Alessandra Tanessini - Philosophy of Language a-Z

Philosophy of Language A–Z

Alessandra TanesiniThe first glossary to cover the theories, debates, concepts, problems and philosophers within the philosophy of language in one volume.

This essential reference tool, written in a language accessible to beginners and non-specialists alike, provides concise and precise entries on all the relevant keyterms and issues. It includes extensive cross-references which indicate the contextsof each entry, and can be used to deepen understanding of any given topic.

Philosophy of Language A–Z offers clear and thorough guidance on how to negotiatethe complexities of the philosophy of language.

Alessandra Tanesini is Reader in Philosophy at Cardiff University. Her publicationsinclude Wittgenstein: A Feminist Introduction (Polity Press, 2004) and An Introduction toFeminist Epistemologies (Blackwell, 1999).

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Edinburgh University Press22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF

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Alessandra Tanesini

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AlessandraTanesini

PHILOSOPHY A–Z SERIESGENERAL EDITOR: OLIVER LEAMAN

These thorough, authoritative yet concise alphabetical guides introduce the central concepts of the various branches of philosophy. Written by established philosophers, they cover both traditional and contemporary terminology.

Features

• Dedicated coverage of particular topics within philosophy• Coverage of key terms and major figures• Cross-references to related terms.


PhilosophyofLanguage

A–Z

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PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE A–Z

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Volumes available in the Philosophy A–Z Series

Christian Philosophy A–Z, Daniel J. Hill and Randal D.Rauser

Epistemology A–Z, Martijn Blaauw and Duncan PritchardEthics A–Z, Jonathan A. JacobsIndian Philosophy A–Z, Christopher BartleyJewish Philosophy A–Z, Aaron W. HughesPhilosophy of Religion A–Z, Patrick QuinnPhilosophy of Mind A–Z, Marina Rakova

Forthcoming volumes

Aesthetics A–Z, Fran GuterChinese Philosophy A–Z, Bo MouFeminist Philosophy A–Z, Nancy McHughIslamic Philosophy A–Z, Peter GroffPhilosophy of Science A–Z, Stathis PsillosPolitical Philosophy A–Z, Jon Pike

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Philosophy of

Language A–Z

Alessandra Tanesini

Edinburgh University Press

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C© Alessandra Tanesini, 2007

Edinburgh University Press Ltd22 George Square, Edinburgh

Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabonby TechBooks, India, and printed and

bound in Great Britain byAntony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts

A CIP record for this book isavailable from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 2228 3 (hardback)ISBN 978 0 7486 2229 0 (paperback)

The right of Alessandra Tanesinito be identified as author of this workhas been asserted in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published with the support of the Edinburgh UniversityScholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

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Contents

Series Editor’s Preface viiIntroduction and Acknowledgements ix

Philosophy of Language A–Z 1

Bibliography 184

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Series Editor’s Preface

Philosophy is not only expressed in language, but language isoften its main object of interest and enquiry. Not of courselanguage in the sense of grammar and style, which is morethe realm of linguistics and literary investigation. Languageas our medium for pursuing meaning, which in itself is therepository of meaning, has constantly fascinated philosopherswith its ability both to enlighten and confuse. The issue ofhow words mean things, an issue that seems on the face of itso very simple, has in fact served to differentiate some of themajor philosophical schools, and continues to appear on thebattlefields of major theoretical controversies in philosophy.One of the intriguing features of debates about language isthat they are generally conducted in terms of the very mediumunder discussion.

In modern times the philosophy of language has becomerather technical in nature, and it is very helpful to have asystematic list of explanations of many of the key concepts andfigures in the discipline. Alessandra Tanesini has provided sucha guide, and I am sure that readers of this volume will find herroute through the thicket of different theories and argumentsa useful one to follow. A solid grasp of some of the basicpositions in the philosophy of language is indispensable for agrasp of philosophy as a whole, and this volume is designedto go someway to fulfilling that role.

Oliver Leaman

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Introduction andAcknowledgements

This dictionary introduces readers to the main theories, prob-lems, figures and arguments in the philosophy of language.It aims for breadth of coverage, including over 490 entrieson every topic in the philosophy of language and on manynotions in the cognate areas of logic, philosophical logic andthe philosophy of mind. Entries are written in accessible, non-technical vocabulary and made to be as concise as possible.Each entry is cross-referenced to others that are related to it, sothat the reader can broaden his or her knowledge of the issuesand debates connected to a given problem or figure. Further,entries are supplemented by brief further readings.

I would like to thank Alex Miller and Michael Lynch forsuggestions about which entries to include, and Michael Dur-rant, Richard Gray and Oliver Leaman for useful commentson earlier drafts. Staff at Edinburgh University Press were par-ticularly helpful with all queries and have greatly facilitatedthe writing of this work.

Cardiff, WalesMay 2006

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A

A posteriori: The term applies primarily to knowledge that isultimately dependent on experience or observation, and isthus dubbed ‘empirical’. The truths of natural science areknowable in this way. Some of these truths, such as thoseabout subatomic particles, might be highly theoretical.Nevertheless, they are knowable a posteriori because theyare based on evidence which is ultimately provided by thesenses. A posteriori falsehoods are those claims whosefalsity is ultimately known by means of experience orobservation. A posteriori truths are opposed to a prioritruths, which are not empirical. Until recently it was notuncommon for philosophers to assume that the notion ofa posteriori or empirical truth was coextensive with thoseof synthetic truth and of contingent truth. In other words,they assumed that all and only the empirical truths werecontingent and also that all and only these were synthetic.

See Analytic; Kripke, Saul; Necessary

A priori: The term applies to what can be known by reflectionindependently of experience. Arithmetical truths, such astwo plus two is four, are typically thought to be knowablein this way. An a priori falsehood is a claim whose falsitycan be established by reflection alone, for example, that

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4 PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE A–Z

two plus two is three. A priori truths are not empirical,which is to say that they are not a posteriori. Until re-cently it was not uncommon for philosophers to assumethat the notion of a priori truth was coextensive withthose of analytic truth, and of necessary truth. In otherwords, they assumed that all and only the a priori truthswere necessary and also that all and only these were an-alytic.

See Contingent; Kripke, Saul; Synthetic

Further reading: BonJour (1998), ch. 1

Abstract entity: An entity that exists outside space or timeand does not have any causal powers. If any such entitiesexist, and philosophers disagree on this matter, numberscould be a good example. An entity which is not abstractis concrete. It is called a particular.

See Universal

Abstraction: (1) Early modern philosophers used the term torefer to the process of neglecting or suppressing specificdetails. Thus, we obtain the idea of a dog, any dog, by ab-straction from the idea of a spaniel by neglecting specificfeatures pertaining to this breed but not shared by otherdogs. Thus, an abstract idea is a general idea which isnot fully detailed. This notion of abstraction has little incommon with contemporary conceptions of an abstract

entity. See Berkeley, George. (2) The term is also used toname a principle, attributed to Frege, for the formulationsof definitions of a special sort. Consider, for example, allthe lines in the world and group together all of those thatare parallel to each other. By this process one obtains sev-eral classes of lines, with each class including all and onlyparallel lines. It is now possible to define the notion ofthe direction of a line as that which is the same for all thelines in each group. This is an abstractive definition of



PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE A–Z 5

direction. Frege was dissatisfied with it because the defi-nition does not by itself tell us what to say about thingswhich intuitively we do not think as having a direction.

Acquisition argument: This is a challenge, put forward byDummett, to semantic realism. Semantic realism is theview that to understand a sentence is to know the con-ditions under which it is true (its truth conditions), andthat these conditions might be such that it is potentiallybeyond us to detect whether or not they obtain (thatis, the truth conditions are evidence-, verification- orrecognition-transcendent). Dummett challenges the sup-porter of semantic realism to explain how knowledgeof these evidence-transcendent conditions could possi-bly have been acquired. Dummett agrees with the realistthat to understand a sentence is to know its truth con-ditions. However, he claims that states of affairs whoseobtaining is by hypothesis undetectable could not haveplayed a role in our acquisition of such knowledge.Thus, semantic realism must be false, and those sentenceswe understand must have truth conditions that are notevidence-transcendent. The argument is generally consid-ered unsuccessful since the semantic realist can explainour understanding of sentences whose truth conditionsare evidence-transcendent in terms of our understandingof their constituent words and of their modes of combi-nation.

See Communicability argument; Manifestation argu-

ment; Tacit knowledge; Verification transcendence

Further reading: Hale (1999)

Alethic: An adjective which means pertaining or concerningtruth (from the Greek word for truth, aletheia).

Ambiguity: A word or expression is ambiguous when it hasmore then one meaning.




Analogy: An argument by analogy is one that relies on thesimilarities with a known case to draw inferences aboutan unknown one. Thus, it used to be claimed that weknow of the existence of other minds by means of ananalogy with our own. I know that in my case I behavein certain ways because of my beliefs, desires and sensa-tions. I observe that others behave in similar ways, andI conclude, by analogy from my own case, that behindtheir behaviour are mental states similar to my own. Thisparticular argument has severe shortcomings, includingthe fact that it generalises to all persons on the basis ofone instance only.

Analysis: It is a means of clarifying a concept by breaking it upinto its conceptual components. Thus, for example, theconcept of bachelor can be analysed as unmarried manof a marriageable age.

See Analysis, paradox of

Analysis, paradox of: The paradox has a long history havingperhaps originated with Plato. Suppose that a statementof A is B offers an analysis, where A is the term to beexplained or analysed (analysandum) and B is what givesthe analysis (analysans). Either A and B are equivalent inmeaning or they are not. If they are equivalent in meaning,then the analysis is trivial because it is not informative.If they are not equivalent in meaning, then the analysis isincorrect, because it does not tell us what the concept weanalyse means. Either way, conceptual analyses are eithertrivial or wrong. A response to the paradox might be tosay that an analysis that goes beyond merely restating theoriginal meaning of the concept to be analysed need notbe incorrect. Instead, it can refine, and sharpen up, thatconcept in ways that are informative.




Analytic: A statement, claim or sentence which is true (false)in virtue only of the meanings of the expressions whichmake it up. For instance, ‘bachelors are unmarried malesof a marriageable age’ is said to be an analytic truth. Syn-

thetic truths, whose truth depends also on how thingsare, are opposed to analytic truths. Quine argued againstthe analytic–synthetic distinction, claiming that no non-circular definition of the notion of analyticity couldbe provided. Until recently, it was not uncommon forphilosophers (including Quine himself) to assume that alland only analytic truths were necessary, and also that alland only analytic truths were knowable a priori.

Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 4; Quine (1951)

Anaphora: The cross-referencing relation which can hold, forexample, between a noun and a pronoun. In the sen-tence ‘Mary arrived late at the party, and she left early’,the name ‘Mary’ is the anaphoric antecedent of the pro-noun ‘she’ which cross-refers to it. Any expression thatstands in anaphoric relation to an antecedent is called an‘anaphor’. Confusingly, the antecedent might come af-ter its anaphor in a sentence. An example is: ‘When shefirst crossed the line, Paula bowed to the audience’. Somephilosophers have claimed that expressions other thanpronouns can have anaphoric relations with antecedentlocutions.

See Pronoun; Prosentence

Anscombe, G. E. M. (1919–2001): Professor Anscombe wasa fellow of Somerville College, Oxford University andEmeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge Univer-sity. Her influential work in philosophy includes her bookIntention (1957) on action theory, and her papers onthe intentionality of sensation and on the first person.




Anscombe had been a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein,and was one of his literary executors. She was the trans-lator of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, andthe author of the highly influential An Introduction toWittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959).

Anti-realism: The label for a family of views opposed to re-

alism. Sometimes they are also referred to as non-realist.There are many kinds of anti-realism which are best un-derstood in terms of the realist assumptions they reject.Anti-realists about an area of discourse, who deny theexistence of the alleged entities in that area, divide intosupporters of error-theory, who believe that all atomicclaims in that area of discourse are simply false, and sup-porters of expressivism or non-cognitivism, who believethat sentences in that area of discourse are not used tomake claims but simply to vent one’s attitudes or emo-tions. Other anti-realists accept the existence of the al-leged entities, but deny that these objects exist indepen-dently of us. Dummett, for instance, opposes what he callssemantic realism. He argues that sentences in any givenarea of discourse should not be understood as being madetrue or false by conditions that might be even in principleundetectable by us, as the realist would have it. Instead,these sentences depend, in some way to be specified, onus for their truth. For instance, in arithmetic Dummett ar-gues that truth cannot outstrip the possibility of finding aproof. Response-dependence about an area of discourseis another kind of anti-realism which takes the objectsin question to depend on us for their existence. Recently,some philosophers have attempted to debunk the wholerealism/anti-realism debate and support quietism instead.

