Language and Reality from a Naturalistic Perspective PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Language and Reality from a Naturalistic Perspective PDF full book. Access full book title Language and Reality from a Naturalistic Perspective by Andrea Bianchi. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Andrea Bianchi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030476413
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Get Book
Book Description
This book celebrates the many important contributions to philosophy by one of the leading philosophers in the analytic field, Michael Devitt. It collects seventeen original essays by renowned philosophers from all over the world. They all develop themes from Devitt’s work, thus discussing many fundamental issues in philosophy of linguistics, theory of reference, theory of meaning, methodology, and metaphysics. In a long final chapter, Devitt himself replies to the contributors. In so doing, he further elaborates his views on various of these issues, for example defending his claim (in opposition to Chomskyan orthodoxy) that languages are external rather than internal; his well-known causal theory of reference; his “shocking” idea that meanings can be causal, non-descriptive, modes of presentation; his methodological naturalism; his commitment to scientific realism; and his version of biological essentialism. The volume will appeal to all scholars and students interested in contemporary theoretical analytic philosophy, and will be a must-read for any serious researcher in philosophy of language. It provides a deep insight into the work of one of the most important living philosophers, and will help readers to better understand language and reality from a naturalistic perspective.
Author: Andrea Bianchi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030476413
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Get Book
Book Description
This book celebrates the many important contributions to philosophy by one of the leading philosophers in the analytic field, Michael Devitt. It collects seventeen original essays by renowned philosophers from all over the world. They all develop themes from Devitt’s work, thus discussing many fundamental issues in philosophy of linguistics, theory of reference, theory of meaning, methodology, and metaphysics. In a long final chapter, Devitt himself replies to the contributors. In so doing, he further elaborates his views on various of these issues, for example defending his claim (in opposition to Chomskyan orthodoxy) that languages are external rather than internal; his well-known causal theory of reference; his “shocking” idea that meanings can be causal, non-descriptive, modes of presentation; his methodological naturalism; his commitment to scientific realism; and his version of biological essentialism. The volume will appeal to all scholars and students interested in contemporary theoretical analytic philosophy, and will be a must-read for any serious researcher in philosophy of language. It provides a deep insight into the work of one of the most important living philosophers, and will help readers to better understand language and reality from a naturalistic perspective.
Author: Lynne Rudder Baker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199914737
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Get Book
Book Description
Science and its philosophical companion, Naturalism, represent reality in wholly nonpersonal terms. How, if at all, can a nonpersonal scheme accommodate the first-person perspective that we all enjoy? In this volume, Lynne Rudder Baker explores that question by considering both reductive and eliminative approaches to the first-person perspective. After finding both approaches wanting, she mounts an original constructive argument to show that a non-Cartesian first-person perspective belongs in the basic inventory of what exists. That is, the world that contains us persons is irreducibly personal. After arguing for the irreducibilty and ineliminability of the first-person perspective, Baker develops a theory of this perspective. The first-person perspective has two stages, rudimentary and robust. Human infants and nonhuman animals with consciousness and intentionality have rudimentary first-person perspectives. In learning a language, a person acquires a robust first-person perspective: the capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself, in the first person. By developing an account of personal identity, Baker argues that her theory is coherent, and she shows various ways in which first-person perspectives contribute to reality.
Author: Michael Devitt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262540995
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 366
Get Book
Book Description
What is language? How does it relate to the world? How does it relate to the mind? Should our view of language influence our view of the world? These are among the central issues covered in this spirited and unusually clear introduction to the philosophy of language. Making no pretense of neutrality, Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny take a definite theoretical stance. Central to that stance is naturalism--that is, they treat a philosophical theory of language as an empirical theory like any other and see people as nothing but complex parts of the physical world. This leads them, controversially, to a deflationary view of the significance of the study of language: they dismiss the idea that the philosophy of language should be preeminent in philosophy. This highly successful textbook has been extensively rewritten for the second edition to reflect recent developments in the field.
Author: Charles Taliaferro
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441148825
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book
Book Description
A philosophical inquiry into the strengths and weaknesses of theism and naturalism in accounting for the emergence of consciousness, the visual imagination and aesthetic values. The authors begin by offering an account of modern scientific practice which gives a central place to the visual imagination and aesthetic values. They then move to test the explanatory power of naturalism and theism in accounting for consciousness and the very visual imagination and aesthetic values that lie behind and define modern science. Taliaferro and Evans argue that evolutionary biology alone is insufficient to account for consciousness, the visual imagination and aesthetic values. Insofar as naturalism is compelled to go beyond evolutionary biology, it does not fare as well as theism in terms of explanatory power.
Author: Sander Verhaegh
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190913150
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Get Book
Book Description
During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a "naturalistic" approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy--the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning--philosophers today largely follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. Sander Verhaegh here offers a comprehensive study of Quine's groundbreaking naturalism. Building on Quine's published corpus as well as a wealth of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, Verhaegh aims to reconstruct both the nature and the development of his naturalism. As such, Working from Within aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. Transcriptions of five unpublished papers, letters, and notes are included in the appendix.
Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694608
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Get Book
Book Description
Two countervailing trends mark the intellectual tenor of our age – the spread of naturalistic worldviews and religious orthodoxies. Advances in biogenetics, brain research, and robotics are clearing the way for the penetration of an objective scientific self-understanding of persons into everyday life. For philosophy, this trend is associated with the challenge of scientific naturalism. At the same time, we are witnessing an unexpected revitalization of religious traditions and the politicization of religious communities across the world. From a philosophical perspective, this revival of religious energies poses the challenge of a fundamentalist critique of the principles underlying the modern Wests postmetaphysical understanding of itself. The tension between naturalism and religion is the central theme of this major new book by Jürgen Habermas. On the one hand he argues for an appropriate naturalistic understanding of cultural evolution that does justice to the normative character of the human mind. On the other hand, he calls for an appropriate interpretation of the secularizing effects of a process of social and cultural rationalization increasingly denounced by the champions of religious orthodoxies as a historical development peculiar to the West. These reflections on the enduring importance of religion and the limits of secularism under conditions of postmetaphysical reason set the scene for an extended treatment the political significance of religious tolerance and for a fresh contribution to current debates on cosmopolitanism and a constitution for international society.
Author: Sebastian Shaumyan
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027252017
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Get Book
Book Description
The book presents a new science of semiotic linguistics. The goal of semiotic linguistics is to discover what characterizes language as an intermediary between the mind and reality so that language creates the picture of reality we perceive. The cornerstone of semiotic linguistics is the discovery and resolution of language antinomies -contradictions between two apparently reasonable principles or laws. Language antinomies constitute the essence of language, and hence must be studied from both linguistic and philosophical points of view. The basic language antinomy which underlies all other antinomies is the antinomy between meaning and information. Both generative and classical linguistic theories are unaware of the need to distinguish between meaning and information. By confounding these notions they are unable to discover language antinomies and confine their research to naturalistic description of superficial language phenomena rather than the quest for the essence of language.(Series A)
Author: Abrol Fairweather
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192845454
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 340
Get Book
Book Description
Despite the considerable attention the topic of luck has received in ethics and epistemology, very little has been published in the philosophical literature overtly on linguistic luck. The essays collected here provide the first sustained examination of the diverse forms of linguistic luck, the mechanisms available to reduce the impact of linguistic luck and how to cope with residual luck not eliminated by the causal, inferential, and intentional mechanisms which aim at its eradication. Of primary interest is not some, hitherto unnoticed widespread prevalence of luck in the determinants of meaning and communication, but rather the impressive extent to which luck is reduced or eliminated therein. Whether through casual, inferential or intentional means, the determinants of meaning and communication are impressively independent of luck and chance. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a world with human language where efforts to communicate succeed no better than chance. Linguistic communication is only possible because robust luck reducing variables are at work. The essays collected seek to understand the diversity, scope and mode of operation of luck reducing mechanisms in language. While it is not possible here to cover the full range of linguistic phenomena affected by luck, a wide range of issues in linguistics and philosophy of language are investigated, including, syntax processing, demonstrative reference, conversational implicature, testimony, lexical innovation, joint attention, communicative value, conventionalism vs. anti-conventionalism, metasemantic safety, and semantic skepticism, to name a few.
Author: Michael Devitt
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030706532
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Get Book
Book Description
This book criticizes the methodology of the recent semantics-pragmatics debate in the theory of language and proposes an alternative. It applies this methodology to argue for a traditional view against a group of “contextualists” and “pragmatists”, including Sperber and Wilson, Bach, Carston, Recanati, Neale, and many others. The author disagrees with these theorists who hold that the meaning of the sentence in an utterance never, or hardly ever, yields its literal truth-conditional content, even after disambiguation and reference fixing; it needs to be pragmatically supplemented in context. The standard methodology of this debate is to consult intuitions. The book argues that theories should be tested against linguistic usage. Theoretical distinctions, however intuitive, need to be scientifically motivated. Also we should not be guided by Grice’s “Modified Occam’s Razor”, Ruhl’s “Monosemantic Bias”, or other such strategies for “meaning denialism”. From this novel perspective, the striking examples of context relativity that motivate contextualists and pragmatists typically exemplify semantic rather than pragmatic properties. In particular, polysemous phenomena should typically be treated as semantic ambiguity. The author argues that conventions have been overlooked, that there’s no extensive “semantic underdetermination” and that the new theoretical framework of “truth-conditional pragmatics” is a mistake.
Author: Andrzej Pawelec
Publisher: Wydawnictwo UJ
ISBN: 8323328684
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 195
Get Book
Book Description
This book presents an ongoing debate in cognitive linguistics about the modelling of prepositional polysemy, known as "the story of over." Additionally, it discusses a Polish counterpart - "the story of za(-)" (a preposition and a verbal prefix). Its further aim is to reveal a deep divergence of perspectives between the cognitive and hermeneutical approaches to the meaning of words. The argument could be summarised as follows: the issue of the representation of lexical senses (available out of context) presupposes the issue of distinct meanings of words in communal use, which in turn presupposes the question of the transformative power of words (in linguistics, articulated by Humboldt as energeia). In short, the book proposes to complement a post hoc static cognitive approach with a dynamic "expressive" one.
