The Unity of the Proposition

The Unity of the Proposition PDF Author: Richard Gaskin
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019155362X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
Richard Gaskin presents a work in the philosophy of language. He analyses what is distinctive about sentences and the propositions they express—what marks them off from mere lists of words and mere aggregates of word-meanings respectively. Since he identifies the world with all the true and false propositions, his account of the unity of the proposition has significant implications for our understanding of the nature of reality. He argues that the unity of the proposition is constituted by a certain infinitistic structure known in the tradition as 'Bradley's regress'. Usually, Bradley's regress has been regarded as vicious, but Gaskin argues that it is the metaphysical ground of the propositional unity, and gives us an important insight into the fundamental make-up of the world.

The Unity of the Proposition

The Unity of the Proposition PDF Author: Richard Gaskin
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019155362X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 473

Get Book Here

Book Description
Richard Gaskin presents a work in the philosophy of language. He analyses what is distinctive about sentences and the propositions they express—what marks them off from mere lists of words and mere aggregates of word-meanings respectively. Since he identifies the world with all the true and false propositions, his account of the unity of the proposition has significant implications for our understanding of the nature of reality. He argues that the unity of the proposition is constituted by a certain infinitistic structure known in the tradition as 'Bradley's regress'. Usually, Bradley's regress has been regarded as vicious, but Gaskin argues that it is the metaphysical ground of the propositional unity, and gives us an important insight into the fundamental make-up of the world.

Force, Content and the Unity of the Proposition

Force, Content and the Unity of the Proposition PDF Author: Gabriele M. Mras
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000517330
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This volume advances discussion between critics and defenders of the force-content distinction and opens up new ways of thinking about force and speech acts in relation to the unity problem. The force-content dichotomy has shaped the philosophy of language and mind since the time of Frege and Russell. Isn’t it obvious that, for example, the clauses of a conditional are not asserted and must therefore be propositions and propositions the forceless contents of forceful acts? But, others have recently asked in response, how can a proposition be a truth value bearer if it is not unified through the forceful act of a subject that takes a position regarding how things are? Can we not instead think of propositions as being inherently forceful, but of force as being cancelled in certain contexts? And what do assertoric, but also directive and interrogative force indicators mean? Force, Content and the Unity of the Proposition will be of interest to researchers working in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, philosophy of mind and linguistics.

The Unity of Linguistic Meaning

The Unity of Linguistic Meaning PDF Author: John Collins
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199694842
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
John Collins presents an analysis of the problem of the unity of the proposition - how propositions can be both single things and complexes at the same time. He surveys previous investigations of the problem and offers his own solution, which is defended from both philosophical and linguistic perspectives.

Concept and Object

Concept and Object PDF Author: Anthony Palmer
Publisher: Routledge Library Editions: Logic
ISBN: 9780367426255
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
Originally published in 1988. This text gives a lucid account of the most distinctive and influential responses by twentieth century philosophers to the problem of the unity of the proposition. The problem first became central to twentieth-century philosophy as a result of the depsychoiogising of logic brought about by Bradley and Frege who, responding to the 'Psychologism' of Mill and Hume, drew a sharp distinction between the province of psychology and the province of logic. This author argues that while Russell, Ryle and Davidson, each in different ways, attempted a theoretical solution, Frege and Wittgenstein (both in the Tractatus and the Investigations) rightly maintained that no theoretical solution is possible. It is this which explains the importance Wittgenstein attached in his later work to the idea of agreement in judgments. The two final chapters illustrate the way in which a response to the problem affects the way in which we think about the nature of the mind. They contain a discussion of Strawson's concept of a person and provide a striking critique of the philosophical claims made by devotees of artificial intelligence, in particular those made by Daniel Dennett.

The Russellian Origins of Analytical Philosophy

The Russellian Origins of Analytical Philosophy PDF Author: Graham Stevens
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415360449
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
"This book explores in detail the repercussions for his philosophical logic of Russell's discovery of the contradiction in 1901. From close study of Russell's development of the theory of types, including the recently rediscovered work on his substitutional theory in unpublished manuscripts, an interpretation of Russell's philosophical logic emerges which provides new and important insights into his philosophy as a whole, and places the problem of the unity of the proposition at its heart from start to finish."--BOOK JACKET.

One

One PDF Author: Graham Priest
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191022675
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Graham Priest presents an original exploration of philosophical questions concerning the one and the many. He covers a wide range of issues in metaphysics--including unity, identity, grounding, mereology, universals, being, intentionality, and nothingness--and deploys the techniques of paraconsistent logic in order to offer a radically new treatment of unity. Priest brings together traditions of Western and Asian thought that are usually kept separate in academic philosophy: he draws on ideas from Plato, Heidegger, and Nagarjuna, among other philosophers.

