Three Conceptions of the Logical Form of Exemplification (original) (raw)
Related papers
2011
According to the relevance-theoretic account, identifying what is communicated explicitly by an utterance (its explicature) involves several pragmatic processes: disambiguation, saturation of indexical elements, the recovery of unarticulated constituents and ad hoc concept construction, both of the latter being free from any linguistic indication. This is at odds with a current philosophical position according to which contextual contributions to the proposition expressed are confined to the processes of disambiguation and saturation; this view necessitates positing a number of hidden (unarticulated) indexicals in the logical form of linguistic expressions. The arguments for the two positions are assessed.
Eliminativism: the Problem of Representation and Carnapian Metametaphysics
Acta Analytica, 2018
The aim of this paper is to propose a new reading of eliminative materialism concerning propositional attitudes, along the lines of broadly understood Carnapian metametaphysics. According to the proposed reading, eliminativism should be seen as a normative metalinguistic claim that we should dispose of terms like Bbeliefs^and associated linguistic rules. It will be argued that such reading allows a significant philosophical problem which besets eliminativism to be solved: the problem of representation. The general idea of the problem of representation, which is taken to be one of the aspects of the celebrated Bcognitive suicide^issue, is that an eliminativist has a problem with maintaining that her position represents reality. It will be argued that on the Carnapian reading an eliminativist might put forward a negative ontological claim without the need to invoke any representationalistic notions.
Towards Exemplarity: When the Particular Matters
Law & Literature, 2017
I start from the definition of the exemplary case offered by Angela Condello and Maurizio Ferrarisan exemplary case is a "concrete abstraction"and argue that exemplarity is a process, an attribute of the phenomena depending on the action, and a realistic practice. I refer to the analysis of Walter Benjamin and Gy€ orgy Luk acs on realistic and modernist literature to consider that, in order to be exemplary, a case has to be particular and that we discover exemplarity when we focus on the details of the case. I call the particularity of an exemplary case its "thick features" and claim that these features cannot be absorbed by an abstract model. Exemplary cases cannot be described and understood by their thin featuresas if they were facts belonging to a speciesbut they need to be appreciated through their thick features. Furthermore, I claim that exemplarity exists only within a community and because of an appreciation and that the gesture of appreciation is not an "innocent" practice. I analyze the gesture of appreciation and claim that exemplarity does not belong to the Platonic kind of knowledge, but it entails the same ontological premises of mimesis. We appreciate a case because we are in a mimetic relation with it. We do not learn the general model the case refers to by a concept, but we learn it by reference to a concrete situation. We see the general model in a concrete situation. I argue that there is a strong link between the appreciation of a case and the special normativity of exemplarity. The special link between the concrete and the abstract characterizes the normativity of exemplarity so radically that exemplarity appears always, in a certain way, as "counter-normative." It expresses a principle not yet expressed, without a formal recognition, a voice without language.
Presuppositions as pragmemes. Acts of exemplification and referential failure
In this paper, I discuss referential failure in the context of the speech act ‘exemplification’ . I propose that contextual information is required in the understanding of how exemplification works and of the corresponding pragmeme, following van Dijk (2009)’s position that the context of use should play a crucial role in studies of language. In the context of this pragmeme, it often happens that the speaker in proffering a proper name does not have an individual in mind. Thus, there is a clear difference between the pragmeme of exemplification and the act of asserting (or the pragmeme of asserting), which is normally either true or false. A pragmeme of exemplification is neither true nor false (with the exception of quasi-assertions, which will be discussed separately) in that the issue of its truth does not arise when the point of the utterance in question or of the sequence of utterances does not reach the threshold of the intentionality required by an assertion, whose point is/should be to aim at the truth, to pass some information about the world to the hearer, to justify epistemic authority on the basis of the evidence possessed by the speaker (Goldberg 2015). In the case of exemplification, we can have three cases: referential expressions like proper names do not refer to anything; some proper names refer to individuals while others do not refer to anything; all proper names refer to individuals (and in case they saturate predicates that are true of them, they can constitute true assertions). In the former two cases, the exemplification act does not reach the threshold of intentionality required by assertions and, thus, it cannot be said to be true or false, since an example, in itself, is only something that can be correct or not with respect to a certain language and its grammar rules or communicative competence. In the latter case, if the exemplification act coincides with the intentions that characteristically accompany an assertion, then the act can be said to be true or false. However, even if the act is true of the world, this does not mean that the speaker, in uttering it, aimed at the truth, as he could very well only say something that indirectly relates to a certain language and the rules that characterize linguistic competence in it. The speaker’s point need not necessarily be to direct the hearer’s attention to the world but only to exemplification as a way to justify a certain grammatical rule or rule of language use.
