Author: Herman Cappelen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198814712
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 223
Book Description
Herman Cappelen investigates how language and other representational devices can go wrong, and how to fix them. We use language to understand and talk about the world, but what if our language has deficiencies that prevent it from playing that role? How can we revise our concepts, and what are the limits on revision?
Fixing Language
Author: Herman Cappelen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192546295
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Book Description
Herman Cappelen investigates ways in which language (and other representational devices) can be defective, and how they can be improved. In all parts of philosophy there are philosophers who criticize the concepts we have and propose ways to improve them. Once one notices this about philosophy, it's easy to see that revisionist projects occur in a range of other intellectual disciplines and in ordinary life. That fact gives rise to a cluster of questions: How does the process of conceptual amelioration work? What are the limits of revision? (How much revision is too much?) How does the process of revision fit into an overall theory of language and communication? Fixing Language aims to answer those questions. In so doing, it aims also to draw attention to a tradition in 20th- and 21st-century philosophy that isn't sufficiently recognized. There's a straight intellectual line from Frege and Carnap to a cluster of contemporary work that isn't typically seen as closely related: much work on gender and race, revisionism about truth, revisionism about moral language, and revisionism in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. These views all have common core commitments: revision is both possible and important. They also face common challenges about the methods, assumptions, and limits of revision.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192546295
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Book Description
Herman Cappelen investigates ways in which language (and other representational devices) can be defective, and how they can be improved. In all parts of philosophy there are philosophers who criticize the concepts we have and propose ways to improve them. Once one notices this about philosophy, it's easy to see that revisionist projects occur in a range of other intellectual disciplines and in ordinary life. That fact gives rise to a cluster of questions: How does the process of conceptual amelioration work? What are the limits of revision? (How much revision is too much?) How does the process of revision fit into an overall theory of language and communication? Fixing Language aims to answer those questions. In so doing, it aims also to draw attention to a tradition in 20th- and 21st-century philosophy that isn't sufficiently recognized. There's a straight intellectual line from Frege and Carnap to a cluster of contemporary work that isn't typically seen as closely related: much work on gender and race, revisionism about truth, revisionism about moral language, and revisionism in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. These views all have common core commitments: revision is both possible and important. They also face common challenges about the methods, assumptions, and limits of revision.
Fixing English
Author: Anne Curzan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107020751
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Anne Curzan presents a pioneering new definition of prescriptivism as a linguistic phenomenon.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107020751
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Anne Curzan presents a pioneering new definition of prescriptivism as a linguistic phenomenon.
Fixing Language
Author: Herman Cappelen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198814712
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 223
Book Description
Herman Cappelen investigates how language and other representational devices can go wrong, and how to fix them. We use language to understand and talk about the world, but what if our language has deficiencies that prevent it from playing that role? How can we revise our concepts, and what are the limits on revision?
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198814712
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 223
Book Description
Herman Cappelen investigates how language and other representational devices can go wrong, and how to fix them. We use language to understand and talk about the world, but what if our language has deficiencies that prevent it from playing that role? How can we revise our concepts, and what are the limits on revision?
Making AI Intelligible
Author: Herman Cappelen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192894722
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Book Description
Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? One aim of Making AI Intelligible is to show that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Cappelen and Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy of to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they also show ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved: our linguistic encounters with AIs revel that our theories of meaning have been excessively anthropocentric. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but the answers have pressing practical implications. Many important decisions about human life are now influenced by AI. In giving that power to AI, we presuppose that AIs can track features of the world that we care about (e.g. creditworthiness, recidivism, cancer, and combatants.) If AIs can share our concepts, that will go some way towards justifying this reliance on AI. The book can be read as a proposal for how to take some first steps towards achieving interpretable AI. Making AI Intelligible is of interest to both philosophers of language and anyone who follows current events or interacts with AI systems. It illustrates how philosophy can help us understand and improve our interactions with AI.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192894722
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Book Description
Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? One aim of Making AI Intelligible is to show that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Cappelen and Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy of to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they also show ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved: our linguistic encounters with AIs revel that our theories of meaning have been excessively anthropocentric. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but the answers have pressing practical implications. Many important decisions about human life are now influenced by AI. In giving that power to AI, we presuppose that AIs can track features of the world that we care about (e.g. creditworthiness, recidivism, cancer, and combatants.) If AIs can share our concepts, that will go some way towards justifying this reliance on AI. The book can be read as a proposal for how to take some first steps towards achieving interpretable AI. Making AI Intelligible is of interest to both philosophers of language and anyone who follows current events or interacts with AI systems. It illustrates how philosophy can help us understand and improve our interactions with AI.
Understanding Language Change
Author: April M. S. McMahon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521446655
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Book Description
This textbook analyses changes from every area of grammar and addresses recent developments in socio-historical linguistics.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521446655
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Book Description
This textbook analyses changes from every area of grammar and addresses recent developments in socio-historical linguistics.
