Overview

The philosophy of language is not an isolated philosophical discipline of merely technical interest to other philosophers. Rather, as Mark Platts shows, the philosophy of language can help to solve traditional problems in other areas of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Ways of Meaning provides a clear, comprehensive introduction to such issues at the forefront of philosophy. Assuming only minimum knowledge of elementary formal logic, the book shows how taking truth as the central notion in the theory of meaning can clarify the relations between language, reality, and knowledge, and thus illuminate the nature of each. This second edition of the book contains a new chapter on the notions of natural-kind words and natural kinds. Unlike other discussions of the subject, this one places the semantic issues involved in the context of questions about the relations between knowing subjects and known objects. The author has also added a bibliography of further readings published since the first edition appeared in 1979.

Full Product Details

Author:   Mark Platts (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
Publisher:   MIT Press Ltd
Imprint:   MIT Press
Edition:   second edition
Dimensions:   Width: 15.00cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 22.60cm
Weight:   0.476kg
ISBN:  

9780262661072

ISBN 10:   0262661071
Pages:   320
Publication Date:   10 April 1997
Recommended Age:   From 18 years
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   No Longer Our Product
Availability:   Out of stock  
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

Table of Contents

"Part 1 The elements of meaning: truth - conditions, predicates and definitions - theories of truth, Ramsey's theory of truth, simple truth-definitions, predicates and satisfaction, sequences as satisfiers, the workings of satisfaction, realism and correspondence, truth-bearers, some refinements; theories of truth and theories of meaning - novelty and boundlessness in language use, some possible constraints on theories of meaning - holism and monism, the elimination of ""... means that ..."", meaning and truth-conditions, the role of the theory of meaning, a definition of sentence-meaning; shades of meaning - traditional analysis, refining traditional analysis - conversational implicatures, the role of intentions in the theory of language use. Part 2 Some structures of meaning: the logical form of quantified sentences - standard truth-theories for the universal and existential quantifiers, the problem of non-standard quantifiers, the beginnings of a solution, logical form and inference; reported speech - the problems of intentionality - reported speech - the problems, Quine's proposal, the Fregean proposal, Davidson's proposal, the varieties of reported speech; names and objects - the object theory of proper names - objections, the object theory - some responses, names as austere predicates, names as ambiguous predicates; adjectival constructions - the predicative-attributive distinction, implicit and explicit attributes - semantical attachment, why attributives are not one-place predicates, positive, comparative, superlative, Wheeler's proposal, some other possibilities; actions and causes - events - understanding action-sentences - Davidson's proposal, understanding action-sentences - some problems, some logical form of singular causal sentences, singular causal statements - logical form and epistemology, some epistemological worries. Part 3 Language and reality: understanding and reality - understanding and paradox, vagueness and rules, rules and observationality, understanding and knowledge, language, reality and verification; moral reality - the nature of ethical realism, relativism and reason, morality and action; talk of a kind - words and kinds, explanatory kinds, the orders of things, knowing subjects and known objects, natural-kind words - Putnam's proposal, kind words and understanding, a moralizing postscript."

Reviews

This is the book that turned on a generation of philosophers of language--turned them on to the Davidsonian program, that is ... More than that, he surveyed a number of natural language constructions, showing how they could be handled in such a framework, and thereby mapping out the landscape of what has since become a full-blown philosophical research program. --Peter Ludlow, State University of New York at Stony Brook

This is the book that turned on a generation of philosophers of language--turned them on to the Davidsonian program, that is... More than that, he surveyed a number of natural language constructions, showing how they could be handled in such a framework, and thereby mapping out the landscape of what has since become a full-blown philosophical research program. Peter Ludlow, State University of New York at Stony Brook

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