Conceptual Atomism and Justificationist Semantics

Conceptual Atomism and Justificationist Semantics PDF Author: Manuel Bremer
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631578766
Category : Atomism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Conceptual atomism claims that most concepts cannot be decomposed into features, so that the conjunction of the features is equivalent to the concept in question. Conceptual atomism of this type is incompatible with many other semantic approaches. One of these approaches is justificationist semantics. This book assumes conceptual atomism. Justificationist semantics in its pure form, therefore, has to be wrong. Nevertheless, its epistemological approach to questions of evaluations and semantic rules could still stand. The main question is how conceptual atomism can be combined with some justificationist ideas. This new synthesis centres on the representational theory of mind and 'internalist' semantics, but ties these to ideas which stress the epistemic commitments that accompany successful assertions.

Conceptual Atomism and Justificationist Semantics

Conceptual Atomism and Justificationist Semantics PDF Author: Manuel Bremer
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631578766
Category : Atomism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Get Book Here

Book Description
Conceptual atomism claims that most concepts cannot be decomposed into features, so that the conjunction of the features is equivalent to the concept in question. Conceptual atomism of this type is incompatible with many other semantic approaches. One of these approaches is justificationist semantics. This book assumes conceptual atomism. Justificationist semantics in its pure form, therefore, has to be wrong. Nevertheless, its epistemological approach to questions of evaluations and semantic rules could still stand. The main question is how conceptual atomism can be combined with some justificationist ideas. This new synthesis centres on the representational theory of mind and 'internalist' semantics, but ties these to ideas which stress the epistemic commitments that accompany successful assertions.

Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind

Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind PDF Author: John-Michael Kuczynski
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027252050
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
What is it to have a concept? What is it to make an inference? What is it to be rational? On the basis of recent developments in semantics, a number of authors have embraced answers to these questions that have radically counterintuitive consequences, for example: • One can rationally accept self-contradictory propositions (e.g. Smith is a composer and Smith is not a composer).• Psychological states are causally inert: beliefs and desires do nothing. • The mind cannot be understood in terms of folk-psychological concepts (e.g. belief, desire, intention). • One can have a single concept without having any others: an otherwise conceptless creature could grasp the concept of justice or of the number seven. • Thoughts are sentence-tokens, and thought-processes are driven by the syntactic, not the semantic, properties of those tokens. In the first half of Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind, John-Michael Kuczynski argues that these implausible but widely held views are direct consequences of a popular doctrine known as content-externalism, this being the view that the contents of one's mental states are constitutively dependent on facts about the external world. Kuczynski shows that content-externalism involves a failure to distinguish between, on the one hand, what is literally meant by linguistic expressions and, on the other hand, the information that one must work through to compute the literal meanings of such expressions. The second half of the present work concerns the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Underlying CTM is an acceptance of conceptual atomism – the view that a creature can have a single concept without having any others – and also an acceptance of the view that concepts are not descriptive (i.e. that one can have a concept of a thing without knowing of any description that is satisfied by that thing). Kuczynski shows that both views are false, one reason being that they presuppose the truth of content-externalism, another being that they are incompatible with the epistemological anti-foundationalism proven correct by Wilfred Sellars and Laurence Bonjour. Kuczynski also shows that CTM involves a misunderstanding of terms such as “computation”, “syntax”, “algorithm” and “formal truth”; and he provides novel analyses of the concepts expressed by these terms. (Series A)

Semantic Atomism

Semantic Atomism PDF Author: Ashish Dalela
Publisher: Shabda Press
ISBN: 9789385384417
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Vaiśeṣika is one of the Six Systems of Vedic philosophy, and Vaiśeṣika Sūtra is the oldest and most authoritative text on this philosophy. This book translates and comments on this ancient text. Vaiśeṣika describes all things in the world as Padārtha-pada denotes a symbol and artha denotes its meaning. These symbols of meaning are created by the combination of Samānya and Vaiśesa or universals and individuals. These Padārtha are connected to each other through a relationship of inherence called Samvāya, which we can call the whole-part relationship. Thus, one symbol represents the whole, and the other symbols connected to it through inherence constitute its parts. This whole-part relation between symbols of meaning is organized from whole to parts like an inverted tree in which the root is the whole, the branches are the parts of the root, the leaves are parts of the branches, etc. The universals are of three types-guna (qualities), kriya (activities), and dravya (object). The activities and qualities inhere in the object, and they are manifest through interactions between symbols. We can measure the effects of interactions via physical instruments and convert the semantic reality to physical reality, but we can never explain these effects based on the quantities. This description of atomism in Vaiśeṣika helps us understand why modern scientific atomism is incomplete-it tries to explain effects measured using physical instruments in terms of physical objects and their properties, when the objects, their properties, and their effects must all be described as concepts.