Opening Minds
Author: Peter Johnston
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003842194
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 161
Book Description
Introducing a spelling test to a student by saying, 'Let' s see how many words you know,' is different from saying, 'Let's see how many words you know already.' It is only one word, but the already suggests that any words the child knows are ahead of expectation and, most important, that there is nothing permanent about what is known and not known. Peter Johnston Grounded in research, Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Livesshows how words can shape students' learning, their sense of self, and their social, emotional and moral development. Make no mistake: words have the power to open minds – or close them. Following up his groundbreaking book, Choice Words, author Peter Johnston continues to demonstrate how the things teachers say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for the literate lives of students. In this new book, Johnston shows how the words teachers choose can affect the worlds students inhabit in the classroom. He explains how to engage children with more productive talk and how to create classrooms that support students' intellectual development, as well as their development as human beings.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003842194
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 161
Book Description
Introducing a spelling test to a student by saying, 'Let' s see how many words you know,' is different from saying, 'Let's see how many words you know already.' It is only one word, but the already suggests that any words the child knows are ahead of expectation and, most important, that there is nothing permanent about what is known and not known. Peter Johnston Grounded in research, Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Livesshows how words can shape students' learning, their sense of self, and their social, emotional and moral development. Make no mistake: words have the power to open minds – or close them. Following up his groundbreaking book, Choice Words, author Peter Johnston continues to demonstrate how the things teachers say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for the literate lives of students. In this new book, Johnston shows how the words teachers choose can affect the worlds students inhabit in the classroom. He explains how to engage children with more productive talk and how to create classrooms that support students' intellectual development, as well as their development as human beings.
Roads to Reference
Author: Mario Gómez-Torrente
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019258524X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for? Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like 'water', 'three', and 'red' refer to appropriate things, just as the word 'Aristotle' refers to Aristotle? If so, which things are these, and how do they come to be referred to by those words? In Roads to Reference, Mario Gómez-Torrente provides novel answers to these and other questions that have been of traditional interest in the theory of reference. The book introduces a number of cases of apparent indeterminacy of reference for proper names, demonstratives, and natural kind terms, which suggest that reference-fixing conventions for them adopt the form of lists of merely sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure. He then provides arguments for a new anti-descriptivist picture of those kinds of words, according to which the reference-fixing conventions for them do not describe their reference. This book also defends realist and objectivist accounts of the reference of ordinary natural kind nouns, numerals, and adjectives for sensible qualities. According to these accounts these words refer, respectively, to 'ordinary kinds', cardinality properties, and properties of membership in intervals of sensible dimensions, and these things are fixed in subtle ways by associated reference-fixing conventions.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019258524X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for? Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like 'water', 'three', and 'red' refer to appropriate things, just as the word 'Aristotle' refers to Aristotle? If so, which things are these, and how do they come to be referred to by those words? In Roads to Reference, Mario Gómez-Torrente provides novel answers to these and other questions that have been of traditional interest in the theory of reference. The book introduces a number of cases of apparent indeterminacy of reference for proper names, demonstratives, and natural kind terms, which suggest that reference-fixing conventions for them adopt the form of lists of merely sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure. He then provides arguments for a new anti-descriptivist picture of those kinds of words, according to which the reference-fixing conventions for them do not describe their reference. This book also defends realist and objectivist accounts of the reference of ordinary natural kind nouns, numerals, and adjectives for sensible qualities. According to these accounts these words refer, respectively, to 'ordinary kinds', cardinality properties, and properties of membership in intervals of sensible dimensions, and these things are fixed in subtle ways by associated reference-fixing conventions.
Language Change
Author: Joan Bybee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107020166
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
This new introduction explores all aspects of language change, with an emphasis on the role of cognition and language use.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107020166
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
This new introduction explores all aspects of language change, with an emphasis on the role of cognition and language use.
Language Change
Author: Jean Aitchison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521795357
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
This is a lucid and up-to-date overview of language change. It discusses where our evidence about language change comes from, how and why changes happen, and how languages begin and end. It considers both changes which occurred long ago, and those currently in progress. It does this within the framework of one central question - is language change a symptom of progress or decay? It concludes that language is neither progressing nor decaying, but that an understanding of the factors surrounding change is essential for anyone concerned about language alteration. For this substantially revised third edition, Jean Aitchison has included two new chapters on change of meaning and grammaticalization. Sections on new methods of reconstruction and ongoing chain shifts in Britain and America have also been added as well as over 150 new references. The work remains non-technical in style and accessible to readers with no previous knowledge of linguistics.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521795357
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
This is a lucid and up-to-date overview of language change. It discusses where our evidence about language change comes from, how and why changes happen, and how languages begin and end. It considers both changes which occurred long ago, and those currently in progress. It does this within the framework of one central question - is language change a symptom of progress or decay? It concludes that language is neither progressing nor decaying, but that an understanding of the factors surrounding change is essential for anyone concerned about language alteration. For this substantially revised third edition, Jean Aitchison has included two new chapters on change of meaning and grammaticalization. Sections on new methods of reconstruction and ongoing chain shifts in Britain and America have also been added as well as over 150 new references. The work remains non-technical in style and accessible to readers with no previous knowledge of linguistics.
Words that Change Minds
Author: Shelle Rose Charvet
Publisher: Author's Choice Publishing
ISBN: 9780787234799
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Book Description
Publisher: Author's Choice Publishing
ISBN: 9780787234799
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Book Description