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| Author | : Anthony J. Everett |
| Publisher | : Stanford Univ Center for the Study |
| Total Pages | : 325 |
| Release | : 2000-01-01 |
| Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
| ISBN | : 9781575862538 |
Contributions of important researchers working in empty names, fiction, and the puzzles of non-existence.
| Author | : Jody Azzouni |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 282 |
| Release | : 2010-09-30 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0199780439 |
Ordinary language and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a singular way (using demonstratives and names), what we recognize not to exist: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized but nonexistent objects that our scientific theories are often couched in terms of. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items-especially in the case of the application of mathematics to the sciences-are indispensable. We cannot avoid talking about such things. Scientific and ordinary languages thus enable us to say things about Pegasus or about hallucinated objects that are true (or false), such as "Pegasus was believed by the ancient Greeks to be a flying horse," or "That elf I'm now hallucinating over there is wearing blue shoes." Standard contemporary metaphysical views and semantic analyses of singular idioms on offer in contemporary philosophy of language have not successfully accommodated these routine practices of saying true and false things about the nonexistent while simultaneously honoring the insight that such things do not exist in any way at all (and have no properties). That is, philosophers often feel driven to claim that such objects do exist, or they claim that all our talk isn't genuine truth-apt talk, but only pretence. This book reconfigures metaphysics (and the role of metaphysics in semantics) in radical ways that allow the accommodation of our ordinary ways of speaking of what does not exist while retaining the absolutely crucial presupposition that such objects exist in no way at all, have no properties, and so are not the truth-makers for the truths and falsities that are about them.
| Author | : Manuel García-Carpintero |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 369 |
| Release | : 2014 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0199647054 |
The contents of linguistic and mental representations may seem to be individuated by what they are about. But a problem arises with regard to representation of the non-existent -- words and thoughts that are about things that don't exist. Fourteen new essays get to grips with this much-debated problem.
| Author | : Anthony Everett |
| Publisher | : OUP Oxford |
| Total Pages | : 255 |
| Release | : 2013-08-29 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0191662453 |
Anthony Everett defends the commonsense view that there are no such things as fictional people, places, and things. More precisely he develops and defends a pretense theoretic account on which there are no such things as fictional objects and our talk and thought that purports to be about them takes place within the scope of a pretense. Nevertheless we may mistakenly suppose there are fictional objects because we mistake the fact that certain utterances count as true within the pretense, and convey veridical information about the real world, for the genuine truth of those utterances. In the first half of The Nonexistent an account of this form is motivated, developed in detail, and defended from objections. The second half of the book then argues against fictional realism, the view that we should accept fictional objects into our ontology. First it is argued that the standard arguments offered for fictional realism all fail. Then a series of problems are raised for fictional realism. The upshot of these is that fictional realism provides an inadequate account of a significant range of talk and thought that purports to concern fictional objects. In contrast the pretense theoretic account developed earlier provides a very straightforward and attractive account of these cases and of fictional character discourse in general. Overall, Everett argues that we gain little but lose much by accepting fictional realism.
| Author | : Angelo Napolano |
| Publisher | : Cambridge Scholars Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 130 |
| Release | : 2014-10-16 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 1443869058 |
If it is true that when we use a name, it must be the name of something, what is it that we name when we use terms such as Sherlock Holmes, Odysseus, and many of the same type? What is it we are addressing and how do the referential relations work assuming that we are thinking or talking about something when we use these terms? Otherwise, if we are speaking about nothing when we use a fictional name, how do we understand the linguistic process which gives us the impression of speaking about something? This book develops a critical study of some theories which deny any ontological existence to fictional characters. It provides an analysis of the contribution of these terms to the meaning of the sentences in which they are used and the structure of thoughts adopted in assertions about fictional characters.
| Author | : Stefano Predelli |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 194 |
| Release | : 2017-03-16 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0191083992 |
Proper Names explores the aims and scope of the Millian approach to the semantics of proper names. Stefano Predelli covers the core semantic aspects of Millianism, and develops them against the background of an independently motivated pre-semantic picture, grounded on the distinction between meaning and use. Accordingly, the volume defends Millianism from certain popular misconceptions and criticisms, it highlights its explanatory potential, and it tackles a variety of traditional philosophical problems from its viewpoint. In particular, Predelli discusses the relationships between co-referential names, the issue of non truth-conditional meaning for proper names, the role of onomastics in a theory of the use of names, the phenomenon of empty names, cases of so-called fictional names and names from myth and false scientific theories, and apparently predicative uses of proper names.