Semantics

Semantics PDF Author: Steven Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198031335
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 936

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Book Description
Semantics: A Reader contains a broad selection of classic articles on semantics and the semantics/pragmatics interface. Comprehensive in the variety and breadth of theoretical frameworks and topics that it covers, it includes articles representative of the major theoretical frameworks within semantics, including: discourse representation theory, dynamic predicate logic, truth theoretic semantics, event semantics, situation semantics, and cognitive semantics. All the major topics in semantics are covered, including lexical semantics and the semantics of quantified noun phrases, adverbs, adjectives, performatives, and interrogatives. Included are classic papers in the field of semantics as well as papers written especially for the volume. The volume comes with an extensive introduction designed not only to provide an overview of the field, but also to explain the technical concepts the beginner will need to tackle before the more demanding articles. Semantics will have appeal as a textbook for upper level and graduate courses and as a reference for scholars of semantics who want the classic articles in their field in one convenient place.

Semantic Under-determinacy and Communication

Semantic Under-determinacy and Communication PDF Author: D. Belleri
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137398442
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Combining a fresh, previously unexplored view of the subject with a detailed overview of the past and ongoing philosophical discussion on the matter, this book investigates the phenomenon of semantic under-determinacy by seeking an answer to the questions of how it can be explained, and how communication is possible despite it.

Atomism in Philosophy

Atomism in Philosophy PDF Author: Ugo Zilioli
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350107506
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
The nature of matter and the idea of indivisible parts has fascinated philosophers, historians, scientists and physicists from antiquity to the present day. This collection covers the richness of its history, starting with how the Ancient Greeks came to assume the existence of atoms and concluding with contemporary metaphysical debates about structure, time and reality. Focusing on important moments in the history of human thought when the debate about atomism was particularly flourishing and transformative for the scientific and philosophical spirit of the time, this collection covers: - The discovery of atomism in ancient philosophy - Ancient non-Western, Arabic and late Medieval thought - The Renaissance, when along with the re-discovery of ancient thought, atomism became once again an important doctrine to be fully debated - Logical atomism in early analytic philosophy, with Russell and Wittgenstein - Atomism in Liberalism and Marxism - Atomism and the philosophy of time - Atomism in contemporary metaphysics - Atomism and the sciences Featuring 28 chapters by leading and younger scholars, this valuable collection reveals the development of one of philosophy's central doctrines across 2,500 years and within a broad range of philosophical traditions.

The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap

The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap PDF Author: Alberto Coffa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521447072
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
J. Albert Coffa traces the roots of logical positivism in a semantic tradition that arose in opposition to Kant's theory that a priori knowledge is based on pure intuition.

Semantics, Pragmatics and Meaning Revisited

Semantics, Pragmatics and Meaning Revisited PDF Author: Magdalena Sztencel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319691163
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This book systematically investigates what follows about meaning in language if current views on the limited, or even redundant, role of linguistic semantics are taken to their radical conclusion. Focusing on conditionals, the book defends a wholly pragmatic, wholly inferential account of meaning – one which foregrounds a reasoning subject’s individual state of mind. The topics discussed in the book include conceptual content, internalism and externalism, the semantics-pragmatics distinction, meaning holism and explicit versus implicit communication. These topics and the author’s analysis of conditionals will allow the reader to engage with some traditional and current research in linguistics, philosophy and psychology.

Philosophical Semantics

Philosophical Semantics PDF Author: Claudio Ferreira Costa
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527527425
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
This book offers an innovative systematic approach to the problems of meaning, reference and related issues, unifying in promising ways some of the best insights, not only of exponential philosophers like Wittgenstein and Frege, but also of some influential later theorists like Michael Dummett, Ernst Tugendhat, John Searle and Donald Williams. Moreover, it exposes some main errors popularized by clever formalist-oriented philosophers, from Willard Van Orman Quine to Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam. In this way, it shows how some older major approaches could regain their central importance and how the cartography of philosophy of language could be once more redrawn. The book is clearly written, and will be of interest to anyone with basic training in analytic philosophy.

The Systematicity Arguments

The Systematicity Arguments PDF Author: Kenneth L. Aizawa
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461502756
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book addresses a part of a problem. The problem is to determine the architecture of cognition, that is, the basic structures and mechanisms underlying cognitive processing. This is a multidimensional problem insofar as there appear to be many distinct types of mechanisms that interact in diverse ways during cognitive processing. Thus, we have memory, attention, learning, sensation, perception, and who knows what else, interacting to produce behavior. As a case in point, consider a bit of linguistic behavior. To tell a friend that I think Greg won a stunning victory, I must evidently rely on various bits of information stored in my memory, including who my friends are, who Greg is, what he won, and what natural languages I share with my friend. I must sense and perceive that my friend is within hearing distance, how loud I need to speak, how loud I am speaking, and whether my friend is paying attention. I must avail myself of what I know about the language I share with my friend, along with innumerable principles about human "folk psychology. " This book does not address the full range of contemporary theorizing about cognitive architecture, but only a part. It addresses theories of cognitive architecture that hypothesize that there exist cognitive representations, then begins to explore the possible structure of these representations. One of the leading hypotheses concerning the structure of cognitive representations is that it is akin to that found in symbolic logic.