Search Results

An account of temporal supervenience requires an account of temporal predication: a semantic account of the language in which facts about ordinary time are stated. For the detenser, the problem of temporal predication is essentially the task of giving an account of the semantic function of the modifier ‘at t’ in ‘a is F at t’. In the project of explaining temporal supervenience, an account of temporal predication functions as an analysis of ordinary temporal facts, which is required to build an explanatory bridge from these temporal facts to their spatiotemporal supervenience base. This chapter discusses various accounts of temporal predication that share the common feature that temporal supervenience cannot be explained on the basis of them, because these accounts allow no plausible explanatory link between the facts of persistence and change and any facts about spacetime.

Many ‘pre-pragmatist’ opponents of the classical picture begin with a suspicion that such doctrines place unrealistic demands upon human capacity: that when we grasp a collection of vocabulary, its syntax rarely becomes as firmly attached to the world as the classical story promises. In overreaction, thinkers such as W. V. Quine frequently become sceptical that the world independently possesses attributes to which language might potentially attach at all. Such doubts are impossibly radical, but a pre-pragmatist can plausibly argue on engineering grounds that it is not easy to set classical-style semantic attachments in place. Confronted with these practical impediments, over time language often develops into more complicated forms of semantic arrangement than classical thinking anticipates.

The Fregean and the modern schemata for extensions and intensions of terms, predicates, and propositions are subjected to a new critique and are revised accordingly, whereby an intensional ontology of virtual objects and facts is developed, in the light of the original Fregean problem of substitution salva veritate. Categories of reference values are defined for terms and for propositional structures.

This chapter focuses on word reference, and shows that the meaning of an expression cannot be identified with its reference to things in the world, rather than its expression of ideas in the mind. It looks at extensionalist versions of the referential theory that focus on objects in the actual world and sets thereof, as well as intensionalist versions that consider other possible worlds and/or properties and relations. It examines the Davidsonian theory, which used a Tarski-style axiomatization for languages to describe the compositionality of language. Truth-theoretic properties can be systematized in an ideational theory using a generative theory of thought, with phrase structure rules and Tarskian reference rules.

This chapter begins an argument against the ‘Frege-Mill dichotomy’, the assumption that names have either a descriptive sense or no sense at all. Millian theories denying that names have a sense are considered, as well as Millian theories identifying sense with reference. Russell’s and Frege’s problems are the principal objections. Modal version of Millianism that identifies the meaning of a name with an intension or character function cannot avoid these problems without unrealistic existence and identity assumptions.

This chapter shows that the treatment of names as having nondescriptive, indefinable senses does not preclude a powerful formal semantics; that the referential properties of names can be treated formally without identifying the meaning of a name with its reference; and that names can be handled within an ideational semantics, or by situation and possible worlds semantics. The key to avoiding both Russell’s and Frege’s problems is to drop the assumption that the elements of the ordered n-tuples representing situations, or the values of intension functions representing meanings, are the referents of the terms whose meanings are being represented, and to rely on the formal character of formal semantics.

In this essay, Davidson sets out to demonstrate that successful communication or mutual interpretability indicates the presence of a shared, and largely true, view of the world. Beliefs must be shared for the attribution of error or disagreement can only occur against a widely shared background: error and disagreement can only be local and never massive or total (Essay 13). Truth is no longer relative to conceptual schemes but only to languages that can be shown to be largely correct about the world. Consequently, by studying one's language one can derive ontological conclusions: a truth theory (such as that developed in Essay 2) will reveal the overall ontology required by a particular language, and while quotations and intensions can be dispensed with as distinct entities (on a proper analysis of them, given in Essays 1, 6, and 7), an ontology of events cannot, provided the language contains causal statements (Essays 6 and 8 of Essays on Actions and Events). By eliminating the concepts of satisfaction and denotation from our truth theories (cf Essay 15), Davidson can eliminate their concomitant ontology (cf Essay 3) as well as avoid extending the ideology of the interpreter's language too much beyond that of the language to be interpreted (Essay 4).