| Author | : Sanford C. Goldberg |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 903 |
| Release | : 2020-03-17 |
| Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
| ISBN | : 0190675233 |
Assertions belong to the family of speech acts that make claims regarding how things are. They include statements, avowals, reports, expressed judgments, and testimonies - acts which are relevant across a host of issues not only in philosophy of language and linguistics but also in subdisciplines such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Over the past two decades, the amount of scholarship investigating the speech act of assertion has increased dramatically, and the scope of such research has also grown. The Oxford Handbook of Assertion explores various dimensions of the act of assertion: its nature; its place in a theory of speech acts, and in semantics and meta-semantics; its role in epistemology; and the various social, political, and ethical dimensions of the act. Essays from leading theorists situate assertion in relation to other types of speech acts, exploring the connection between assertions and other phenomena of interest not only to philosophers but also to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, lawyers, computer scientists, and theorists from communication studies.
| Author | : Jody Azzouni |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 264 |
| Release | : 2004-01-08 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 9780198036241 |
If we must take mathematical statements to be true, must we also believe in the existence of abstracta eternal invisible mathematical objects accessible only by the power of pure thought? Jody Azzouni says no, and he claims that the way to escape such commitments is to accept (as an essential part of scientific doctrine) true statements which are about objects that don't exist in any sense at all. Azzouni illustrates what the metaphysical landscape looks like once we avoid a militant Realism which forces our commitment to anything that our theories quantify. Escaping metaphysical straitjackets (such as the correspondence theory of truth), while retaining the insight that some truths are about objects that do exist, Azzouni says that we can sort scientifically-given objects into two categories: ones which exist, and to which we forge instrumental access in order to learn their properties, and ones which do not, that is, which are made up in exactly the same sense that fictional objects are. He offers as a case study a small portion of Newtonian physics, and one result of his classification of its ontological commitments, is that it does not commit us to absolute space and time.
| Author | : Bradley Armour-Garb |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 257 |
| Release | : 2020-02-05 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0190689609 |
"Within contemporary, analytic philosophy, "Fictionalism"-broadly understood as a view that uses a notion of fiction in order to resolve certain philosophical problems that do not necessarily have anything to do with fiction-has been on the scene for some time. There is a well-known collection, Fictionalism in Metaphysics (OUP, 2005), which provided a good indication of the scope of the view (and its problems) as things stood in the early 2000's. But more than a decade has passed since the appearance of that volume, and much has happened in philosophy, including in the area of fictionalism. In addition to the fact that fictionalism in philosophy appears to be more popular than ever, there are now competing views about how to tackle some of the issues that fictionalists aim to address. Moreover, fictionalism has branched out into many more areas, and there is a continuing debate about what fictionalism in philosophy actually amounts to, and about how precisely it ought to be pursued. There is thus a pressing need for a volume such as Fictionalism in Philosophy. After a detailed discussion in the book's introductory chapter of how, in the light of these ongoing debates, philosophers should think of fictionalism and its connection to metaontology more generally, the remaining chapters provide readers with some of the most current and up-to-date work on fictionalism, both for and against. As such, the volume will be of interest to professional philosophers, as well as to graduate students in philosophy and to advanced undergraduates"--
| Author | : Dov M. Gabbay |
| Publisher | : Springer Science & Business Media |
| Total Pages | : 348 |
| Release | : 2013-03-09 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 940170466X |
It is with great pleasure that we are presenting to the community the second edition of this extraordinary handbook. It has been over 15 years since the publication of the first edition and there have been great changes in the landscape of philosophical logic since then. The first edition has proved invaluable to generations of students and researchers in formal philosophy and language, as well as to consumers of logic in many applied areas. The main logic article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1999 has described the first edition as 'the best starting point for exploring any of the topics in logic'. We are confident that the second edition will prove to be just as good! The first edition was the second handbook published for the logic commu nity. It followed the North Holland one volume Handbook of Mathematical Logic, published in 1977, edited by the late Jon Barwise. The four volume Handbook of Philosophical Logic, published 1983-1989 came at a fortunate temporal junction at the evolution of logic. This was the time when logic was gaining ground in computer science and artificial intelligence circles. These areas were under increasing commercial pressure to provide devices which help and/or replace the human in his daily activity. This pressure required the use of logic in the modelling of human activity and organisa tion on the one hand and to provide the theoretical basis for the computer program constructs on the other.