See Semantic anti-realism; Wright, Crispin

Further reading: Miller (2005)




Argument: (1) A piece of reasoning consisting of one or moreconclusions and some premises, which are statements pre-sented as reasons for, evidence in favour of, the conclusionor conclusions. Deductive arguments are those in whichthe premises are intended to provide conclusive reasonswhich guarantee the truth of the conclusion given thetruth of the premises. Inductive arguments are those inwhich the premises provide evidence in favour of the con-clusion. See Validity. (2) In mathematics and in logic theinputs of functions and operations are called their argu-ments, and the outputs are their values. For instance, in‘2 + 3 = 5’, addition is the function, the arguments are 2and 3, and the value is 5.

Argument from above: One of two arguments offered byQuine in favour of the claim that translation is indeter-minate. The other is known as the argument from below.Indeterminacy of translation is the thesis that in manyinstances there is no fact of the matter about which oftwo competing (and mutually incompatible) translationsis correct. The argument from above relies on the idea thatscientific theories are under-determined by all the possi-ble empirical evidence. This is the idea that theories whichare actually different might have exactly the same empir-ical consequences, so that no empirical evidence could beprovided for favouring one over the other. Suppose wewant to translate into our language the scientific theoryof a scientist who belongs to a culture with whom wehave never been in touch and who speaks a language thatis totally new to us. In this instance we need to start thetranslation from scratch. In these cases, Quine claims thatthe translation of the theoretical claims in the foreigner’stheory is under-determined by our translations of thoseportions of its theory which are about observation. That




is to say, there will be more than one way of translatingthese theoretical sentences, all of which are equally com-patible with our translation of the foreigner’s observationsentences, despite being mutually incompatible. Quine’sclaim here is not that translation is as under-determinedas scientific theories are. Rather, his claim is that evenwhen scientific under-determination is ignored, and onehas chosen one scientific theory (as the foreign scientisthas done), translation is still not determinate. Thus, theindeterminacy of translation is meant to be additional tothe under-determination of scientific theories by all thepossible empirical evidence.

See Inscrutability of reference

Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 4

Argument from below: One of two arguments offered byQuine in favour of the claim that translation is indetermi-nate. The other is known as the argument from above. In-

determinacy of translation is the thesis that in many casesthere is no fact of the matter about which of two compet-ing (and mutually incompatible) translations is correct.The argument relies on the idea of a radical translatorwho needs to translate a novel language from scratch.At the beginning the translator must rely exclusively onthe behaviour of native speakers. For Quine, the trans-lator can only avail herself of facts about the stimulus

meaning of sentences of the native language. She canonly take into account the circumstances under whichnatives would assent to sentences and the circumstancesunder which they would dissent from them. Quine claimsthat when all these facts are in, translation is still in-determinate, because mutually incompatible translationswould be compatible with all the facts about stimulusmeaning. This is the argument from below, and Quinesubstantiates it by example. Imagine that the natives




assent to ‘gavagai’ when a rabbit is in sight and dissentfrom it when there is no rabbit. Both a translation ofthe native sentence as ‘there is a rabbit’ and as ‘thereis an undetached rabbit part’ (i.e., a part of rabbit at-tached to the whole rabbit), despite being incompatible,are compatible with these facts about stimulus meaning.We cannot get evidence for preferring one of the transla-tions over the other by asking, while pointing first to onepart of a rabbit and then to another part of the same rab-bit, whether this is ‘erat gavagai’ as that, because there isno unique way of determining whether the native word‘erat’ is best translated as ‘same’ or as ‘undetached partof the same’. Translation is indeterminate because factsabout stimulus meaning, which are the only acceptablefacts, do not determine it. Evans has argued that indeter-minacy is dissolved when the range of acceptable trans-lations is restricted only to those which meet the furtherconstraint of compositionality. Any translation of a com-plex expression must attribute to each of its semanticparts the same meaning it attributes to that part whenused in combination with other semantic parts. Supposenatives sometime also say ‘ugul gavagai’ and also sup-pose that on the basis of previous natives’ utterances wetake ‘ugul’ to mean ‘white’. But now the indeterminacyseems to disappear since ‘white rabbit’ and ‘white unde-tached rabbit part’ have different stimulus meanings. Thepresence of a black rabbit with a white foot would promptdissent to the first but not necessarily to the second. Quinecannot reply by saying that ‘ugul’ could mean ‘part of awhite animal’ because (by compositionality) ‘ugul’ mustmean the same thing every time it is used. The problemis that ‘white’ and ‘part of a white animal’ have differentstimulus meaning since the first, but not the second, ap-plies to things that are not animals. Further, the problemis not addressed by taking ‘ugul’ to mean ‘part of a white




thing’ because a white foot of a rabbit is also a thing.Thus, ‘white’ and ‘part of a white thing’ differ with re-gard to their stimulus-meanings since the first does notapply to a black rabbit with a white ear, but the secondapplies to one of its undetached parts.

See Inscrutability of reference

Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 4; Evans (1996),ch. 2; Quine (1960)

Ascription: Attribution. When philosophers talk about as-criptions, they are often interested in the language usedto make the ascription, rather than exclusively in what isascribed.

Assertibility condition: The condition which, if satisfied, war-rants or justifies the assertion of the statement. Thus, thelitmus paper’s turning red when immersed in a liquid isa condition that warrants the assertion that this liquid isacid. Supporters of semantic anti-realism have developedaccounts of meaning in terms of assertibility conditions.Supporters of semantic realism, instead, have providedtheories of meaning in terms of truth conditions.

See Semantics, assertibility conditions; Superassertibil-

ity

Assertion: A speech act that consists in putting forward aproposition as true. In order to be entitled to make theassertion a speaker does not need to have a guaranteethat the assertion is true; some form of warrant or jus-tification is sufficient. It is a matter of dispute amongphilosophers whether in order to provide an account ofassertion we need to rely on a previously understood no-tion of truth. The debate between semantic realism andsemantic anti-realism concerns whether the meaning ofdeclarative sentences is to be understood in terms of theirtruth conditions or of their assertibility conditions.




Assertoric content: The fact stating content of statements.Statements might also have additional meaning, but if itdoes not contribute to determining which facts are statedby the assertion, it is not part of its assertoric content.

See Assertoric force

Assertoric force: In order to make an assertion, a declarativesentence must be uttered with assertoric force. In general,force is that pragmatic component of meaning that makesthe difference as to whether the utterance is a question, acommand, an assertion, and so forth.

See Assertoric content

Asymmetric dependence: This is Fodor’s answer to the dis-

junction problem faced by indicator semantics. Imagine aperson who cannot tell by sight a rabbit from a hare. Thisperson learns about rabbits from books and by having apet rabbit as a child. Whenever this person is in the pres-ence of a rabbit, she forms a mental state of kind R. Thissame person, however, also forms a mental state of kindR when she sees a hare in the field. Indicator semanticsappears to force us to say that the person has an either-rabbit-or-hare representation. Intuitively, we want to say,instead, that this person at times mistakenly applies herrepresentation of rabbits to hares. In other words, at timesshe mistakes a hare for a rabbit. Fodor suggests a way ofpatching indicator semantics so that it offers the right in-tuitive response. He claims that R-mental states representrabbits rather than rabbits-or-hares because the causal re-lation between hares and R-mental states is asymmetri-cally dependent on the causal relation between rabbitsand R-mental states. Intuitively, the point is that oneapplies R-mental states to hares because hares look likerabbits but not the other way round (hence, the asym-metry). If all hares were to be painted orange tomorrow,




so that they looked very different from rabbit, the per-son would not form R-mental states in their presence. If,instead, rabbits were painted so as to differentiate themfrom hares, the person would continue to form R-mentalstates in their presence.

Further reading: Crane (2003), ch. 5

Atomic sentence: A basic sentence which cannot be furtherdecomposed into even more basic sentences.

See Logical atomism

Attributive position: An adjective occurs in an attributive po-sition when it modifies a noun or a noun-phrase. Thus,‘white’ in ‘she was wearing white shoes’ occurs in attribu-tive position. This use of adjective is contrasted to theiruse in predicative positions when they are complementsof a verb. Thus, ‘white’ in ‘those lilies are white’ occursin a predicative position.

Austin, J. L. (1911–60): Austin worked at Oxford Universitypublishing only a small part of his work during his life-time. Many of his books, including How to Do Thingswith Words (1975), were published posthumously andconsist of his lecture notes as edited by his students.Austin was one of the main proponents of ordinary lan-

guage philosophy; he focused his work on the many dif-ferent uses to which words are ordinarily put. He is bestknown for his account of performatives and more specif-ically for his taxonomy of speech acts, which he classifiedas locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary.

See Illocutionary act; Locutionary act; Perlocutionary

act

Ayer, A. J. (1910–89): Famous for introducing logical pos-

itivism to Britain, Ayer spent his academic career atOxford University and University College London. In his




book Language, Truth, and Logic (2nd edn. 1946) Ayerargued that all meaningful propositions were either an-alytic or verifiable. Ayer’s definition of verifiability wassubject to many refinements in order to combat the chargethat any statement whatsoever would satisfy the defini-tion. In the philosophy of perception Ayer developed aversion of sense-data theory which was strongly criticisedby Austin.

See Verification principle

Further reading: McDonald (2005)

B

Bedeutung: Frege’s term for the feature of a linguistic expres-sion which contributes to the determination of the truthor falsity of the sentences in which it occurs. For him,the Bedeutung of a proper name is the thing or personit names. The Bedeutungen of sentences are one of twotruth-values: the true and the false. One-place functions(which Frege calls ‘concepts’) from objects to truth-valuesare the Bedeutungen of predicates with only one argu-

ment place (e.g. ‘. . . is red’); relations from more thanone object to a truth-value are the Bedeutungen of predi-cates with more than one argument place (e.g., ‘. . . is westof . . . ’). Frege’s Bedeutung has been variously translatedinto English as reference, designation or meaning. It isclosely related to the contemporary notion of the seman-

tic value of an expression; that is, the contribution of thatexpression to what determines the truth or falsity of thesentences in which it occurs. Frege also distinguished thereference of an expression from its Sinn (sense), which iswhat determines the Bedeutung.

Further reading: McCulloch (1989), chs 1 and 5; Frege(1892a)




Begriffsschrift See Concept-script

Behabitive: A term coined by Austin for a type of (illocu-

tionary) speech act which consists in the adoption of anattitude towards the behaviour of others. Thanking some-body by saying ‘Thank you’ is an example; apologising bysaying ‘Sorry’ is another. Austin acknowledges that thisis a rather miscellaneous category whose boundaries areless than clear.

Further reading: Austin (1975)

Belief: Like desires, wants and hopes, beliefs are propositional

attitudes. That is, they are attitudes towards propositions.Philosophers of language often think of beliefs as relationsbetween individuals and propositions. Since Frege, theyhave also been aware of puzzles presented by sentencesthat report on individuals’ propositional attitudes.

See De dicto attribution; De re attribution; Frege’s puz-

zles; Propositional attitude report

Berkeley, George (1685–1753): Born in Kilkenny, Ireland andeducated at Trinity College Dublin, Berkeley, Bishop ofCloyne, was one of the earliest and most interesting sup-porters of idealism. In his view, there exist only minds,including God, and ideas in these minds. Berkeley deniesthe existence of matter, but does not deny the existence ofordinary objects such as tables and rocks. Instead, in hisview ordinary objects are collections of ideas. Some of hisarguments against materialism are of interest in the phi-losophy of language. For instance, he argues that repre-sentation is always a matter of resemblance or likeness; heconcludes that ideas can only represent other ideas sinceonly ideas are like other ideas. This conception of repre-sentation is generally rejected by contemporary philoso-phers. Berkeley also argued against the existence of ab-stract ideas; that is to say, ideas lacking in some detail.




Thus in his view, for example, we do not possess a generalidea of a triangle. Since ideas are pictures in the mind, theidea of a triangle must be triangular and therefore it mustbe equilateral, or scalene, or isosceles. It must have atleast one and at most one of these features. Berkeley wasaware that this view generated complexities with regardto his theory of linguistic meaning. Since the meaning ofthe word ‘triangle’ is general, but the idea in the mind cor-responding to it is specific, the meaning of the word can-not be equated with the idea associated with it. Instead,Berkeley argues that our dispositions and customs withregard to the use of the word contribute to its meaning.

See Abstraction; Meaning, ideational theory of

Biconditional: A sentence or proposition of the form ‘P if andonly if Q’. The connective ‘if and only if’ is shortenedas ‘iff’. In logical notation the connective is representedeither as ‘≡’ or ‘↔’. Biconditionals are often used to statenecessary and sufficient conditions.

Bivalence: The law that states that every statement is eithertrue or false. Thus, the law states that there are only twovalues and that each statement has at least and at most oneof them. This is why this law is called bivalence. Bivalenceshould not be confused with excluded middle, accordingto which for every statement either it or its negation istrue. Bivalence entails excluded middle, but the converseis not true. Dummett has argued that unqualified supportfor bivalence in a given area of discourse is a mark ofadopting a realist position with regard to that area ofdiscourse.

See Realism

Blackburn, Simon (1944–): A British, Cambridge-educatedphilosopher who has held academic positions at Oxford,Cambridge and the University of North Carolina. He is




the main proponent of a version of non-cognitivism whichhe has dubbed quasi-realism.