The Modal and Epistemic Arguments Against the Invariance Criterion for Logical Terms (penultimate)
Journal of Philosophy, 2015
The essay discusses a recurrent criticism of the isomorphism-invariance criterion for logical terms, according to which the criterion pertains only to the extension of logical terms, and neglects the meaning, or the way the extension is fixed. A term, so claim the critics, can be invariant under isomorphisms and yet involve a contingent or a posteriori component in its meaning, thus compromising the necessity or apriority of logical truth and logical consequence. This essay shows that the arguments underlying the criticism are flawed since they rely on an invalid inference from the modal or epistemic status of statements in the metalanguage to that of statements in the object-language. The essay focuses on McCarthy’s version of the argument, but refers to Hanson and McGee’s versions as well.
Manifestability and Semantic Realism
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2003
This paper provides a critical discussion of Alexander Miller's recent attack on antirealist arguments against semantic realism that are based on manifestability requirements. Miller attempts to defend semantic realism against Wright-Hale arguments from manifestability. He does so in reliance on a McDowell type assertion-truth platitude. This paper argues in both general terms and in relation to the details of Miller's argument, that attempts to defend semantic realism while accepting a Dummettian-Wittgensteinian framework on theories of meaning, are misconceived and likely to fail, as I believe is true in Miller's case. Semantic realism is best defended within a context of metaphysical realism, and naturalistic-causal theories of meaning and explanation.
Logical Form and Linguistic Form: On Descriptions as Quantifiers
2007
ABSTRACT: The purpose of this essay is to advance and defend a theory on the notion of logical form as a representation of the structure of the meanings of natural language sentences. Central to this defense is an examination of Russell’s 1905 theory of descriptions. Following an investigation of the different ways in which this theory has been applied (for instance, in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophical psychology), it is argued that there is a modified application of this theory that can be defended as a substantive contribution to a general theory on the semantics of natural language. This general theory proposes that linguistic meaning be treated as determined by grammatical form on the supposition that the syntactic compositionality inherent in the forms of sentences involving descriptive phrases is systematically commensurate with the compositionality inherent in the structures associated with their meanings. The result is a theory of descriptions which, while largely abandoning the view that natural language grammatical form is misleading, remains consonant with the general spirit of the Russellian program by proposing to build structure into the language of logic as a way of rendering perspicuous our knowledge of the logical forms of natural language sentences. Following recent developments in linguistics, it is argued that semantic interpretation applies at an abstract level of analysis that linguists call “Logical Form.” A systematic procedure is then articulated for transforming the sentences of natural language into structures that facilitate a direct mapping onto the formulas of a logical grammar. This grammar consists of a non-standard second-order logic with restricted quantifiers, lambda abstracts for complex predicates, and nominalized predicates. In the process of applying this logical grammar to natural language, an inter-linguistic, comparative approach is adopted that looks to other natural languages such as Chinese. It is shown, for instance, how the system here developed yields logical forms for sentences in Chinese involving intensional contexts. Such sentences reveal interesting idiosyncrasies in connection with the semantics of predication and identity, and this forces us to rethink many of our assumptions about the relationship between grammatical form and logical form.
Compositional Semantics for Expressivists
I here propose a hitherto unnoticed possibility of solving embedding problems for noncognitivist expressivists in metaethics by appeal to Conceptual Role Semantics. I show that claims from the latter as to what constitutes various concepts can be used to define functions from states expressed by atomic sentences to states expressed by complex sentences, thereby allowing an expressivist semantics that satisfies a rather strict compositionality constraint (as well as a further, substantial explanatory constraint). The proposal can be coupled with several different types of concept individuation claim (e.g., normative or causal-functional), and is shown to pave the way to novel accounts for, e.g., negation.
With reference to Polish logico-philosophical tradition two formal theories of language syntax have been sketched and then compared with each other. The first theory is based on the assumption that the basic linguistic stratum is constituted by object-tokens (concrete objects perceived through the senses) and that the types of such objects (ideal objects) are derivative constructs. The other is founded on an opposite philosophical orientation. The two theories are equivalent. The main conclusion is that in syntactic researches it is redundant to postulate the existence of abstract linguistic entities. Earlier, in a slightly different form, the idea was presented in and signalled in and [-25].