Philosophy of language

The papers and comments published in the present volume represent the proceedings of a research workshop on the grammar and semantics of natural languages held at Stanford University in the fall of 1970.

One of the first things to strike the reader of Wittgenstein's writings is the unique power of his style.

This book is nominally about linguistic representation.

Philosophers of science work not only with the methods of the sciences but with their contents as well.

This book deals with the philosophy of language and with what is at issue in the philosophy of language.

Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (1915-1975) was one of the leading intellectuals of Israel and of the world.

This book has arisen out of lectures I gave in recent years at the Uni- versities of Munich and Regensburg, and it is intended to serve as a textbook for courses in the Philosophy of Language.

In 1973 a workshop was held at The University of Western Ontario on topics of common interest to philosophers and linguists.

It is gratifying to see that philosophers' continued interest in Words and Objections has been so strong as to motivate a paperback edition.

A preface is best written last, after a book is done and its author may look back to survey what he hopes he has accomplished and what he must admit he has not.

For the past four or five years much of my thinking has centered up- on the relationship of symbolic forms to philosophic imagination and interpretation.

Predicates and their Subjects is an in-depth study of the syntax-semantics interface focusing on the structure of the subject-predicate relation.

In Rediscovering Colors: A Study in Pollyanna Realism, Michael Watkins endorses the Moorean view that colors are simple, non-reducible, properties of objects.

Since the revolution in philosophic method that began about a century ago, the focus of philosophic attention has been on language as used both in daily conversation and in specialized institutional activities such as science, law, and the arts.

In 1962 a mimeographed sheet of paper fell into my possession.

In the Introduction to the Polish-language version of the present book I expressed the hope that Polish studies in semiotics would before long be numerous enough to make possible another anthology on semiotics in Poland containing material published since 1970.

The essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages.

In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology.

To the philosopher, the logician, and the linguist, questions have a special fascination.

Richard Martin's thoroughly philosophical as well as thoroughly tech- nical investigations deserve continued and appreciative study.

With publication of the present volume, The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science enters its second phase.

Among the several dozens of symposia held on the occasion of the quincentennial of U ppsala University, there was included one symposium devoted to the theme of 'Philosophy and Grammar'.

The most general goal of this book is to propose and illustrate a program of research in word semantics that combines some of the methodology and results in linguistic semantics, primarily that of the generative semantics school, with the rigorously formalized syntactic and semantic framework for the analysis of natural languages developed by Richard Montague and his associates, a framework in which truth and denotation with respect to a model are taken as the fundamental semantic notions.

This volume constitutes the Proceedings of a workshop on formal seman- tics of natural languages which was held in Tiibingen from the 1st to the 3rd of December 1977.

The essays in this book deal with a number of problems in the analysis of intensional language - more especially with the analysis of the personal modalities in natural language.

Ladislav Tondl's insightful investigations into the language of the sciences bear directly upon some decisive points of confrontation in modern philos- ophy of science and of language itself.

The present publication is a continuation of two earlier series of chronicles, Philosophy in the Mid-Century (Firenze 1958/59) and Contemporary Philosophy (Firenze 1968), edited by Raymond KJibansky.

Fundamental problems of the uses of formal techniques and of natural and instrumental practices have been raised again and again these past two decades, in many quarters and from varying viewpoints.

This essay contains material which will hopefully be of interest not only to philosophers, but also to those social scientists whose research concerns the analysis of communication, verbal or non-verbal.

We are grateful to the authors who wrote papers specially for this volume and kindly gave their permission for printing them together.

VIrtually all the papers in these volumes originated in presentations at the Fourth Groningen Round Table, held in July 1980.

In this book, I attempt to lay the axiomatic foundations of metaphysics by developing and applying a (formal) theory of abstract objects.

Tran Duc Thao, a wise and learned scientist and an eminent Marxist philoso- pher, begins this treatise on the origins of language and consciousness with a question: "e;One of the principal difficulties of the problem of the origin of consciousness is the exact determination of its beginnings.

Adverbial modification is probably one of the least understood areas of linguistics.

I n order to appreciate properly what we are doing in this book it is necessary to realize that our approach to linguistic theorizing differs from the prevailing views.

The goal of this book is to investigate the semantics of absolute constructions in English; specifically, my object is to provide an explanation for the semantic variability of such constructions.

Phenomenology as practised by Adolf Reinach ( 1883-191 7) in his all too brief philosophical career exemplifies all the virtues of Husserl's Logical Investigations.

Some fifteen years ago, research on generalized quantifiers was con- sidered to be a branch of mathematical logic, mainly carried out by mathematicians.

The aim of this series is to inform both professional philosophers and a larger readership (of social and natural scientists, methodologists, mathematicians, students, teachers, publishers, etc.

The relationship between thought, language, and the world is an intimate one.

by the question in its being an answer, if only in a circumstantial (i.

This book is meant to serve as an introduction to the philosophy of Thomas Reid by way of a study of certain themes central to that philosophy as we find it expounded in his extensive and influential published writings.