Bound variable See Variable

Brain in a vat: A contemporary version of Descartes’ evil ge-nius thought experiment due to Putnam. Putnam uses thethought experiment to argue against scepticism (and infavour of semantic externalism). Putman asks us to imag-ine a brain in a vat of nutrients which is fed by a computernerve stimuli that are exactly like those human beings re-ceive from the external world. In later reformulations ofthe thought experiment, the brain is said to have alwaysbeen in the vat (ab initio brain in the vat). Putnam claimsthat, despite some intuitions to the contrary, such a braincould not have thoughts about trees and other ordinaryobjects because it does not have the right kinds of causalrelations to them. Thus, Putnam’s conclusion is based onthe causal theory of reference and of mental represen-tation to which he subscribed when he developed thisthought experiment. Supporters of internalism have dif-ferent intuitions about the conceivability of this case.

Further reading: Putnam (1981)

Broad content: The content of psychological states which isdetermined by their truth conditions. Thus, when a per-son on Earth, Oscar, for example, has a belief which hewould express by means of the utterance that there is wa-ter in the glass, he has a belief whose broad content ischaracterised by the fact that it is true if and only if thereis water in the glass. However, when Twin Oscar on Twin

Earth has a belief which he would express by means ofan utterance of the words ‘there is water in the glass’, hehas a belief with a different broad content, since his beliefis true if and only if there is twater in the glass (because




twater is the odourless, colourless liquid people drink onTwin Earth).

See Burge, Tyler; Content; Externalism; Narrow con-

tent

Burge, Tyler (1946–): At the time of writing a professor ofphilosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles(UCLA), Burge is one of the most prominent opponentsof individualism in the philosophy of mind. Instead, hesupports a version of externalism about mental content

according to which facts about the physical and socialenvironment external to a person contribute to the in-

dividuation of that person’s mental states, whose con-tents are consequently broad. Whilst Putnam argued bymeans of his Twin Earth example that the physical en-vironment plays a role in the individuation of linguis-tic and mental content, Burge’s arthritis example makesa similar case for the importance of the social environ-ment. Burge asks us to imagine a person Jane who uttersthe words, ‘I have arthritis in my thigh’. Jane, in Burge’sopinion, has a false belief since arthritis is a condition ofthe joints and not of the thigh. However, since linguis-tic meaning is conventional, Jane’s linguistic communitycould have developed a different linguistic practice. Theword ‘arthritis’ could have been used to refer to a rheuma-toid disease of the bones, and not just of joints. Let uscall it ‘tharthritis’. Thus, had the community developedin that different manner, Jane’s utterance of the words ‘Ihave arthritis in my thigh’ might have been saying some-thing true since her words would have meant that shehas tharthritis in her thigh. In this instance, Jane’s wordswould have expressed the true belief that she has tharthri-tis in her thigh. The example illustrates that the meaningsof Jane’s words and the contents of her beliefs can varybecause of changes in the social environment, despite the




absence of any change in the intrinsic facts about Janeherself.

See broad content; internalism; narrow content

C

Cambridge property: Those relational properties whichthings can acquire or lose without themselves undergoingany change. Thus, when Socrates died his wife acquiredthe property of being his widow. Since these properties arecausally impotent, many philosophers do not take themto be genuine properties at all.

Canonical notation: The translation of ordinary sentencesinto a formal or semi-formal language that is intendedto make explicit the logical form of those sentences.

Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970): A German philosopher of sci-ence who was a member of the Vienna Circle and promi-nent exponent of logical positivism. He moved to theUnited States in 1935 because of his opposition to theNazi regime. In his early work The Logical Structure ofthe World (1928), Carnap attempted the reduction of allscientific terms to a purely phenomenalistic language. Inthe 1940s and 1950s Carnap wrote several books andarticles which greatly contributed to the development offormal semantics and modal logic.

Categorical predicate: A predicate that refers to a categoricalproperty. Categorical properties are distinguished fromthe dispositional properties of things. For example, be-ing soluble in water is a dispositional property of sugar,while being rectangular is a categorical property of mosttelevisions. The notion of a categorical property is also




used to characterise properties that are not a matter ofdegree. In this second meaning, being intelligent is not acategorical property since it is possible to be more or lessintelligent, while having two eyes is a categorical propertysince one either has them, or does not. The two meaningsof categorical are different and should not be conflated.

Categorical property See Categorical predicate

Category: There are many different notions of a category.First, grammatical categories are those described in booksof grammar. They include: verbs, nouns, adverbs, and soforth. Second, logical categories are deployed when de-scribing the logical form of sentences. They include: sin-

gular terms, quantifiers and predicates as well as modal

operators. Third, some philosophers have developed theidea of a semantic category where two words are said tobelong to the same category if and only if the substitutionof one for the other in a meaningful sentence results inanother sentence which is also meaningful.

Category mistake: An expression coined by Gilbert Ryle. Ifafter I were shown all the colleges’ buildings, I were toask, ‘Yes, but where is the university?’ I would be makingone such mistake. I would be treating the university asif it were an additional physical object with a locationof its own. In general, to make a category mistake is toattribute properties or predicates appropriate for thingsof one kind to things of a different kind. Thus, asking ofa stone whether it is blind is also a category mistake.

Causal theory of reference: Introduced as an alternative tothe description theory of reference, this is the name givento various views according to which an expression refersto whatever is causally linked to it in a certain way. For




example, a proper name refers to the person it names.Kripke argues that, in these cases, the name is first in-troduced when the parents name the child, through theceremony of naming the child (a sort of baptism); thename has its reference fixed by being causally linked tothe child. In this way the name is causally grounded in itsreferent. Once the name is introduced, other people usethe name to refer to the same person as the initial bap-tisers. This phenomenon is called reference borrowing.These other speakers acquire the ability to use the nameso that it refers to the person it referred to at the baptisingceremony by becoming part of a causal chain of speakerswhich goes back to the initial baptisers. Besides propernames of people and other particulars, the causal theoryof reference has also been adopted for natural kind termssuch as ‘water’, ‘giraffe’, ‘gold’, ‘tiger’. In these instances,the reference of the term is first fixed when some speakerscome in causal contact with a sample of the natural kindin question. Thus, the term ‘tiger’ is first introduced whensome individuals were presented with tigers, and it is in-troduced to refer to all the objects that share the same na-ture of the sample objects; that is, to all tigers. Subsequentspeakers borrow the reference from the initial dubbers ofthe term. Thus formulated, the theory allows for the pos-sibility that names and natural kind terms might have asense as well as a reference, and it is therefore not auto-matically committed to a theory of direct reference (theMillian view). The sense of a proper name, for example,could be a definite description used in the baptising cer-emony to fix the reference of the name so as to establishthe causal connection between the name and the personnamed. Alternatively, in purely causal theories, the sensecould be the mode in which the causal link to the refer-ent is secured. Evans has presented several objections tothe causal theory of reference. He points out that names




sometimes change their reference, whilst in this theoryreference change is impossible. He also notes that the the-ory has difficulties in explaining the role of empty nameslike ‘Father Christmas’, which lack a referent.

See Cluster theory of reference; Qua-problem; Refer-

ence; Rigid designator

Further reading: McCulloch (1989), chs 4 and 8;Kripke (1980)

Charity, principle of: A principle to which, according toDavidson, we appeal when interpreting the words ofother people. We apply charity to their pronouncementsby assuming that they hold beliefs that are mostlytrue. Thus, we interpret other people’s words in a waythat maximises truth. Thus, if one says, ‘That saucepanhas a teflon coating’, and I see that the person is gesturingtowards a frying pan, I would normally take that personto mean frying pan by ‘saucepan’. That is to say, I wouldnormally apply the principle of charity and take thatperson to be saying something which is true.

See Humanity, principle of; Radical interpretation

Chomsky, Noam (1928–): Born in the USA, Chomsky is aprofessor of linguistics at MIT. He is the most influen-tial American linguist in the twentieth century as well asbeing a prominent left-wing political activist. Chomskyhas revolutionised the science of linguistics by focusinghis attention on the study of the language faculty in hu-man beings. Chomsky’s starting point is the observationthat linguistic competence is remarkably uniform amonghuman beings. He thinks that an excessive focus on lin-

guistic performance has obscured this important obser-vation. Chomsky explains this uniformity by postulatingthe existence of a language faculty in human beings whichis largely innate. Chomsky provides a variety of reasons in




favour of innatism. First, he deploys the so-called povertyof stimulus argument. He claims that children could nothave acquired competence with regard to certain featuresof languages simply on the basis of their experiences ofother speakers. Chomsky also notes that innatism pro-vides the best explanation for the speed at which childrenacquire linguistic competence, and the absence of certainkinds of errors in young learners which one would ex-pect if their learning operated on a trial-and-error basissupplemented by feedback provided by competent speak-ers. In the 1970s Chomsky postulated the developmentof the language faculty from an initial innate state (uni-versal grammar) to a more evolved state which is notsubject to further changes. Chomsky also made a distinc-tion between two levels of representation. The first levelis a deep structure, known as generative grammar, com-mon to all speakers independently of what language theymight speak. This grammar consists of explicitly statablerecursive rules for the generation of all the possible phrasestructures in a language. The surface structure, or trans-formative grammar, is derived from the deep structure bymeans of rules of transformation. In the 1980s Chomskyabandoned parts of this framework and began to think ofuniversal grammar as a system of innate principles com-mon to all speakers, combined with a certain numbers ofparameters. The learning of a specific natural languagewould thus be understood largely as a matter of setting theright parameters for that language. Crucially, Chomskydoes not believe that language–world relations play animportant role in the characterisation of the structure oflanguage.

Further reading: Chomsky (1995)

Cluster theory of reference: A more recent version, developedby John Searle and Strawson, of the description theory




of reference. Instead of taking each name to abbreviateone definite description, the cluster theory takes names toabbreviate clusters of definite descriptions most of which,but not necessarily all, are satisfied by the referent ofthe name. The cluster theory can cope with some of thearguments raised by Kripke against the description the-

ory of reference. More specifically, it can answer most ofKripke’s non-modal arguments. Thus, the cluster theorycan acknowledge the fact that different people associatedifferent descriptions, provided they are part of the clus-ter, with the same name. Similarly, it can explain whypeople often associate more than one description witha name. Further, since the referent of the name mightnot satisfy all the descriptions that the name abbrevi-ates, there is no single description in the cluster whichthe referent of the name must satisfy. Further, by invok-ing reference borrowing and a social division of linguisticlabour, the theory can explain how speakers can refer tosomething even though the cluster of descriptions theyassociate with the name either fails to identify the refer-ent uniquely or is not even true of it. Supporters of thetheory can explain the phenomena appealed to by Kripkein his modal argument by relying on the idea of the scope

of quantifiers.Further reading: Devitt and Sterelny (1999), ch. 3.2;

McCulloch (1989)

Cognitive command: A notion introduced by Wright. Wrightis concerned with individuating among the areas of dis-course which are minimally truth-apt, those that can berealistically construed. One of the marks of discourseabout which realism can be maintained is that it ex-hibits cognitive command. Roughly speaking a discourseexhibits this feature if it is a priori true that any differenceof opinion in this area can only be satisfactorily explained




in terms of the cognitive shortcomings (including lack ofinformation or faulty reasoning) of at least one of the twodisagreeing parties.

See Cosmological role

Further reading: Wright (1992)

Cognitivism: To be a cognitivist about a given area of dis-course is to hold that judgements made in that area pur-port to express beliefs and describe facts, and as such canbe assessed as true or false. Cognitivism can take manyforms including error-theory, response-dependence andrealism. Cognitivism is opposed to non-cognitivism, ac-cording to which judgements in a given area of discoursedo not express beliefs and do not describe facts.


Commissive: A term introduced by Austin to name a type of(illocutionary) speech act by means of which the speakerpurports to place himself or herself under an obligation.Promising is the paradigmatic example. Utterances of ‘Ipromise’, ‘I will do it’, ‘I give you my word’, when used tomake a promise, are instances of commissive speech acts.


Common knowledge: A piece of knowledge such that eachagent in a group has that knowledge, and further eachagent in the group knows that each agent in the grouphas that knowledge, and further each agent in the groupknows that each agent in the group knows that each agentin that group has that knowledge, and so on ad infinitum.The existence of common knowledge is often necessaryfor co-ordinated activity in social interaction. We owe thefirst explicit analysis of this notion to David Lewis in hisbook Convention.

Further reading: Lewis (1986a)




Communicability argument: An argument deployed byDummett against views that identify linguistic meaningswith private mental states. Dummett argues that if lin-guistic meanings were private, linguistic communicationwould be impossible. However, since we do communicateby means of language, linguistic meanings are not privatemental states.

See Acquisition argument; Manifestation argument

Competence, linguistic See Linguistic competence

Completeness: A formal system is said to be complete if everyvalid argument can be proved within the system. A com-plete system could be unsound if arguments that are notvalid are also provable in the system.

