THE SEMANTIC TRADITION AND DOCTRINES OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY: THE CONCEPTUAL ROLE OF LOGICAL CONSTANTS

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Logical Constants ◽  
Conceptual Role

Semiotic analysis of symbolic logic using tagmemic theory: with implications for analytic philosophy

Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vern S. Poythress
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Formal Languages ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Symbolic Logic ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
The World

Abstract This article uses tagmemic theory as a semiotic framework to analyze symbolic logic. It attends particularly to the issue of context for meaning and the role of personal observer/participants. It focuses on formal languages, which employ no ordinary words and from one point of view have “no meaning.” Attention to the context and the theorists who deploy these languages shows that formal languages have meanings at a higher level, colored by the purposes of the analysts. In fact, there is an indefinitely ascending hierarchy of theories of theories, each of which analyzes and evaluates the theories at a lower level. By analogy with Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theory, no level of the hierarchy can capture within formalism everything in a sufficiently complex system. The personal analysts always have to make judgments about how a formalized system is analogous to the world outside the system. Arguments in analytic philosophy can be useful in clarification, but neither clarification of terms nor clarification of the structure of arguments can eliminate the need for personal judgment.

Semantics, conceptual role

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ned Block
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Functional Role ◽  
Good Health ◽  
Procedural Semantics ◽  
Functional Roles ◽  
Conceptual Role Semantics ◽  
Conceptual Role

According to conceptual role semantics (CRS), the meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent, for example, in perception, thought and decision-making. It is an extension of the well-known ‘use’ theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of a word is its use in communication and, more generally, in social interaction. CRS supplements external use by including the role of a symbol inside a computer or a brain. The uses appealed to are not just actual, but also counterfactual: not only what effects a thought does have, but what effects it would have had if stimuli or other states had differed. Of course, so defined, the functional role of a thought includes all sorts of causes and effects that are non-semantic, for example, perhaps happy thoughts can bolster one’s immunity, promoting good health. Conceptual roles are functional roles minus such non-semantic causes and effects. The view has arisen separately in philosophy (where it is sometimes called ‘inferential’ or ‘functional’ role semantics) and in cognitive science (where it is sometimes called ‘procedural semantics’).

“Hard Times Make for Hard Arteries and Hard Livers”: Deindustrialization, Biopolitics, and the Making of a New Working Class

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-132
Author(s):  
Gabriel Winant
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Social History ◽  
Conceptual Role ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
Market Transformation ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Economic Regime

Abstract This article argues for a view of “actually existing neoliberalism,” identifying points of continuity from midcentury social democracy and showing how American neoliberalism developed unevenly across a preexisting landscape. It does so with a case study of labor market transformation in Pittsburgh, showing a causal relationship between the New Deal state’s institutional structures and the rise of low-wage employment in health care in the 1970s and 1980s. The low-wage service economy did not only come after the high-wage industrial economy: it grew out of it, sped by the decline of steel manufacturing and shaped within the distinctive matrix of the postwar public-private welfare. In establishing this historical process, the article also suggests that social history can play a useful conceptual role linking Foucauldian and Marxist accounts of neoliberalism, by showing concretely the role of the production of subjectivity and the governance of population in the establishment of the neoliberal economic regime. Pointing to a homology between the structural role of incarceration in neoliberalism and that of health care, the article suggests the term “biopolitical Keynesianism” for understanding this conceptual synthesis, which uncovers new contradictions within neoliberalism.

scholarly journals Perception and hallucination: from an analytical approach to an enactive approach

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-108
Author(s):  
Ana Lorena Domínguez Rojas
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Enactive Approach

In this opinion, I examine the benefits of the enactivist approach in the study of perception and hallucination, which have traditionally been studied in the context of analytic philosophy. I consider some arguments that rescue the role of objects and the body in the perceptual experience, which allow certain clarities regarding the case of hallucination.

scholarly journals Tonk Strikes Back∗

2005 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Bonnay ◽  
Benjamin Simmenauer
Keyword(s):  
Logical Constant ◽  
Double Line ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Logical Constants ◽  
Inferential Role ◽  
The Right

What is a logical constant? In which terms should we characterize the meaning of logical words like “and”, “or”, “implies”? An attractive answer is: in terms of their inferential roles, i.e. in terms of the role they play in building inferences. More precisely, we favor an approach, going back to Dosen and Sambin, in which the inferential role of a logical constant is captured by a double line rule which introduces it as reflecting structural links (for example, multiplicative conjunction reflects comma on the right of the turnstyle). Rule-based characterizations of logical constants are subject to the well known objection of Prior’s fake connective, tonk. We show that some double line rules also give rise to such pseudo logical constants. But then, we are able to find a property of a double line rules which guarantee that it defines a genuine logical constant. Thus we provide an alternative answer to Belnap’s requirement of conservatity in terms of a local requirement on double line rules.

scholarly journals Degrees of Freedom: Is Good Philosophy Bad Science?

Disputatio ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (61) ◽  
pp. 73-94
Author(s):  
Timothy Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
International Language ◽  
Mathematics History ◽  
Global Spread ◽  
Alternative Methodology

Abstract The lecture starts by considering analytic philosophy as a tradition, and its global spread over recent years, of which Disputatio’s success is itself evidence. The costs and benefits of the role of English as the international language of analytic philosophy are briefly assessed. The spread of analytic philosophy is welcomed as the best hope for scientific philosophy, in a sense of ‘science’ on which mathematics, history, and philosophy can all count as sciences, though not as natural sciences. Arguably, experimental philosophy provides no plausible alternative methodology for philosophy, only a way of psychologizing it. However, it serves a useful purpose by highlighting the inadequacy of current methods for detecting errors in judgments on possible cases, which may result from reliance on possibly universal but imperfectly reliable cognitive heuristics. The problem is exacerbated by analytic philosophers’ tendency to regard increased flexibility in a theoretical framework as progress, where natural scientists would treat it as methodologically vicious profligacy with degrees of freedom. The result is a familiar type of bad science, overfitting theory to uncritically accepted data. The recent ‘hyperintensional revolution’ may be an example of such overfitting, it is suggested. The lecture ends with a call for a more miserly attitude to degrees of freedom.

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