scholarly journals Is Kripkenstein really a skeptic about meaning?

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Milos Sumonja
Keyword(s):  
Private Language ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Standard Interpretation ◽  
Sceptical Conclusion

According to the standard interpretation of position about the meaning that Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein in his study Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Kripkenstein advocates skepticism about the meaning facts, and semantic antirealism - the view that sentences of semantic discourse have assertability conditions instead of truth conditions. The aim of this paper is to show that the standard interpretation of the skeptical solution is not accurate because the sceptical conclusion implies only that Kripkenstein doubts the existence of philosophical super-facts which uniquely determine the truth conditions that the speaker has in mind when he utters a certain sentence, but not the existence of facts about meaning altogether.

Language

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin McGinn
Keyword(s):  
Language Games ◽  
Private Language ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Public Language ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sentence Meaning ◽  
Theory Of Meaning

This chapter examines philosophical issues in language. A very influential trend in philosophy is the notion that different kinds of sentence have different kinds of meaning—that sentence meaning is not a unitary affair. One might call this view “meaning pluralism.” In contrast, the rejected view can be called “meaning monism”—the doctrine that sentences are all of one type, that meanings are always uniformly the same, that there is something deeply common to all meaningful utterances. The chapter then looks at the concept of language-games, and studies meaning and communication, the private language, the public language, the verification and truth conditions theory of meaning, and arguments.

Meaning and rule-following

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Foundations Of Mathematics ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Fundamental Issue ◽  
Private Language ◽  
Rule Following ◽  
Linguistic Practice ◽  
Competent Speaker ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Sceptical Conclusion

Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule-following, and the recent responses to it, have been widely regarded as providing the deepest and most challenging issues surrounding the notions of meaning, understanding and intention – central notions in the philosophy of language and mind. The fundamental issue is what it is for words to have meaning, and for speakers to use words in accordance with their meanings. In Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein explores the idea that what could give a word its meaning is a rule for its use, and that to be a competent speaker is to use words in accordance with these rules. His discussion of the nature of rules and rule-following has been highly influential, although there is no general agreement about his conclusions and final position. The view that there is no objectivity to an individual’s attempt to follow a rule in isolation provides one strand of Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language. To some commentators, Wittgenstein’s discussion only leads to the sceptical conclusion that there are no rules to be followed and so no facts about what words mean. Others have seen him as showing why certain models of what it takes for an individual to follow a rule are inadequate and must be replaced by an appeal to a communal linguistic practice.

scholarly journals Models & Proofs: LFIs Without a Canonical Interpretations

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Alejandro Barrio
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Logical System ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Conservative Extension ◽  
Standard Interpretation ◽  
Conflicting Evidence ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The One ◽  
Excluded Middle ◽  
Canonical Interpretation

In different papers, Carnielli, W. & Rodrigues, A. (2012), Carnielli, W. Coniglio, M. & Rodrigues, A. (2017) and Rodrigues & Carnielli, (2016) present two logics motivated by the idea of capturing contradictions as conflicting evidence. The first logic is called BLE (the Basic Logic of Evidence) and the second—that is a conservative extension of BLE—is named LETJ (the Logic of Evidence and Truth). Roughly, BLE and LETJ are two non-classical (paraconsistent and paracomplete) logics in which the Laws of Explosion (EXP) and Excluded Middle (PEM) are not admissible. LETJ is built on top of BLE. Moreover, LETJ is a Logic of Formal Inconsistency (an LFI). This means that there is an operator that, roughly speaking, identifies a formula as having classical behavior. Both systems are motivated by the idea that there are different conditions for accepting or rejecting a sentence of our natural language. So, there are some special introduction and elimination rules in the theory that are capturing different conditions of use. Rodrigues & Carnielli’s paper has an interesting and challenging idea. According to them, BLE and LETJ are incompatible with dialetheia. It seems to show that these paraconsistent logics cannot be interpreted using truth-conditions that allow true contradictions. In short, BLE and LETJ talk about conflicting evidence avoiding to talk about gluts. I am going to argue against this point of view. Basically, I will firstly offer a new interpretation of BLE and LETJ that is compatible with dialetheia. The background of my position is to reject the one canonical interpretation thesis: the idea according to which a logical system has one standard interpretation. Then, I will secondly show that there is no logical basis to fix that Rodrigues & Carnielli’s interpretation is the canonical way to establish the content of logical notions of BLE and LETJ . Furthermore, the system LETJ captures inside classical logic. Then, I am also going to use this technical result to offer some further doubts about the one canonical interpretation thesis.

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.

Mechanisms and Causation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Glennan
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Causal Relations ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter motivates a theory of causation according to which causal claims are existential claims about mechanisms. The chapter begins with a review of the variety of causal claims, emphasizing the differences between singular and general claims, and between claims about causal production and claims about causal relevance. I then argue for singularism—the view that the truth-makers of general causal claims are facts about collections of singular and intrinsic causal relations, and specifically facts about the existence of particular mechanisms. Applying this account, I explore possible truth conditions for causal generalizations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between mechanistic and manipulability approaches to causation. I argue that Woodward’s manipulability account provides valuable insights into the meaning of causal claims and the methods we use to assess them, but that the underlying truth-makers for the counterfactuals in that account are in fact mechanisms.