See Soundness

Compositionality: The principle of compositionality statesthat the meaning of a sentence is dependent upon themeanings of its semantic (or meaningful) parts and theway in which these meanings are brought together. Thus,the meaning of ‘Mary loves her sister’ depends on themeanings of ‘Mary’, ‘loves’ and ‘her sister’ and on theirorder in the sentence. Supporters of compositionality in-voke it to explain the productivity and systematicity oflinguistic understanding. They claim that composition-ality explains our ability to understand novel sentencesand that when we understand a complex expression wetend also to understand others that are constituted by thesame parts in different orders. A theory of meaning for alanguage is said to respect compositionality if it includesonly a finite number of axioms, and generates theoremswhich specify the meanings of each sentence in that lan-guage in a way that displays how these meanings dependon the meanings of its parts.

See Language of thought; Semantics, truth-conditional




Concept: For Frege a concept is a one-place function from anobject to a truth-value (true or false), it is the reference

(Bedeutung) of a one-place predicate such as ‘. . . is red’ or‘. . . is British’. In contemporary philosophy of mind andlanguage the notion has acquired a new meaning. On thisview to ascribe possession of a concept to an individualis to ascribe a set of abilities to that individual. Thus tohave the concept of a horse one must be able to recognisehorses, know that they are animals, and so forth.

Concept-script (Begriffsschrift): The title of Frege’s first bookand the name of the formal logical language he developedto express all conceptual contents. Frege offered an analy-sis of sentences in terms of functions (designated by predi-cates) and arguments (designated by names and other sin-gular terms). Frege also developed the notion of a truth

function, which is a function that takes truth-values (thetrue and the false) as arguments and yields truth-values asvalues. Conjunction, disjunction and negation are exam-ples of such functions. Probably most importantly of all,Frege developed the notion of a quantifier. Thus, he madeit possible to express multiple generalities in logic for thefirst time. Frege’s own notation for quantifiers and truthfunction is not used by contemporary logicians. These ty-pographical differences should not obscure the fact thatFrege’s logic is what we use now.

Further reading: Beaney (1996), ch. 2; McCulloch(1989), ch. 1

Conditional: In ordinary language there are at least two kindsof conditionals: indicative conditionals as exemplified bythe conditional ‘if Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy, someoneelse did’, and subjunctive conditionals, such as ‘if Oswaldhad not killed Kennedy, someone else would have’. Sub-junctive conditionals with an antecedent which is either




known to be false or assumed to be false are called ‘coun-

terfactuals’. There is some disagreement about how toclassify some conditionals. Thus, some philosophers takefuture conditionals such as ‘if Barcelona does not win thechampionship in 2007, Chelsea will’ to be indicative; oth-ers classify them with subjunctive conditionals. There isalso disagreement about how best to understand indica-tive conditionals. Some philosophers think that indicativeconditionals are statements which have truth conditions.Among these, some take the indicative conditional to bethe truth-functional material conditional familiar in logic.Others argue that it is not a truth-functional sentential

connective. A different approach takes indicative condi-tionals not to be the sort of thing that has truth conditionsat all, but to be an expression of conditional probabilities.In other words, according to this approach when I say ‘ifI study, I will pass the exam’, I am not stating a condi-tional fact, instead I am saying that the probability that Iwill pass the exam is high on the supposition that I study.

See Conventional implicature

Further reading: Bennett (2003); Edgington (2001)

Connective, truth-functional See Truth-functional sentential

connective

Connotation: The connotation, or linguistic intension, of aterm is contrasted with its denotation. The denotation ofa term is its extension, namely, the collection of things itstands for. The term ‘intension’ is used in more than oneway: either as what determines what falls in the extensionor as the function which assigns for each possible world

an extension to a term in that world.

Constative: Austin coined the expression to refer to descrip-tive utterances or statements. An example would be an




utterance of the sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’. Consta-tive utterances are contrasted by Austin with performa-

tive utterances, such as ‘I promise to give you a ticket’.

Content: The meaning of an utterance or of a mental statesuch as a belief or a desire is its content. Some philoso-phers distinguish between two kinds of content of men-tal states: broad contents which are determined by thetruth conditions of the state, and narrow contents whichsupervene on the internal states of the agent. Thus, forinstance, I and my doppelganger on Twin Earth might bein states with the same narrow contents. I believe that Isee a glass of the odourless clear liquid that fills the lakes,etc., and so does she. But our states have different broadcontents since my belief is true if what I see is a glass ofwater, while her belief is true if what she sees is a glassof what she calls ‘water’, but has chemical compositionXYZ.

See Externalism; Internalism

Further reading: Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (1996)

Context: The situation in which an utterance occurs. It oftendetermines the identity of the words involved; it also dis-ambiguates the utterance. Thus, for example, the contextserves to determine whether by ‘bank’ a speaker meansmoney or river bank. In the case of indexical expressionssuch as ‘I’, the context is necessary to determine the mean-ing and reference of expressions even when there are noambiguities.

Context principle: A principle, first elaborated by Frege in TheFoundations of Arithmetic (1884), where he states that‘it is only in the context of a sentence that a word has ameaning’. Frege never restates the principle in any of hislater works, but it was adopted by Ludwig Wittgenstein




in both the Tractatus (1922) and Philosophical Investiga-tions (1953). The basic idea behind the principle is thatthe sense of a word is given by its role in the sentence inwhich it occurs.

See Compositionality

Contingency: A proposition is contingent if and only if it istrue but could have been false. Thus, contingent truthsare contrasted with necessary truths.

See Modality; Necessity; Possibility

Convention: Language, it is generally agreed, is conventionalat least in the sense that the relation between language andthe reality it is about is arbitrary. Thus, the word ‘apple’could have referred to pears; its reference to apples is amatter of convention. More recently, some philosophersalso claim that language is conventional in the sense thatthe meanings of words are under the speakers’ rationalcontrol.

See Common knowledge; Language

Convention T: First devised by Alfred Tarski as a minimalconstraint (which he dubbed ‘criterion of material ad-

equacy’) on any theory of truth. He claimed that anymaterially adequate account of the truth predicate in alanguage must identify as the truth predicate in that lan-guage a predicate which satisfies all instances of a schema,which he called the T-schema. The schema is: S is True ifand only if p, where what replaces S is the name of a sen-tence and what replaces p is a translation of that sentencein the language in which the schema is formulated. Forexample, the following are all instances of the T-schema:‘La neve e bianca’ is true if and only if snow is white;‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white. Thus,in order for a theory of truth that takes the truth predicate




in English to be ‘is true’ to be materially adequate, it musthave as theorems all the instances of the T-schema such as‘grass is green’ is true if and only if grass is green; ‘snowis white’ is true if and only if snow is white; ‘London isthe capital of the UK’ is true if and only if London is thecapital of the UK; and so forth. Tarski postulated that theexpressions used to fill the places indicated by S and p inthe schema had already been assigned determinate mean-ings. He, therefore, presupposed knowledge of meaningin order to define truth.

See Semantics, truth-conditional; Truth, semantic

theory of

Further reading: Tarski (1944) and (1969)

Conventional implicature: A notion developed by FrankJackson in the context of his account of indicative con-

ditionals. In Jackson’s view indicative conditionals aretruth-functional material conditionals. Thus, he claimsthat somebody who asserts an indicative conditionalmakes the same assertion with the same truth conditionsas somebody who asserts the equivalent material condi-tional. There are notorious problems with this view. Forinstance, all material conditionals with false antecedentsare true. Thus, since I ate no waffles today, the follow-ing absurd conditional ‘if I ate waffles today, you ateone thousand eggs’ should be true if it were a mate-rial conditional. Jackson solves the problem by sayingthat although the conditional assertion is an assertionof a material conditional, the assertion also has a con-ventional implication. Besides asserting what it does, italso implies, suggests or conveys something else. Whatit implies is a matter of the conventions governing themeaning of the word ‘if’, rather than, as with the case ofconversational implicature, a matter of the conversational

maxims governing communication. For Jackson asserting




a conditional of the form ‘if A then B’ implies that oneaccords to B a high probability of being true, under thesupposition that A is true. Jackson coins a technical termfor this relationship. He writes that, in this instance, Bis robust with respect to A. Thus, the conventional im-plicature of the word ‘if’ in every conditional is that theconsequent has a high probability of being true, given thesupposition that the antecedent is true. This implicatureis violated in conditionals such as ‘if I ate waffles today,you ate one thousand eggs’ where the antecedent and theconsequent are unrelated. That is why these conditionalsseems absurd.

See conditional

Conversational implicature: Conversation is governed byconversational maxims which require us, for example,to be relevant and sincere. Often, we can communicatesomething without explicitly saying it, by relying on theother person’s knowledge of these maxims. What is thuscommunicated is a conversational implicature. Thus, ifyou are at my place, and I have stopped offering youany drink sometime previously and I now say that I amtired, you might conclude that I want you to leave. Youdraw this conclusion by reasoning that if I say that I amtired, then my tiredness must be relevant to the currentsituation, and it would be relevant if I wanted you toleave. Conversational implicatures are not created onlyby following conversational maxims, but also by violat-ing them, as is often done when one is being sarcastic.Thus, I might say ‘that’s great’ in a context in which it isclear that I intend you to see that I am implicating thatit is not great at all. The maxim requiring speakers notto say what they believe to be false is, in this instance,flouted on purpose.

See Grice, H. P.




Conversational maxim: Maxims or social norms that gov-ern cooperative conversation. They include the follow-ing: 1. be relevant; 2. do not say what you believe tobe false; 3. make your contribution as informative as re-quired for the purposes of the current exchange; 4. bebrief; 5. do not say things for which you do not haveadequate evidence; 6. avoid ambiguity. These maximsare all derived from the principal normative principleof cooperative conversation, the Cooperative Principle,which enjoins us to make our conversational contribu-tion such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, bythe accepted purpose or direction of the talk-exchangein which we are engaged. The theory of conversationalmaxims and implicature was first developed by H. P.Grice.

See Conversational implicature

Copula: One of the roles played by the verb ‘to be’. Thus,‘is’ is the copula in the sentence ‘Edinburgh is beautiful’.Some philosophers like Frege take the copula to be partof the predicate which is thus conceived as an incompleteexpression with a gap that can be filled by a subject. Otherphilosophers take a proposition to be composed by twonames (one of a thing and the other of a property) con-joined by the copula.

See Predication

Corner quotation: First devised by Quine and symbolised as�. . .�, corner quotations express generalisations over quo-

tations. If p is a variable that ranges over sentences, �p� isa variable that ranges over the results of applying quota-tions marks to the sentences p ranges over. Thus, whilst pis a place-holder for sentences (i.e., the cat is on the mat),�p� is a place-holder for their quote names (i.e., ‘the catis on the mat’).




Cosmological role: A notion introduced by Wright. He is con-cerned with individuating among the areas of discoursewhich are minimally truth-apt those that can be realis-tically construed. One of the marks of discourse aboutwhich realism can be maintained is that it exhibits widecosmological role. A discourse, such as that of physics, ex-hibits wide cosmological role because the putative factsreported by its characteristic claims are invoked in expla-nations of further facts of other kinds, besides facts aboutour beliefs or other propositional attitudes.

See Cognitive command


Count term: For example, ‘dog’ or ‘tree’. These are knownas count or countable terms because it makes sense toask how many of these are present. We can count dogsor trees and state how many of these we wish to talkabout. Count terms are contrasted with mass terms suchas ‘gold’ or ‘water’.

See Criterion of identity or identification; Individua-

tion; Natural kind term; Sortal

Counterfactual: A counter to fact conditional such as ‘if themoon were made of cheese, radiation from the sun wouldmelt it’. Counterfactuals always have false antecedents;this is what it means to say that they are counter to fact.Intuitively, some counterfactuals are false, for example, ‘IfNapoleon had been Italian, he would have spoken Polish’.Hence, counterfactuals cannot be material conditionalswhich are true, whenever their antecedents are false. Thebest-known semantics for counterfactuals has been de-veloped in terms of possible worlds by Lewis. He claimsthat a counterfactual such as ‘if the moon were made ofcheese, radiation from the sun would melt it’ is true if andonly if in any possible world in which the antecedent is




true (that is, the moon is made of cheese) and such that itresembles the actual world as much as possible given thetruth of the antecedent (that is, it is a world in which themoon is made of cheese but it is otherwise as close as pos-sible to how things actually are), the consequent is alsotrue (that is, radiation from the sun melts the moon). Thisinterpretation treats any counterfactuals with impossibleantecedents as vacuously true.

See Semantics, possible worlds; Subjunctive condi-

tional

Further reading: Lewis (1973)

Counterpart: A notion introduced by Lewis in his modal re-alist theory of possible worlds. For Lewis, each possibleworld is a concrete universe, completely physically iso-lated from any other possible world. For Lewis, entitiesare world-bound; they each exist in only one world. How-ever, entities have counterparts in other worlds. Thesecounterparts are entities existing in other worlds, butwhich are similar to the entities of which they are coun-terparts. The notion of being a counterpart is vague, sinceit has borderline cases. In some worlds two separate enti-ties could both be the most similar to an entity in anotherworld. In some worlds, it might be vague whether or not agiven entity has a counterpart at all. In Lewis’s view whatmakes it true that Gordon Brown could have been theprime minister of the UK in 2005 is the fact that there is apossible world in which Gordon Brown’s counterpart isthe prime minister of the counterpart of the UK in 2005.This view has often been met with what Lewis describesas ‘the incredulous stare’.

