For the book Philosophical Semantics to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2917/2
BLURB
This book offers an innovative systematic approach to the problems of meaning and reference, unifying in promising ways some of the best insights, not only of exponential philosophers like Wittgenstein, Frege, Russell and Husserl, but also of influential later theorists like Michael Dummett, Ernst Tugendhat, John Searle and Donald Williams. Moreover, it exposes some of the main errors popularized by clever but reductionist formalistically-oriented philosophers, from Willard V-O. Quine to Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam. In this way, it shows how some old central approaches could regain the integrity of their most proper epistemic place and find a new approach with which to redraw the cartography of philosophy of language.
PHILOSOPHICAL
SEMANTICS
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter I: Introduction
Appendix to Chapter I: How Do Proper Names Really Work? (Cutting the Gordian knot)
1. A meta-descriptivist rule for proper names
2. Identification rules at work
3. Objection of vagueness
4. Signification
5. Ignorance and error
6. Rigidity
7. Names versus descriptions
8. Autonomous definite descriptions
9. Kripke’s counterexamples
10. Donnellan’s counterexamples
11. Explanatory failure of the causal-historical view
Chapter II: Against the Metaphysics of Reference: Methodological Assumptions
1. Common sense and meaning
2. Critical common-sensism
3. Ambitious versus modest common sense
4. Resisting changes in worldviews
5. Primacy of established knowledge
6. Philosophizing by examples
7. Tacit knowledge of meaning: traditional explanation
8. A very simple example of semantic-cognitive rules
9. Criteria versus symptoms
10. Challenges to the traditional explanation (i): John McDowell
11. Challenges to the traditional explanation (ii): Gareth Evans
12. Non-reflexive semantic cognitions
13. Conclusion
Appendix to Chapter II: Modal Illusions: Against Supra-Epistemic Metaphysical Identities
Addendum: disposing of externalism
Chapter III: Wittgensteinian Semantics
1. Semantic-cognitive link
2. Why can’t reference be meaning?
3. Failure of Russell’s atomistic referentialism
4. Meaning as a function of use
5. Meaning as a kind of rule
6. Meaning as a combination of rules
7. Meaning and language-games
8. Meaning and forms of life
9. Tying the threads together
10. Criteria and symptoms revisited
11. Transgressions of the internal limits of language
12. The form of semantic cognitive rules
13. What is wrong with the private language argument?
14. Concluding remarks
Appendix to Chapter III: Trope Theory and the Unbearable Lightness of Being
1. Introducing tropes
2. Tropes and universals
3. Tropes and concrete particulars
4. Tropes and formal properties
5. Conclusion
Chapter IV: An Extravagant Reading of Fregean Semantics
1. Reference of a singular term
2. Sense of a singular term
3. Reference of a predicative expression
4. Ontological level
5. Referring to particularized properties (tropes)
6. Difficulties with the concept of unsaturation
7. Unsaturation as ontological dependence
8. Sense of a predicative term
9. The dependence of the predicative sense
10. The concept of horse paradox
11. Existence as a property of concepts
12. Existence as a property of conceptual rules
13. Two naïve objections
14. Attributing existence to objects
15. Existence of objects and its identification rules
16. Existence of spatio-temporal locations: indexicals
17. Advantages of the higher-order view of existence
18. Ubiquity of existence
19. Answering some final objections
20. Reference of concepts again: a metaphysical excurse (Mill)
21. The reference of a sentence as its truth-value
22. Logical structure of facts
23. Ontological nature of facts
24. Church’s slingshot argument
25. Facts: sub-facts and grounding facts
26. Taking seriously the sentence’s reference as a fact
27. The riddle of identity in difference
28. No necessity of necessary a posteriori
29. Sense of sentences: the thought
30. The thought as the truth-bearer
31. Facts as true thoughts?
32. The thought as a verifiability rule
33. Frege’s Platonism
34. Avoiding Frege’s Platonism
35. Further ontological consequences
36. A short digression on contingent futures
37. Conclusion
Appendix to Chapter IV: Frege, Russell, and the Puzzles of Reference
1. Russell’s solutions to the puzzles of reference
2. Fregean solutions to the same puzzles
3. Reviewing Fregean assumptions
4. Reviewing Russellian assumptions
5. Building a bridge between both views
6. Conclusion
Chapter V: Verificationism Redeemed
1. Origins of semantic verificationism
2. Wittgensteinean verificationism
3. A verifiability rule as a criterial rule
4. Objection 1: the principle is self-refuting
5. Objection 2: a formalist illusion
6. Objection 3: verificational holism
7. Objection 4: existential-universal asymmetry
8. Objection 5: arbitrary indirectness
9. Objection 6: empirical counterexamples
10. Objection 7: formal counterexamples
11. Objection 8: skepticism about rules
12. Defending analyticity
13. Conclusion
Appendix to Chapter V: The only Key to Solving the Humean Problem of Induction
1. Formulating a Humean argument
2. The basic idea
3. Reformulating PF
Chapter VI: Sketch of a Unified Theory of Truth
1. The deceptive simplicity of adequation
2. Compatibility between verificationism and adequation
3. Analysis of adequation: structural isomorphism
4. Analysis of adequation: categorical match
5. Excurse on logical form
6. Analysis of adequation: intentionality and causality
7. The logical form of the adequation relation
8. Negative truths
9. Self-referentiality
10. Pragmatics of the adequation relation
11. Retrograde procedures
12. A more complex case
13. General statements
14. Some funny facts
15. Expansion to formal sciences
16. Why can analytic truth be called true?
17. The insufficiency of coherence
18. Coherence as a mediator
19. Roles of empirical coherence
20. What about the truth of the truth-maker?
21. Objection of the linguistic-cognitive circle
22. Answering the objection of the linguistic-cognitive circle
23. Answering traditional arguments against direct realism
24. Question: How to warrant a non-mental external content?
25. Answer: A definitional criterion of external reality
26. Proving the existence of the external world
27. Skeptical scenarios
28. Verification and intentionality: Husserl
29. Solving two Husserlian problems
30. Truth and existence again
31. The rule’s structural mirroring of the world
32. The unavoidability of particularizing tropical qualities
33. Synopsis of this book
Epilogue: Discovery of Wine
References
Niemand weiß noch, wer künftig in jenem Gehäuse wohnen wird und ob am Ende dieser ungeheuren Entwicklung ganz neue Propheten oder eine mächtige Wiedergeburt alter Gedanken und Ideale stehen werden, oder aber – wenn keins von beiden – mechanisierte Versteinerung, mit einer Art von krampfhaftem sich wichtig nehmen verbrämt. Dann allerdings könnte für die “letzten Menschen” dieser Kulturentwicklung das Wort zur Wahrheit werden: “Fachmenschen ohne Geist, Genußmenschen ohne Herz: dies Nichts bildet sich ein, eine nie vorher erreichte Stufe des Menschentums erstiegen zu haben.”
[No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For the ‘last man’ of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialist without spirit, sensualist without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of humanity never before achieved.’]
Max Weber
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