What Is Meaning?

What Is Meaning? PDF Author: Scott Soames
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691156395
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
The tradition descending from Frege and Russell has typically treated theories of meaning either as theories of meanings (propositions expressed), or as theories of truth conditions. However, propositions of the classical sort don't exist, and truth conditions can't provide all the information required by a theory of meaning. In this book, one of the world's leading philosophers of language offers a way out of this dilemma. Traditionally conceived, propositions are denizens of a "third realm" beyond mind and matter, "grasped" by mysterious Platonic intuition. As conceived here, they are cognitive-event types in which agents predicate properties and relations of things--in using language, in perception, and in nonlinguistic thought. Because of this, one's acquaintance with, and knowledge of, propositions is acquaintance with, and knowledge of, events of one's cognitive life. This view also solves the problem of "the unity of the proposition" by explaining how propositions can be genuinely representational, and therefore bearers of truth. The problem, in the traditional conception, is that sentences, utterances, and mental states are representational because of the relations they bear to inherently representational Platonic complexes of universals and particulars. Since we have no way of understanding how such structures can be representational, independent of interpretations placed on them by agents, the problem is unsolvable when so conceived. However, when propositions are taken to be cognitive-event types, the order of explanation is reversed and a natural solution emerges. Propositions are representational because they are constitutively related to inherently representational cognitive acts. Strikingly original, What Is Meaning? is a major advance.

Propositional Content

Propositional Content PDF Author: Peter Hanks
Publisher: Context & Content
ISBN: 0199684898
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Peter Hanks defends a new theory about the nature of propositional content. According to this theory, the basic bearers of representational properties are particular mental or spoken actions. Propositions are types of these actions, which we use to classify and individuate our attitudes and speech acts. Hanks abandons several key features of the traditional Fregean conception of propositional content, including the idea that propositions are the primary bearers of truth-conditions, the distinction between content and force, and the concept of entertainment. The main difficulty for this traditional conception is the problem of the unity of the proposition, the problem of explaining how propositions have truth conditions and other representational properties. The new theory developed here, in its place, explains the unity of propositions and provides new solutions to a long list of puzzles and problems in philosophy of language.

Truth and Predication

Truth and Predication PDF Author: Donald Davidson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674030220
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This brief book takes readers to the very heart of what it is that philosophy can do well. Completed shortly before Donald Davidson's death at 85, Truth and Predication brings full circle a journey moving from the insights of Plato and Aristotle to the problems of contemporary philosophy. In particular, Davidson, countering many of his contemporaries, argues that the concept of truth is not ambiguous, and that we need an effective theory of truth in order to live well. Davidson begins by harking back to an early interest in the classics, and an even earlier engagement with the workings of grammar; in the pleasures of diagramming sentences in grade school, he locates his first glimpse into the mechanics of how we conduct the most important activities in our life--such as declaring love, asking directions, issuing orders, and telling stories. Davidson connects these essential questions with the most basic and yet hard to understand mysteries of language use--how we connect noun to verb. This is a problem that Plato and Aristotle wrestled with, and Davidson draws on their thinking to show how an understanding of linguistic behavior is critical to the formulating of a workable concept of truth. Anchored in classical philosophy, Truth and Predication nonetheless makes telling use of the work of a great number of modern philosophers from Tarski and Dewey to Quine and Rorty. Representing the very best of Western thought, it reopens the most difficult and pressing of ancient philosophical problems, and reveals them to be very much of our day.

Thinking and Being

Thinking and Being PDF Author: Irad Kimhi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674985281
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Opposing a long-standing orthodoxy of the Western philosophical tradition running from ancient Greek thought until the late nineteenth century, Frege argued that psychological laws of thought—those that explicate how we in fact think—must be distinguished from logical laws of thought—those that formulate and impose rational requirements on thinking. Logic does not describe how we actually think, but only how we should. Yet by thus sundering the logical from the psychological, Frege was unable to explain certain fundamental logical truths, most notably the psychological version of the law of non-contradiction—that one cannot think a thought and its negation simultaneously. Irad Kimhi’s Thinking and Being marks a radical break with Frege’s legacy in analytic philosophy, exposing the flaws of his approach and outlining a novel conception of judgment as a two-way capacity. In closing the gap that Frege opened, Kimhi shows that the two principles of non-contradiction—the ontological principle and the psychological principle—are in fact aspects of the very same capacity, differently manifested in thinking and being. As his argument progresses, Kimhi draws on the insights of historical figures such as Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein to develop highly original accounts of topics that are of central importance to logic and philosophy more generally. Self-consciousness, language, and logic are revealed to be but different sides of the same reality. Ultimately, Kimhi’s work elucidates the essential sameness of thinking and being that has exercised Western philosophy since its inception.