See Modality; Semantics, possible world

Further reading: Divers (2002); Lewis (1986b)

Criterion of identity or identification: It provides the identityconditions of some object or other. In other words, the




criterion of identity is what allows us to tell for any aor b whether they are the same or different. It has beenpointed out that we cannot identify things in the absenceof a specification of the kind of thing to which they be-long. Such specifications are offered by sortal concepts;these concepts supply the criteria of identity for the in-dividuals falling under them. Thus, the concept apple isa sortal concept and it provides criteria for identifyingwhether a and b are the same apple or different apples.Mass concepts such as gold also provide identity criteriasince they permit the identification of the gold of whicha ring is made as the same (or different) gold as that ofwhich the bracelet was made. Thus, there exist identitycriteria for gold, although there are no criteria of individ-

uation for gold, since ‘gold’ is not a count term. Thereare two forms identity criteria might take: one-level andtwo-level. For example, the criterion for the identity ofsets in mathematics is a one-level criterion. It reads: forany two sets X and Y, X is identical with Y if and onlyif X and Y have the same members. What we have hereis a criterion of identity which permits us to tell in allinstances whether two sets are the same. It is one-levelbecause the criterion quantifies over the same things forwhich it supplies a criterion of identity. The criterion ofidentity supplied by Frege for the identity of directionsof lines is, instead, a two-level criterion. It reads: for anytwo lines a and b, the direction of line a is identical to thedirection of line b if and only if lines a and b are parallel.The criterion provides identity conditions for directionsby quantifying over lines (rather than their directions),and is therefore a two-level criterion.

See Definition; Mass term; Relative identity

Further reading: Lowe (1999)

Criterion of material adequacy See Convention T




D

Davidson, Donald (1917–2003): Davidson was an Americanphilosopher, and student of Quine, whose views in thephilosophy of mind and language, and of action havebeen profoundly influential. Davidson’s best-known con-tributions to the philosophy of language are his theoryof meaning as a theory of truth, his notion of radical

interpretation, and his rejection of conceptual relativismbased on arguments against the existence of conceptualschemes.

See Language; Malapropism; Metaphor; Parataxis; Se-

mantics, truth-conditional

Further reading: Malpas (2005)

De dicto attitude: The kind of attitude ascribed to an individ-ual by means of a de dicto attribution.

De dicto attribution: When talking about people’s beliefs, de-sires and other so-called propositional attitudes we canadopt different ways of ascribing or attributing these atti-tudes to them. Thus, for instance, we can ascribe to a per-son, John, the belief that George Orwell is the author of1984. This is an example of a de dicto ascription becauseit relates the believer (in this case, John) to a dictum orproposition (in this instance, the proposition that GeorgeOrwell is the author of 1984). It must be observed thatthe occurrence of singular terms in de dicto attributions isopaque. If we substitute ‘Eric Blair’ (George Orwell’s realname) for ‘George Orwell’ in the attribution above wemight obtain a false sentence. Since John might not knowOrwell’s real name, he might not believe that Eric Blairis the author of 1984. De dicto attributions of this sortare contrasted with de re attributions. Everybody agreesthat there are at least two different ways of attributing




attitudes, like belief and desire, to people. However, thereis disagreement as to whether these are two ways of talk-ing about the same propositional attitudes, or whether dedicto attributions are ascriptions of attitudes of a specialkind, and de re attributions are ascriptions of attitudes ofanother kind.

See Opacity; Propositional attitude reports

Further reading: McKay and Nelson (2005)

De dicto belief: A belief attributed to an individual by meansof a de dicto attribution.

De dicto modality: Modality is about necessity and possibil-

ity. It is said to be de dicto when it concerns the modalstatuses of propositions. The propositions expressed bythe sentences ‘Necessarily a white wall is white’, ‘Possi-bly, London is the capital of the UK’, are all examples ofde dicto modalities. The proposition expressed by ‘Nec-essarily a white wall is white’ is true, because in everypossible world the proposition expressed by ‘a white wallis white’ is true. Ordinary modal sentences in English areoften ambiguous, and can be interpreted as expressingmore than one proposition. Thus, for example, the sen-tence ‘The teacher of Alexander the Great might not havebeen the teacher of Alexander the Great’ can be read intwo ways. Read as expressing a de dicto modal proposi-tion, the sentence is false, since it would mean that it ispossible that the proposition expressed by ‘The teacher ofAlexander the Great is not the teacher of Alexander theGreat’ is true. Read as expressing a de re modal proposi-tion, the sentence is true because it would mean that it ispossible that the teacher of Alexander the Great (namely,Aristotle) might not have been the teacher of Alexanderthe Great.

See de re modality

Further reading: Plantinga (1974)




De re attitude: Their existence as a special kind of attitude ismatter of dispute. If they exist, they are ascribed to anindividual by means of de re attributions.

De re attribution: Some ascriptions of beliefs and desires ap-pear to relate the person who has the attitude to a non-propositional object. An example is the ascription ex-pressed by saying ‘John believes of George Orwell that heis the author of 1984’. Here, we do not seem to ascribe toJohn an attitude towards a proposition. Instead, John’sbelief appears to consist in his attribution of the propertyof being the author of 1984 to an entity (a res in Latin),namely George Orwell. Because they are, or appear tobe, about things rather than propositions, these attitudesare called de re (Latin for about a thing). The occurrenceof singular terms in de re attributions is transparent, be-cause if we substitute ‘Eric Blair’ (George Orwell’s realname) for ‘George Orwell’ in the attribution above, thetruth-value of the sentence expressing the attribution isnot changed. There is an ongoing debate as to whether dere and de dicto attributions are merely two ways of talk-ing about the same propositional attitudes which, despiteappearances to the contrary, always take propositionalobjects or whether they refer to different kinds of atti-tudes. If the latter, there would exist de dicto attitudesthat have propositional objects, and are attributed to in-dividuals by means of de dicto attributions, and de reattitudes, that have non-propositional objects, and areascribed to individuals by means of de re attributions.

See Extensionality; Propositional attitude reports

Further reading: McKay and Nelson (2005)

De re belief: Their existence as a distinct kind of belief is amatter of dispute. Supporters of their existence argue that




de re attributions are ascriptions of a special kind of at-titude, namely a de re attitude.

De re modality: Modality is about necessity and possibility.It is said to be de re when it concerns the modal statusesof the properties of things. For example, ‘the number 2 isnecessarily (or essentially) a prime number’; ‘Tony Blairis contingently (or possibly) the Prime Minister of the UKin 2006’ all express de re modalities. De re modality isdifferent from de dicto modality. The sentence express-ing a de re necessity ‘a white wall is necessarily white’is false, because the wall, which is white, might be of adifferent colour. Ordinary modal sentences in English areoften ambiguous and amenable to both de re and de dictoreadings. Quine argued that the notion of de re modalityis incoherent. His argument was driven by strong oppo-sition to essentialism (a commitment to essences), whichhe thought was a consequence of taking de re modalityseriously.


De re sense: A sense (Sinn) or mode of presentation of anobject which cannot be entertained if the object does notexist. Demonstratives have been thought to have such asense.

See Singular thought

De se attribution: These are ascriptions of beliefs and desires,or other similar attitudes, which are about oneself. It ishas been argued by John Perry and others that at leastsome of these attributions involve attitudes that do nothave propositional objects, but are to be distinguishedalso from ordinary de re attitudes. Suppose I believe thatthe person with the torn sack of sugar is making a messon the floor. I might subsequently discover that I am that




person. I now have a new belief that I am making a mess.This is a de se attribution of what seems to be a de se atti-tude because it is irreducibly about oneself, since it seemsimpossible to capture the content of the belief withoutusing the indexical ‘I’. In order to begin to see why thismight be the case, one needs to compare my belief thatAlessandra Tanesini is making a mess, and my belief thatI am making a mess. These two might seem to have thesame content, and thus it would seem possible to explainthe object of the second belief as a proposition. However,if we think of the content of the attitude as that to whichwe refer in explaining actions, these two beliefs differ incontent. If I believe that I am making a mess, I will searchfor my pack of sugar. If, instead, I believe that AlessandraTanesini is making a mess, I will do no such thing unlessI also believe that I am Alessandra Tanesini. But then, theindexical has reappeared.

Further reading: Perry (1979)

Deconstruction See Derrida, Jacques

Definite description: An expression such as ‘the Queen ofEngland’, or ‘the capital of Wales’. Frege takes definitedescriptions to be names, and acknowledges that someof them might fail to refer either because there is noth-ing they stand for or because there is more than one suchthing. ‘The King of France’ is an example of the first kindof failure, ‘the Chelsea player’ could be an example ofthe second if the context fails to clarify who is the playerin question. Sentences including definite descriptions withno reference are, for Frege, neither true nor false. In orderto avoid taking sentences containing definite descriptionsthat fail to refer as lacking in truth-value, Russell treatsdefinite descriptions as quantified expressions. He sug-gests that a sentence like ‘The King of France is bald’ is




to be read as ‘There is at least one thing and there is atmost one thing such that, that thing is the King of Franceand that thing is bald’. That is, ‘(∃x)(∀y){[x is the King ofFrance & (if y is the King of France, then x = y)] & x isbald}’. Russell also suggests that names such as ‘London’are in fact definite descriptions in disguise and should betreated in the same manner. Kripke has offered argumentsagainst these Russellian views. Kripke claims that namesare rigid designators and that definite descriptions are notrigid. It must also be noted that, as Donnellan points out,there are two uses of definite descriptions: attributive andreferential. In its attributive use the description refers tothe one thing that satisfies the description or otherwisefails to refer. In their referential use definite descriptionscan succeed in referring even though nothing literally sat-isfies the description. Thus, I can use the expression ‘theman drinking champagne over there is the new president’and succeed in referring to the given person even though,unknown to me, what he is drinking is actually lemon-ade.

See Quantifier

Further reading McCulloch (1989)

Definition: In dictionaries words are defined by means of locu-tions that explicate the meaning of the definiendum (theterm to be defined). Philosophers have provided differ-ent kinds of definitions for words and concepts. Explicitdefinitions provide a meaning for a word or an expres-sion in isolation. Thus, for example, unmarried man of amarriageable age is an explicit definition of the concept ofbachelor. Contextual definitions account for the meaningof a term by offering an expression which is necessarilyequivalent to it but does not belong to the same category

as the term to be defined. Thus, Frege relies on the nec-essary equivalence between sentences about parallel lines




and about sameness of direction to offer a contextualdefinition of the concept of the direction of line a. Fregenotes that ‘line a is parallel to line b’ is necessarily equiv-alent to ‘the direction of line a is identical to the directionof line b’, and he uses this fact to define ‘the directionof line a’ as identical to ‘the direction of line b if andonly if a is parallel to b’. Early analytic philosophers suchas Russell and Moore take a philosophical definition toprovide an analysis of the term to be defined.

Deflationism: To take a deflationist approach to a certain kindof talk is to deny that it refers to entities or properties witha substantive metaphysical nature. Thus, for instance,deflationists about truth-talk deny that the word ‘true’refers to a property with a substantive nature. Deflation-ists about fact-talk deny that the notion of a fact has anymetaphysical weight. Deflationists do not jettison the vo-cabulary they deflate; instead, they often acknowledgethat it is very useful. Deflationists are, however, commit-ted to denying that the talk they deflate can play any gen-uine explanatory role of the kind which would require theexistence of the metaphysics they reject. The most popu-lar form of deflationism is that which takes truth-talk asits target.

See Truth, deflationary theories of

Deictic term See Indexical

Demonstrative: A linguistic category that includes the pro-

nouns ‘this’ and ‘that’. It also includes demonstrativephrases such as ‘that woman’. Sentences containingdemonstratives and demonstrative phrases are used indifferent contexts to refer to different things. For thisreason, most philosophers take demonstratives to be of




a kind with indexical terms such as ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’,and offer very similar accounts for both. The main differ-ence between demonstratives and other indexicals lies inthe manner in which their reference in a given context isdetermined. Demonstratives, such as ‘this’ and ‘that’, re-quire something from the speaker, such as a gesture or atleast an intention, to have their reference fixed. If a personsays ‘that is big’ without pointing to anything or think-ing of anything, he or she is not referring to anything bytheir use of ‘that’. The reference of pure indexicals suchas ‘I’ or ‘today’ is, instead, fixed automatically withoutany need for the speaker to point to or have an intentiondirected toward anything.