Causal Idealism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relation ◽  
Mental Activity ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
Causal Judgments

This chapter argues that causal idealism, the view that causation is a product of mental activity, is at least as attractive as several contemporary views of causation that incorporate human thought and agency into the causal relation. The chapter discusses three such views: contextualism, which holds that truth conditions for causal judgments are contextual; contrastivism, which holds that the causal relation is a quaternary relation between a cause, an effect, and contextually specified contrast classes for the cause and the effect; and pragmatism, which holds that causal claims are sensitive to pragmatic factors. This chapter suggests that causal idealism has at least as much explanatory strength as these three theories, and is more parsimonious and internally stable.

Technical or political? The socialist economic calculation debate

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Camarinha Lopes
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Austrian School ◽  
Economic Calculation ◽  
Standard Interpretation ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Mainstream Economics ◽  
Political Position ◽  
Socialist Economic ◽  
Technical Terms

Abstract The paper presents both the key arguments and the historical context of the socialist economic calculation debate. I argue that Oskar Lange presented the most developed strategy to deal with bourgeois economics, decisively helping to create the scientific consensus that rational economic calculation under socialism is possible. Lange’s arguments based on standard economic theory reveal that the most ardent defenders of capitalism cannot reject socialism on technical terms and that, as a consequence, the Austrian School was left with no choice but to diverge from mainstream economics in its search to develop a framework that could support its political position. This shows that Mises’ challenge from 1920 was solved and has been replaced by a political posture developed by Hayek and leading Austrians economists, who have been struggling since the 1980s to revise the standard interpretation of the socialist economic calculation debate. I argue that this revision should not be uncritically accepted and conclude that socialism cannot be scientifically rejected; it can only be politically rejected, by those whose economic interests it opposes.

scholarly journals Dynamic game semantics

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-60
Author(s):  
Norihiro Yamada ◽  
Samson Abramsky
Keyword(s):  
Programming Languages ◽  
Functional Programming ◽  
Operational Semantics ◽  
Dynamic Game ◽  
Standard Interpretation ◽  
Functional Programming Languages ◽  
Game Semantics ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Cartesian Closed Categories ◽  
Cartesian Closed

Abstract The present work achieves a mathematical, in particular syntax-independent, formulation of dynamics and intensionality of computation in terms of games and strategies. Specifically, we give game semantics of a higher-order programming language that distinguishes programmes with the same value yet different algorithms (or intensionality) and the hiding operation on strategies that precisely corresponds to the (small-step) operational semantics (or dynamics) of the language. Categorically, our games and strategies give rise to a cartesian closed bicategory, and our game semantics forms an instance of a bicategorical generalisation of the standard interpretation of functional programming languages in cartesian closed categories. This work is intended to be a step towards a mathematical foundation of intensional and dynamic aspects of logic and computation; it should be applicable to a wide range of logics and computations.

Arabic translation across cultures

Babel ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moheiddin A. Homeidi
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Arabic Translation ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Extensive Analysis ◽  
Arabic And English ◽  
Aspect Culturel

Abstract This paper deals mainly with some of the difficulties the translator might encounter when translating some culturally bound pieces of information. These would include the translation of some idioms, and some culturally bound concepts. The paper starts with definitions of translation, language and culture followed by an extensive analysis of the examples provided. All the examples are drawn from Arabic and English. The examples include the translation of some idioms which violate truth conditions, which are easily recognizable, and some others which may be translated either literally or idiomatically with obviously different results. Then the analysis moves to the translation of some culturally bound expressions from both Arabic and English. Here, we find examples that cannot be translated into the other language simply for lack of cultural equivalents. The skill and the intervention of the translator are most needed in this respect because above all translation is an act of communication. Résumé Cet article traite principalement de certaines difficultés que le traducteur peut rencontrer quand il traduit des textes d’information qui présentent un aspect culturel. Ces difficultés ont trait à certaines locutions idiomatiques et concepts culturels. L’article commence par définir la traduction, la langue et la culture, puis analyse en détail les exemples fournis. Tous les exemples sont tirés de l’arabe et de l’anglais. Ces exemples comprennent la traduction de certaines locutions idiomatiques qui trahissent les conditions de vérite et sont facilement reconnaissables, et de quelques autres qui peuvent etre traduites soit litteralement, soit de manière idiomatique, mais avec bien sur des résultats différents. Puis l’analyse passe à la traduction de certaines expressions de nature culturelle, en arabe et en anglais. Nous y trouvons des exemples qu’il est impossible de traduire dans l’autre langue, tout simplement parce qu’il leur manque des équivalents culturels. L’habileté et l’intervention du traducteur sont des plus nécéssaires dans ce cas, parce que la traduction est avant tout un acte de communication.

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