Work by Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke has made us sensitive to the distinction between metaphysical necessity and conceptual necessity, and between being necessary and being a priori. This chapter relates these matters to the discussion of conceptual analysis given in Ch. 2 and uses the apparatus of two‐dimensional modal logic and the associated distinction between A‐intensions and C‐intensions (or primary and secondary intensions, respectively, in David Chalmers’ terms) to argue that physicalism is committed to the thesis that the mental is in principle a priori derivable from the physical.

The figure of the hermeneutical circle is problematic on the grounds that a circle can only bring one back to where one started, with a slight enhancement of understanding. The hermeneutical spiral, by contrast, is a figure that itself embodies hermeneutics as a thinking in which neither of the two terms nor their relation is fixed; rather, the relation is unfinished because the circuiting motion proceeds through differing planes. The inverse relation between intension and extension is what makes the hermeneutical spiral move. God godself in extension is enduringly indeterminate, and any presentation or re-presentation of God in intension, qua sign or trace, is temporally determinate and subject to both the ravages and the increments of time. The mental mood of the person who reflects on God and the human person is a Stimmung, a voicing mood, of relinquishing and releasement, in which one hears the receding sound of the relinquished, the tonality of releasement. One relinquishes the blind dogmatisms of the Abrahamic religions and the vain certitudes of the modern natural sciences. This thought-experiment has sought to interrelate two mood-worlds, that of the modern natural sciences and that of the human religious enchantments, each with its own imaginary.

The chapter argues that traditional theories of structured propositions of Frege and Russell can’t solve the “problem of the unity of the proposition,” which is to explain how they can be intrinsic, conceptually primary bearers of truth conditions. It further argues that possible-worlds conceptions of propositions can’t bear their truth conditions intrinsically, that they are too coarse-grained even to model propositions, and that theories of truth at a world implicitly presuppose genuine non-possible worlds propositions in order to provide information about meaning.

The study of cognitive phenomena is best approached in an orderly manner. It must begin with an analysis of the function in intension at the heart of any cognitive domain (its knowledge base), then proceed to the manner in which such knowledge is put into use in real-time processing, concluding with a domain’s neural underpinnings, its development in ontogeny, etc. Such an approach to the study of cognition involves the adoption of different levels of explanation/description, as prescribed by David Marr and many others, each level requiring its own methodology and supplying its own data to be accounted for. The study of recursion in cognition is badly in need of a systematic and well-ordered approach, and this chapter lays out the blueprint to be followed in the book by focusing on a strict separation between how this notion applies in linguistic knowledge and how it manifests itself in language processing.

Two distinctive features of Frege’s approach to compositionality are reconstructed in terms of the theory of extension and intension: (i) its bias in favour of extensional operations; and (ii) its resort to indirect senses in the face of iterated opacity. While (i) has been preserved in current formal semantics, it proves to be stronger than a straightforward extensionality requirement in terms of Logical Space, the difference turning on a subtle distinction between extensions at particular points and extensions per se. (ii) has traditionally been dismissed as redundant, and is shown to lead to a mere ‘baroque’ reformulation of ordinary compositionality. Nevertheless, whatever Frege’s motive, the very idea of having opaque denotations keep track of the depth of their embedding gives rise to a fresh view at certain scope paradoxes that had previously been argued to lie outside the reach of a binary distinction between extension and intension.

Any abstractionist approach to thin objects faces the threat of paradox, as illustrated by Frege’s inconsistent Basic Law V. The neo-Fregeans Hale and Wright respond by severely restricting the class of acceptable abstraction principles. Their approach is static in the sense that they hold the domain fixed. This approach to abstraction is criticized, and an alternative approach is developed which permits abstraction on a vast class of equivalence relations. This alternative approach is dynamic in the sense that abstraction on an extensionally specified domain (i.e. a domain specified by means of a plurality of objects) may result in a larger such domain. A form of absolute generality is nevertheless possible, provided that the associated domain is understood in an intensional sense (i.e. it cannot be specified by means of a plurality).