See Dthat; Kaplan, David

Further reading: Braun (2001)

Demonstrative identification: There are, broadly speaking,two ways of identifying objects so that they become avail-able for thought. First, we can track and recognise objectsby being perceptually acquainted with them. That is, wecan identify (and re-identify) an object by seeing, touch-ing or listening to it. These are all examples of demon-strative identification of an object. Once the object hasbeen identified in any of these ways, it becomes possi-ble to have thoughts about it. Second, we can identify anobject by means of a description that applies to that ob-ject. This second way of making an object available forthought is called ‘descriptive identification’. This termi-nology was developed by Strawson, who modelled it onRussell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintanceand knowledge by description. The same terminology wasemployed by Evans in a very influential discussion of thesetopics.

See Demonstrative thought; Russell’s principle

Further reading: Evans (1982)




Demonstrative thought: A thought that has as a constituenta demonstrative (typically perceptual) mode of presen-tation of the object which the thought is about. Thus,one utterance of the sentence ‘that [while pointing toRed Rum] is a horse’ expresses a demonstrative thoughtwhich involves a visual presentation of Red Rum. An ut-terance of ‘that [while listening to Red Rum’s bray] isa horse’ expresses a different thought about Red Rumbecause it has as a constituent an aural presentation ofRed Rum. Occasionally, the expression ‘demonstrativethought’ is used simply to refer to thoughts expressed bysentences containing a demonstrative, independently ofany account one might wish to give of the nature of suchthoughts.

See Demonstrative identification; Descriptive thought;

Russell’s principle; Singular thought

Further reading: McCulloch (1989)

Denotation: Russell’s name for the mode of reference of defi-

nite descriptions. Thus, for example, the definite descrip-tion, ‘the President of the US in 2005’ is said to denoteGeorge W. Bush.

See Extension

Derrida, Jean-Jacques (1930–2004): Derrida was a controver-sial French philosopher, father of deconstruction, whosework has been mostly negatively received by Anglo-American philosophers. Derrida’s early work was primar-ily concerned with the structuralist tradition in linguisticsinitiated by Saussure, and the phenomenological tradi-tion initiated by Edmund Husserl. He then expandedhis critical work to include a variety of essays on manyphilosophical and literary figures. In the course of thiswork, Derrida developed a kind of methodology that hasbeen labelled ‘deconstruction’. Derrida tried to resist any




proceduralist reading of his methodology, but such read-ings are hard to avoid. Deconstruction so understoodconsists in searching for a binary opposition in a text,where a binary opposition is treated in the text as ex-haustive and mutually exclusive. The deconstructive ap-proach proceeds by showing that the privileged term inthese oppositions actually presupposes the rejected or de-spised term, so that the two opposing terms are shownto be interdependent rather than mutually exclusive, andthe underprivileged term is shown to play a pivotal rolein a text that explicitly excludes or devalues it. A famousexample of deconstruction is Derrida’s treatment of theopposition of writing and speech. Although any attemptto extract ordinary philosophical theories from Derrida’sbooks is probably bound to be out of step with the pur-poses served by those works, Derrida does appear to havesome views about linguistic meaning. He appears to holdwith Davidson that all interpretation is radically indeter-minate. Derrida’s starting point is the denial of intrinsic ororiginal intentionality. Instead, he takes meaningfulnessto be always a matter of extrinsic properties or relations.Central to this thought is the notion of iterability. To saythat a sign is iterable is to say that it can be repeated, andthat its repetition consists in the production of anothertokening of the same type. New tokenings can differ insome of their semantic properties from previous token-ings, and still count as tokenings of the same type. Themeaning of the sign would be determined by the wholechain of its tokens. However, since these chains of to-kenings are never ending, meanings are never fully de-terminate. This is an idea that Derrida expresses by say-ing that meanings are never fully present, but are alwaysdeferred.

See DifferanceFurther reading: Wheeler III (2000)




Description theory of reference: The view according to whichnames are abbreviations of definite descriptions. Thesedescriptions provide the sense of the name and deter-mine what the name refers to. The classical formula-tion of the position was developed by Russell who takesnames such as ‘Aristotle’ to be abbreviations of a defi-nite description such as ‘the teacher of Alexander’. Kripke

raised some serious objections against this view, and alsoagainst a more sophisticated version of it known as thecluster theory of reference. His modal argument statesthat names cannot be abbreviations for (clusters of) def-inite descriptions because names behave differently fromdescriptions in modal contexts. ‘Necessarily, ElizabethII is the Queen of England’ is false. However, ‘Neces-sarily, the Queen of England is the Queen of England’is true. Kripke explains this modal phenomenon by ar-guing that names are rigid designators, whilst descrip-tions are not. Kripke also provides several non-modalconsiderations which militate against the description the-ory. First, since different people associate different de-scriptions with the same name, the theory has the oddconsequence that the name has different meanings fordifferent persons. Second, the theory cannot cope withthe fact that people often associate more than one de-scription with the same name. Third, many people can-not provide a description which would uniquely iden-tify the bearer of the name, but if the description ismeant to identify the bearer, it must single the bearerout. Fourth, some people might provide a descriptionwhich is not even true of the bearer of the name. Inother words, people might still succeed in referring tosomething or somebody even though they are confusedabout what or who it is. Fifth, names cannot be com-pletely eliminated in favour of descriptions. Many de-scriptions contain names which can only be substituted




with descriptions which contain further names. Some ofthese difficulties are not a problem for supporters of thecluster theory.

See Causal theory of reference; Frege, Gottlob


Descriptive identification: One of two ways of identifying ob-jects so that they become available for thought. The otheris demonstrative identification. In descriptive identifica-tion we identify an object or person (say, Tiger Woods) interms of a description; normally, the sort of thing whichis expressible by a definite description that uniquely ap-plies to that object or person (say, the winner of the 2005Open at St. Andrews). Once the object is thus identifiedwe can have descriptive thoughts about it; such as thethought that the winner of the 2005 Open at St. Andrewsis American.

See Evans, Gareth

Further reading: McCulloch (1989); Evans (1982)

Descriptive meaning: The factual meaning of an expressionor a sentence. It is often cashed out in terms of truth

conditions by saying that the descriptive meaning of asentence is given by the conditions that must obtain if thesentence is to be true. Non-cognitivism about an area ofdiscourse (such as ethics) denies that indicative sentencesthat belong to that area have descriptive or factual mean-ings. Instead, their role would be to express some formof non-cognitive attitude.

Descriptive thought: A thought that has as a constituent adescriptive (typically expressible by means of a definitedescription) mode of presentation of the object or ob-jects which the thought is about. Thus, the sentence ‘ThePrime Minister of the UK in 2004 was a man’ expresses adescriptive thought about, as it happens, Tony Blair. This




thought has as a constituent a descriptive presentationwhich uniquely identifies Tony Blair as the sole individualthat fits the description of being in 2004 the Prime Min-ister of the UK. Occasionally, the expression ‘descriptivethought’ is used simply to refer to the thoughts expressedby sentences containing a definite descriptions, indepen-dently of any account one might wish to give of the natureof such thoughts.

See Demonstrative thought; Descriptive identification


Designated truth-value: An expression used in logic to indi-cate the truth-value or values which are preserved in validinferences. Thus, in classical logic the only designatedtruth-value is the true. However, in logics that admit ofmore than two truth-values, for example, a logic that ad-mits the values true, false and indeterminate, there mightbe more than one designated truth-value.

Differance: A notion coined by the French philosopherJacques Derrida. The odd typography purports to pointto a difference with a difference in spelling which is in-audible in the French pronunciation. Differance is a nec-essary condition for the possibility of ordinary difference.Derrida’s notion is greatly indebted to Plato’s discussionof difference in the context of the problem of universals.Derrida’s notion is intended to address the same problemin the context of the relation between one universal type

and the many tokens which instantiate it.See Predication

Direct reference: Usually understood as the view, allegedlyfirst formulated by John Stuart Mill, that the meaningof a name is the object it refers to. That is, according tothis position, there is no meaning or sense that mediatesbetween the name and its bearer. Instead, the name




directly refers to the object, and its doing so constitutesthe whole contribution of the name to the meanings of thesentences in which it occurs. This view, which has recentlybeen revived due to the problems faced by the description

theory of reference, has some highly implausible conse-quences. For instance, its supporters must deny that thesentence ‘Mark Twain is an author’ differs in meaningfrom the sentence ‘Samuel Clemens is an author’. In theirview since ‘Mark Twain’ and ‘Samuel Clemens’ are twonames for the same person, these two sentences have thesame meaning. The theory of direct reference must be dis-tinguished from the causal theory of reference. Even sup-porters of a purely causal version of the latter could admitthat names have senses or modes of presentation as wellas referents, although these modes of presentation wouldhave to be causal and not descriptive. Recently, Kaplan

has suggested that, besides names, demonstratives (suchas ‘this’ and ‘that’) and indexicals (such as ‘here’, ‘now’)also might have direct reference. Kaplan’s definition of di-rect reference, however, is slightly different from the oneprovided in this entry.

See Frege’s puzzle; Reference; Sense; Structured propo-

sition

Further reading: Salmon (2005)

Disjunction problem: A difficulty for various forms of indi-

cator semantics. According to this view, a kind of men-tal state represents a certain kind of thing if and only ifthat kind of mental state is reliably causally connected tothings of that kind. But suppose that whenever one per-son is in the presence of rabbits she forms a mental stateof a given kind. This same kind of state, call it R-state,is also had by that person when she reads about rabbitsin books. However, this person is not very good at tellinghares from rabbits just by looking at them. As a result,




her R-mental states are also reliably causally correlatedwith hares. Intuitively, we want to say that this personsometimes mistakes a hare for a rabbit. She forms a men-tal representation of a rabbit when she is in the presenceof a hare. But indicator semantics would commit one tosaying that this person has mental states that represent thedisjunction: either rabbit or hare. This problem is relatedto general difficulties for indicator semantics raised by theidea of misrepresentation. Jerry Fodor’s theory of asym-

metric dependence was developed as an answer to thisproblem. Other supporters of indicator semantics attemptto address this issue by relying on the idea of teleologicalfunction. This approach is known as teleosemantics.


Disposition: Examples of dispositions are solubility, mag-netism, fragility. For example, glass is fragile; it has adisposition to break. This is to say that if glass were tobe struck, it would break. Thus, minimally to attribute adispositional property to a thing is to say that some condi-tionals hold true of that thing. More generally, somethinghas a disposition to do something G if and only if were itto be put in some specific conditions, it would do G. Thosewho think that there is not much more than this to dispo-sitions subscribe to a conditional analysis of dispositions.Others provide more metaphysically weighty accounts ofdispositions as causal powers. These powers would ex-plain why the entities that have them behave as they do.Everybody agrees that entities have dispositional prop-erties even when these are not manifested. Thus, glass isfragile even when it is not broken, and sugar would besoluble in water even if there were no water on earth todissolve it.

See Categorical predicate




Dispositionalism: Supporters of this view argue, contraKripke’s meaning scepticism, that facts about semanticmeanings can be explained in terms of dispositional factsabout language use. A crude dispositional account ofmeaning that equates meaning with actual dispositions touse the relevant expressions is clearly doomed to failure.The idea that somebody might be systematically disposedto make mistakes when they use a given expression makessense; so the meaning of an expression is not determinedby the speakers’ actual dispositions to use that expression.If it were so determined, the idea that speakers can makesystematic mistakes would have to be unintelligible, whilein fact it is perfectly intelligible. A more sophisticatedversion of dispositionalism sees meaning as determinedby facts about how speakers in ideal conditions would bedisposed to use the expression. According to this accountwe should ignore facts about how speakers are disposedto use the expression in less than ideal conditions. Thiskind of sophisticated dispositionalist can make sense ofsystematic error, but faces the difficult problem of specify-ing in a non-question-begging way what conditions countas ideal or optimal. It has been suggested that one way ofmeeting this objection is by the adoption of the Ramsey–Lewis style of reductive explanation. Fodor’s accountof meaning in terms of asymmetric dependence has alsobeing taken by some as a dispositionalist reply to Kripke’ssceptic.

See Ramsey sentence; Rule-following


Disquotation: A device that cancels out the effect of the quo-tation marks.

See Truth, disquotational theory of




Domain: In logic and semantics this is the collection of thingsor abstract entities over which the operators and quan-

tifiers range and which constitute the input of functions.For instance, the quantifiers of ordinary logic are unre-stricted, which means that they range over everythingwhatsoever. This is to say that anything at all is includedin the domain. Similarly, the domain of possible world

semantics is the collection or set of all possible worlds.Modal operators range over that domain.

See Interpretation

Donnellan, Keith (1931–): He is Professor Emeritus of Philos-ophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).Donnellan is credited with making the distinction be-tween referential and attributive uses of definite descrip-

tions.

Dthat: A new word, coined by Kaplan, which is stipulatedto function as a true demonstrative. A demonstrative is aword whose reference varies according to the context ofutterance. The reference of the demonstrative in contextis partly determined by a demonstration, which could be agesture of pointing to one thing, or a sort of inner pointing(an intention directed towards one thing).

