lowest rather than the highest, to the (...) ordinary rather than the extraordinary. By bringing the private into the public, he frees the private from shame and creates the new, modern public space, i.e., society. The invention of the essay is the invention of society. (shrink)

Clinical and philosophical perspectives on key issues and debates in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

_Clinical and philosophical perspectives on key issues and debates in Lacanian psychoanalysis._.

This chapter reviews issues surrounding theories of reference. The simplest theory is the Fido-Fido theory – that reference is all that an NP has to contribute to the meaning of phrases and sentences in which it occurs. Two big problems for this theory are coreferential NPs that do not behave as though they were semantically equivalent and meaningful NPs without a referent. These problems are especially acute in sentences..

The Philosophy of Rhetoric is widely regarded as the most important work of a theory of rhetoric produced in the 18th century. Campbell's work engages such themes in an attempt to formulate a universal theory of human communication. Campbell attempts to develop his theory by discovering deep principles in human nature that account for all instances and kinds of human communication. He seeks to derive all communication principles and processes empirically. In addition, all statements in discourse that have to (...) do with matters of fact and human affairs are likewise to be empirically derived. Thus, his theory of rhetoric is vastly wider than, and different from, such classical theories as those proposed by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, whose theories focused on discourse related to civic affairs. By attempting to elaborate a general theory of rhetoric through empirical procedures, Campbell's project reveals the limitations of his method. He cannot ground all statements empirically and it is at this point that his theological position comes into play. Inspection of his religious views shows that God's design of human nature, and God's revelations to humankind, make moral and spiritual truths known and quite secure to human beings, although not empirically. (shrink)

J. L. Austin was one of the more influential British philosophers of his time, due to his rigorous thought, extraordinary personality, and innovative philosophical method. According to John Searle, he was both passionately loved and hated by his contemporaries. Like Socrates, he seemed to destroy all philosophical orthodoxy without presenting an alternative, equally comforting, orthodoxy. -/- Austin is best known for two major contributions to contemporary philosophy: first, his ‘linguistic phenomenology’, a peculiar method of philosophical analysis of the concepts (...) and ways of expression of everyday language; and second, speech act theory, the idea that every use of language carries a performative dimension (in the well-known slogan, “to say something is to do something”). Speech act theory has had consequences and import in research fields as diverse as philosophy of language, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, linguistics, artificial intelligence and feminist philosophy. -/- This article describes Austin’s linguistic method and his speech act theory, and it describes the original contributions he made to epistemology and philosophy of action. It closes by focusing on two main developments of speech act theory─the dispute between conventionalism and intentionalism, and the debate on free speech, pornography, and censorship. (shrink)

In _Neuroscience and Philosophy_ three prominent philosophers and a leading neuroscientist clash over the conceptual presuppositions of cognitive neuroscience. The book begins with an excerpt from Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker's _Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience_ (Blackwell, 2003), which questions the conceptual commitments of cognitive neuroscientists. Their position is then criticized by Daniel Dennett and John Searle, two philosophers who have written extensively on the subject, and Bennett and Hacker in turn respond. Their impassioned debate encompasses a wide range of central (...) themes: the nature of consciousness, the bearer and location of psychological attributes, the intelligibility of so-called brain maps and representations, the notion of qualia, the coherence of the notion of an intentional stance, and the relationships between mind, brain, and body. Clearly argued and thoroughly engaging, the authors present fundamentally different conceptions of philosophical method, cognitive-neuroscientific explanation, and human nature, and their exchange will appeal to anyone interested in the relation of mind to brain, of psychology to neuroscience, of causal to rational explanation, and of consciousness to self-consciousness. In his conclusion Daniel Robinson (member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University) explains why this confrontation is so crucial to the understanding of neuroscientific research. The project of cognitive neuroscience, he asserts, depends on the incorporation of human nature into the framework of science itself. In Robinson's estimation, Dennett and Searle fail to support this undertaking; Bennett and Hacker suggest that the project itself might be based on a conceptual mistake. Exciting and challenging, _Neuroscience and Philosophy_ is an exceptional introduction to the philosophical problems raised by cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in early-modern philosophy, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of John Locke's critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in writers such as Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Nicole, Pufendorf, Boyle, Malebranche and Locke. Locke, Language and Early-Modern (...) class='Hi'>Philosophy demonstrates that new developments in philosophy, in conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves. Dr Dawson shows that language so fixated all manner of early-modern authors because it was seen as an obstacle to both knowledge and society. She thereby uncovers a novel story about the problem of language in philosophy, and in the process reshapes our understanding of early-modern epistemology, morality and politics. (shrink)