See Indexical

Dummett, Michael (1925–): A British philosopher whospent his teaching career at Oxford University. He is bestknown for his work on the philosophy of Frege. Dummettreads Frege as, among other things, a philosopher oflanguage who developed a semantics based on the twonotions of sense and reference (Bedeutung). Famously,Dummett also argued that the whole debate betweenrealism and anti-realism is best understood in semanticrather than metaphysical terms. For Dummett, a realist




about a certain area of discourse – e.g., the past – claimsthat sentences in that area are true only when conditions,whose obtaining might not be even in principle verifiable,hold. Thus, a realist about the past will say that thesentence ‘Caesar sneezed 10 minutes before crossingthe Rubicon’ is true if and only if he did sneeze at thatpoint, even though there is now no available evidence,and there will never be any evidence, as to whetheror not this situation obtained. The anti-realist about agiven area of discourse claims, instead, that sentencesin that area are true when some conditions, whoseobtaining does not outstrip or transcend verification,hold. Dummett developed two arguments, known as theacquisition argument and the manifestation argument,against realism. In recent years, Wright has refined someof Dummett’s insights about the nature of the debatebetween realism and anti-realism. Dummett has alsowritten extensively on causality and on the philosophy ofmathematics.

See Communicability argument; Verification transcen-

dence

Further reading: Weiss (2002)

E

E-type pronoun: One kind of anaphoric use of pronouns. Anexample is ‘it’ in ‘John picked something up. It was rot-ten and yellow’. E-type pronouns can be substituted bya noun-phrase constructed from the context, in this in-stance ‘The thing picked up by John’.

See Anaphora

Ellipsis: An expression is said to be elliptical when some partsof it have been intentionally omitted.




Elucidation (Erlauterung): Some recent interpreters of Frege

and Wittgenstein, such as James Conant, have taken thisnotion to have a quasi-technical meaning. They claim thatelucidation is akin to a clarification of logically primitivenotions that cannot be defined. The process of elucidationis meant to involve the employment of nonsense sentencessuch as ‘Concepts are predicative expression’, which de-spite appearances to the contrary for Frege fails to sayanything about concepts.

Emotive utterances: Utterances whose purpose is to expressemotions and solicit the same emotions in others. Sup-porters of emotivism in ethics take talk about morality tobe of this nature.

Emotivism: The view, held by Ayer among others, that moraljudgements serve only to express emotions or sentimentsof approval or disapproval. They do not express beliefsand are not capable of being either true or false. Ac-cording to this view, for example, to say that murderis wrong is tantamount to expressing one’s disapprovalof murder which could be equally expressed by saying,‘Boo! Murder’.

See Expressivism; Frege–Geach problem; Non-

cognitivism

Further reading: Ayer (1946)

Empiricism: Early modern empiricists, like Locke, claimed allknowledge is ultimately derived from experience. Theyalso denied the existence of any innate ideas or princi-ples. More recently supporters of logical positivism claimthat, with the exception of a priori truths and falsehoods,the only sentences that are meaningful are those capa-ble of being empirically verified or falsified. The term issometimes used also to refer to the weaker thesis thatexperience is an indispensable source of knowledge.




Entailment: Arguably the central notion in logic. A proposi-tion or propositions is said to entail some other or otherswhen the latter proposition or propositions follow nec-essarily from the former proposition or group thereof.Thus, for example, the propositions all mammals havelungs and whales are mammals entail the propositionwhales have lungs. There is no agreement about whichamong different formal relations provides the correct un-derstanding of the ordinary notion of entailment. Usingthe language of possible worlds, A entails B is interpretedas saying that B is true in all possible worlds in which Ais true.

Enthymeme: An argument in which one or more premises areleft implicit.

Equivalence class: A class of individuals related by an equiv-

alence relation. Thus, for example, all the human beingsin the world can be partitioned into equivalence classesbased on their individual income, so that all the individu-als in each class have the same income as that of all otherindividuals in that same class. In this case, the individualmembers of each class are equivalent to each other withrespect to income level.

Equivalence relation: A relation such as having the same massas, the same income as, or the same number of mem-bers as, which is reflexive (it holds between an objectand itself), symmetrical (if it holds between an object aand another object b, it also holds between b and a) andtransitive (if it holds between a and b, and between b andc, it also holds between a and c). Thus, having the sameincome as is an equivalence relation because any personhas the same income as himself or herself. Further, if aperson – let us call him ‘Bob’ – has the same income asanother – say, Jane – then the second person, i.e., Jane,




has the same income as the first, namely Bob. Finally, ifBob has the same income as Jane, and Jane has the sameincome as Jake, then Bob has the same income as Jake. Bycontrast, being taller than is not an equivalence relationbecause it is not symmetrical since if Bob is taller thanJane, it does not follow that Jane is taller than Bob (quitethe contrary). Identity is an equivalence relation.

See Equivalence class; Relative identity

Equivocation: A fallacy of reasoning that arises when a termor a phrase is used with two or more different meanings.

Error-theory: A position about the status of a whole area ofdiscourse. It is the view that the atomic statements in thatarea aim to describe facts, but, since these facts do notobtain, all these statements are false. The first theory ofthis kind was developed by Mackie, who held that allthe atomic ethical statements are false because there areno ethical facts. More recently, Field has argued that allatomic statements of arithmetic are false because theyaim to describe facts about numbers, and numbers donot exist.

See Cognitivism

Further reading: Miller (2005); Field (1980); Mackie(1977)

Eternal sentence: A sentence whose truth-value remains fixedat all times and for every speaker, such as ‘copper oxideis green’. Eternal sentences are contrasted with occasionsentences such as ‘that is copper oxide’ whose truth-valuecan change depending on the occasion of utterance.

Evans, Gareth (1946–80): Despite his early death, Evans,first a student and subsequently a lecturer at OxfordUniversity, made several important contributions to the




philosophy of language. In his posthumously publishedbook Varieties of Reference (1982) Evans made severalimportant contributions to the theory of reference. Heexposed some problems for a crude causal theory andput forward a defence for mixed theories that recognisedthe importance of both descriptive and demonstrativemodes of identification. In the same book Evans devel-oped analyses of the notions of singular thought and ofnon-conceptual content.

See Argument from below; Russell’s principle

Evidence transcendence See Verification transcendence

Excluded middle, law of: The law that states that for eachproposition either that proposition or its negation istrue. It is symbolised by the schema: A ∨ ¬ A. This lawshould not be confused with bivalence, which statesthat every proposition is either true or false. There arelogical systems in which excluded middle holds becauseany sentence of the form A ∨ ¬ A is a theorem and yetbivalence fails because the system admits of sentenceswhich are neither true nor false. Excluded middle holdsbecause the negations of these sentences are true.

See Bivalence

Exercitive: A term coined by Austin for a type of (illocution-

ary) speech act which consists in the exercise of poweror assertion of influence. The sacking of an employee byuttering the words ‘You are fired’, the adjournment ofthe meeting by uttering ‘the meeting is adjourned’ are allexercitives. Austin includes orders and commands in thisbroader category.

Expositive: A term coined by Austin for a type of (illocution-

ary) speech act which consists in the clarifying of reasons




and the conducting of arguments. Thus, the concession ofa point by saying ‘I see’ or ‘Oh, yes’, and the introductionof a quotation by saying ‘Quote’, are expositives.

Expressivism: A family of views according to which judge-ments about a given area of discourse do not purport todescribe facts, but aim instead to express something, typi-cally an emotion or a feeling of approval and disapproval.Expressivist accounts have been developed especially fordiscourse about morals and aesthetics.

See Emotivism; Frege–Geach problem; Non-cogn-

itivism

Further reading: Miller (2003), chs 3–5

Extension: What a word stands for. Thus, the extension of asingular term is its referent; the extension of a predicateis the collection of things to which it applies; and theextension of a sentence is its truth-value. The extensionof a word is contrasted with its intension.

Extensional context: A linguistic context within which ex-pressions with the same extension can be substituted foreach other without a change to the truth-value of thewhole sentence (salva veritate). For example, ‘London isa busy city’ is an extensional context since the substitu-tion of ‘the capital of the UK’ for ‘London’ does not alterthe truth-value of the whole. Notoriously, some parts ofnatural languages do not seem extensional. The eveningstar is the planet Venus, and yet it might be true that Johnbelieves that Venus is a planet, and false that John believesthat the evening star is a planet.

See Frege’s puzzles; Propositional attitude reports

Externalism: A view primarily about the individuation ofproperties, according to which whether an individual has




a property of a given kind depends at least in part on factswhich are external to the individual in question. In thephilosophy of mind and language externalism is a viewabout what individuates mental and linguistic contents.Externalists argue that facts about the environment exter-nal to the subject contribute to the determination of thecontents of that subject’s mental states and to the mean-ings of the subject’s utterances. The classical arguments infavour of externalism are Putnam’s Twin Earth exampleand Burge’s arthritis example. Critics of these argumentshave either denied the intuitions Putnam and Burge relyon, or alternatively have argued that each mental statehas two kinds of content. Externalism would be true ofone kind of content, broad content, and false of the other,narrow content. Thus, when the earthling and his twinhave thoughts which they would express by uttering thewords ‘there is water in the glass’, their thoughts havea common narrow content which can be characterisedby saying that they think that the glass contains someof the odourless, colourless stuff that fills the lakes. Butthey also have different broad contents since the earthlinghas a thought which is true if and only if there is waterin the glass and the twin has a thought which is true ifand only if there is twater in the glass. Some externaliststhink of psychological states as internal states of the sub-ject whose individuation conditions lay partly outside thesubject. They would thus be analogous to states such asbeing sunburnt which is a state of the skin that is partlyindividuated in terms of what lies outside the skin, sincebeing caused by the sun is what makes a sunburn what itis. Others, strong externalists, claim that the psychologi-cal states themselves partly lie outside the subject whosestates they are.

See Internalism





F

Fact: Some philosophers deflate this notion. In their view afact is just a shadow of a true claim. Thus, they might saythat to call something a fact is nothing more than say-ing that we claim something to be true when we state it.Other philosophers give ontological weight to the notionof a fact. These philosophers insist that only some trueassertions are genuinely factual, while others, despite be-ing truth-apt, fall short of stating an objective fact. Somephilosophers go even further and invoke a metaphysicallyheavy-duty notion of fact to explain the idea of a truth-

maker.See Deflationism; Truth aptness

Fallacy: A fallacious argument is one that is not valid. If the ar-gument is deductive, then it might lead from true premisesto a false conclusion. If it is inductive, the premises do notoffer sufficient evidence in favour of the truth of the con-clusion.

See Validity

Falsity: The opposite of truth. In classical logic it is expressedby the non-designated truth-value: false.

See Designated truth-value

Family-resemblance: A notion introduced by Wittgenstein

in the Philosophical Investigations (1953) to explainconcepts such as that of (game). Wittgenstein points outthat there are no features that all and only games have incommon. What makes all games instances of the con-cept is a looser set of relations which holds betweenvarious examples of games. Thus, basketball and soc-cer are related by being ball games involving more thanone team, the use of a ball connects these games with




tennis but also with children’s games involving bouncinga ball against a wall. Score-keeping links soccer to bridge,and the use of cards connects bridge to patience gameswith cards. Thus, in the same way in which membersof a family do not necessarily share the same features,there will be features shared among some of them andother features some of those might share with yet othermembers.

Fictionalism: A view that can be held about different areas ofdiscourse, such as morality or folk psychology. The cen-tral tenet of the view is that its supporters take atomicsentences belonging to an area of discourse to be liter-ally and systematically false. Thus, fictionalism is a kindof error-theory. However, supporters of fictionalism alsohold that these false claims play a useful role, and thattherefore this kind of discourse should be preserved de-spite its falsity.

‘Fido’-Fido principle: The principle followed by theories ofmeaning that treat all linguistic expressions as if they werenames. A name like ‘Fido’ gets its meaning by referring toan individual, namely Fido. A supporter of the principlewould treat general words like ‘dog’ or ‘triangle’ as namesfor the universals dog-eity or triangularity, thought as ab-stract individuals. The expression ‘“Fido”-Fido Principle’was coined by Gilbert Ryle.

Force: This notion was first introduced by Frege as one ofthree ingredients of meaning as ordinarily understood.The other two are sense and tone. Force is the pragmaticcomponent that makes an utterance of a sentence an in-stance of an assertion or a question or a command, andso forth.

Further reading: Dummett (1981)




Free variable See Variable

Frege, Gottlob (1848–1925): Frege was a mathematician whospent his whole academic career at the University of Jena.Relatively unknown in his lifetime, his work has had anenormous influence on contemporary analytic philosophyof language and of mathematics. He is also widely held asthe founder of contemporary formal logic, arguably, hismost important contribution not just to philosophy but toall areas of knowledge. Frege employs the mathematicalnotions of function and argument to develop a languageof logic which he called ‘concept-script’ (Begriffsschrift).Predicates stand for functions which take objects as argu-ments and yield truth-values (truth or falsity) as their val-ues. Proper names stand for objects. Frege also developsthe notion of a truth function such as ‘and’ or ‘not’ whichtakes truth-values as arguments and yields truth-values asvalues. For instance, ‘and’ generates a truth when it con-joins two truths, and generates a falsehood in all othercases. Before Frege, logicians had no means to deal withsentences, including multiple generalities such as ‘every-body loves somebody’. Using the language of functionsand objects, Frege developed the notion of a universalquantifier which allowed him to express such generali-ties. In mathematics Frege offered a definition of numberand developed a logicist programme aimed at reducingall arithmetical truths to logical truths. The programmehas faced enormous difficulties because of the discov-ery of paradoxes, known as set-theoretical paradoxes,affecting the commonsensical notion of a class or col-lection of items. Frege’s most important contributions tocontemporary philosophy of language are his distinctionsbetween concept and object, and between sense and ref-

erence. Concepts are a kind of function, those with onlyone argument, and objects are their arguments. Concepts




are the referents of predicates, and objects are the refer-ents of proper names. Both proper names and predicatesalso have, besides their referents, senses. These senses arethe constituents of the thoughts which are expressed bythe sentences of which names and predicates are parts.

See Frege’s puzzles

Further reading: Dummett (1981); Frege (1892a and1892b)

Frege–Geach problem: A problem for all forms of non-

cognitivism. The problem as it affects emotivism was firstdiscussed by Geach, who attributed its development toFrege. Supporters of emotivism hold that to state thatmurder is wrong is equivalent to evincing one’s feeling ofdisapproval of murder by uttering ‘Boo! murder’. Geachpoints out that in moral discourse not all uses of sen-tences, such as ‘murder is wrong’, are free-standing; someuses are embedded in more complex constructions. Anexample is: ‘If murder is wrong, then genocide is alsowrong’. The emotivist owes an account of these uses.He cannot claim that in this example one is also merelyevincing one’s disapproval of murder because we use con-ditional sentences such as these without committing our-selves to endorsing their antecedents. Thus, if I say, ‘IfJohn comes home today, I will bake a cake’, I am notclaiming that John is coming home today. Similarly, theemotivist cannot plausibly say that by saying ‘If murderis wrong, then genocide is also wrong’ I am expressingmy disapproval of murder. The emotivist does not merelyface the problem of providing some account of these em-bedded uses of moral discourse, the account also needs tobe such that the apparent validity of inferences involvingmoral discourse is respected. For instance, the inferencefrom (1) murder is wrong and (2) if murder is wrong,then genocide is also wrong, to (C) genocide is wrong




seems perfectly valid. However, it can be valid only if itinvolves no equivocation. Hence, the meaning of ‘murderis wrong’ in (1) and (2) must be the same. But now theproblem for the emotivist appears insurmountable, sincehe cannot give for the expression ‘murder is wrong’ as itappears in (2) the kind of emotivist account he wantedto give for its free-standing use in (1), and yet he alsoneeds to attribute to the expression the same meaning inboth cases. All other forms of non-cognitivism face whatis structurally the same problem.

See Quasi-realism

Further reading: Miller (2003), chs 3–5; Blackburn(1984) ch. 6.2

Frege’s puzzles: First formulated in Gottlob Frege’s seminalarticle ‘On Sense and Meaning’ (1892a), the first puzzleconcerns identity statements and constitutes the primaryfocus of the article. The second puzzle concerns propo-

sitional attitude reports and is only briefly addressed inFrege’s article. Frege notes that identity statements suchas ‘the evening star is the evening star’ and ‘the morningstar is the evening star’ have different cognitive signifi-cance. In order to ascertain the truth of the first we donot need to look at the sky, but the second expresses asubstantial astronomical discovery. Frege’s early accountof language could not explain the difference betweenthese identity statements because it focused exclusivelyon the truth-value of sentences and the contributionsthat the names and predicates in those sentences made tothe determination of those truth-values. In other words,Frege’s exclusive concern was with what in contemporaryparlance is called the ‘semantic value’ of an expression.If we focus only on semantic values there is no differ-ence between the two identity statements. The statementsthemselves have the same semantic value, namely, truth.




The first is true, because Venus (which is the semanticvalue of ‘the evening star’) is identical with Venus (i.e.,is the semantic value of ‘the evening star’). The second istrue, because Venus (which is the semantic value of ‘themorning star’) is identical with Venus (i.e., is the semanticvalue of ‘the evening star’). Thus, there is no differencebetween the two statements with regard to their seman-tic values or those of their parts. In order to explain thedifference between the two statements Frege introducesthe notion of the sense or mode of presentation associatedwith an expression. The names ‘the morning star’ and ‘theevening star’ refer to the same object, but have differentsenses. They present the object differently, because theypresent it respectively as the last star to disappear in themorning and as the first to appear in the evening. Hence,for Frege the two identity statements have differentsenses because they include names with different senses.Frege calls the sense of a sentence, the thought expressedby the sentence. Thus, the two sentences used in the state-ments above are said by Frege to differ in cognitive signifi-cance because they express different thoughts. Frege usedthe same distinction between sense and reference to solvea puzzle concerning propositional attitude reports. Henoted that a sentence like ‘John believes that the eveningstar is the evening star’ could be true and yet the sentence‘John believes that the morning star is the evening star’be false. Frege took examples like this one to show thatthe that-clauses in sentences such as these two contributesomething other than their truth-value to the truth-valueof the whole sentence in which they figure. They cannotcontribute their truth-values because those are the same,and yet the truth-values of the sentences which differ onlywith respect to these clauses are different. Frege proposedas a solution to the puzzle that in these contexts the that-clauses have indirect reference, and this reference is their




ordinary sense. Thus, the contributions made by theseclauses to the overall truth or falsity of the sentences inwhich they appear are the different thoughts expressed bythe clauses. Consequently, since these thoughts differ, it isno surprise that the truth-values of the complex sentencesare also different. Both puzzles are still widely discussed,and many different solutions are being proposed.

See Direct reference; Intensional context; Propositional

attitude reports; Thought

Further reading: Frege (1892a).

Function: There are at least two distinct notions of functioncurrently in use among philosophers: (1) a mathematicalor logical function is an operation that takes argumentsas its inputs and produces values as outputs. For instance,in ‘2 + 3 = 5’, addition is the function, the arguments are2 and 3, and the value is 5; (2) a biological function isthe purpose of a biological entity. For instance, pumpingblood is the function of the heart, because this is what theheart is designed to do. This use of the teleological notionof design should be ultimately understood in evolutionarynon-teleological terms.

See teleosemantics

G

Game See Language-game

Gavagai: This expression figures in Quine’s arguments for theindeterminacy of translation. ‘Gavagai’ is an expressionused by some imaginary natives whose language Quineimagines we need to translate from scratch. The nativesuse the expression when a rabbit is present. Quine pointsout that the expression can equally be translated as ‘there




is a rabbit’ or ‘there is an undetached rabbit part’ amongother things.

See Stimulus meaning

Geach, Peter T. (1916–): A British philosopher who was formany years professor of philosophy at the University ofLeeds. He has made numerous contributions to philo-sophical logic, the philosophy of language and the philos-ophy of religion. He is famous for his work on medievaland Aristotelian logic, for his theory of relative identity

and for his work on the theory of reference.See Frege–Geach problem; Predicable

Gedanke See Thought

Generality: ‘Woman’, ‘apple’, ‘water’ are all general terms.What is characteristic of them is their role in predication.Unlike singular terms, general terms can appear in thepredicative position prefixed by the copula.

See Mass term; Natural kind term; Sortal

Further reading: Quine (1960), ch. 3.

Generative grammar: A notion developed by Chomsky to in-dicate the recursive, context-free rules that govern thedeep structure of the language faculty and generate allphrase structures.

Grammar: A notion more commonly used by linguists ratherthan philosophers. Chomsky in particular has argued forthe existence of a universal grammar, a generative gram-

mar and a transformational grammar.

Grasping a thought: For Frege, thoughts are abstract en-tities; they are what contemporary philosophers meanby ‘propositions’. Hence, thoughts are not psychological




entities. Frege never explained satisfactorily how we arecapable of having knowledge of thoughts, but he used theexpression ‘grasping a thought’ to convey the idea thatthoughts as propositions exist even when they have neverbeen thought or grasped by any human being.

See Platonism

Grice, H. P. (1913–88): Grice began his career at OxfordUniversity but moved to Berkeley, California in the late1960s. He is the founder of psychological approaches tothe theory of linguistic meaning. His work has been ex-tremely influential in bringing about a shift of focus awayfrom language towards thought as the primary bearerof meaning. Grice himself attempts to reduce linguisticmeaning (which he identifies as a kind of non-natural

meaning) to speaker meaning. He also analyses what aspeaker means by his or her words on one occasion ofutterance in terms of the speaker’s communicative inten-tion. Since Grice sees language primarily as a means tocommunicate one’s thoughts to others, he also developsan account of what is conveyed in conversation by impli-cation without being explicitly stated. He calls this phe-nomenon ‘conversational implicature’ and provides a the-ory of it in terms of conversational maxims governing allconversations.

See Meaning, communicative intention theory of; Nat-

ural meaning; Perlocutionary intention

H

Hermeneutics: The term is now used to refer to a specific ap-proach to the study of the interpretation of texts, althoughthe etymology of the term refers to interpretation ingeneral. Among the founders of the hermeneutical




approach to reading and interpretation are FriedrichSchleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. One of the tenetsof the approach is the idea that the parts and the wholeof a text stand in a special relation of co-dependence. Themeaning of each part of the text depends on the meaningof the whole and the meaning of the whole depends oneach part. As a result interpretation involves hermeneuticcircles requiring the reader to go back and forth betweenthe whole and its parts.

Further reading: Ramberg and Gjesdal (2005)

Holism: A family of views according to which whether some-thing has a given property is a matter of its relations toother items. Thus, if meanings are holistically individu-ated, the meaning of an expression depends on the mean-ings of other expressions. The opposite of holism is some-times called atomism.

Further reading: Peacocke (1999)

Homonymy: The relation that holds between two differentwords that just happen to be written in the same way.Thus, for instance ‘bank’ as in river bank and ‘bank’ asin money bank are homonyms in English. The fact thatthey have distinct etymologies shows that what we havehere are two distinct words rather than an ambiguousword with more than one meaning.

Homophonic translation: The preferred approach to a trans-lation or interpretation of the utterances of other speakersof our language. Their words are taken at face value, andinterpreted to mean what the same words mean for theinterpreter.

See Indeterminacy of translation; Radical interpreta-

tion




Humanity, principle of: It is preferred by some philosophersto the principle of charity. It states that when interpretingothers we should attribute to them the thoughts we wouldhave if we were in their circumstances, which is to sayif we had had their upbringing, possessed their sensoryapparatus and lived through their life.

Hyperintensionality: (1) Linguists use the term to indicatecontexts in which expressions with the same intensionsare not intersubstitutable salva veritate. An example isprovided by belief and other propositional attitude con-texts, where, for instance, ‘John believes all triangleshave three angles’ might be true but, due to John’s igno-rance, ‘John believes all triangles have three sides’ is false.(2) The term is also used to refer to theories that takepropositions to be basic entities, which are not reducibleto constructions out of possible worlds.

See structured proposition

Hypostatisation: Also known as reification, hypostatisationis the fallacy of treating something which is not a thingor an object as if it were one. For example, a person thatthinks of justice as an abstract entity which is named bythe word ‘justice’ would be guilty of this fallacy.

I

Icon: In semiotics, an icon is a sign that represents by resem-bling what it is a sign for. A picture is an example of anicon. The terminology was introduced by Peirce.

Idealisation: The process of abstraction from actual limita-tions in order to consider ideal conditions. Thus, forexample, supporters of sophisticated dispositionalism




abstract from actual dispositions to use a word in orderto focus on dispositions in ideal or optimal conditions.

Identity: The equivalence relation that each thing has withitself and nothing else. It is the smallest equivalence rela-tion, since if a is identical with b, then a and b also standin all other equivalence relations. Thus, identity securesindiscernibility because if a is identical to b, then a has aproperty if and only if b also has it. Identity so understoodis an absolute equivalence relation, because whenever itholds between a and b there cannot be another equiva-lence relation which does not hold between that a andb. Not all philosophers believe that ordinary languageshave the resources to express absolute identity. In partic-ular, Geach has argued in favour of relative identity. Inhis view, every claim that x is identical with y is an incom-plete expression which functions as a shorthand for theclaim that x is the same A as y, where A is a sortal term.

See Leibniz’s law

Identity conditions: The conditions that constitute a criterion

of identity or identification for a given thing.

Idiolect: A language spoken by a single person or a singlegroup.

Iff: Shorthand for the biconditional sentential connective ifand only if.

Illocutionary act: is defined by Austin as an act of sayingsomething (locutionary act) with a certain force, such asthe force of a question or a command. Warning is an ex-ample of an illocutionary speech act. Under appropriatecircumstances one can perform such an act, for instance,by uttering the sentence ‘There is a dog in the house’.




Apologising, promising, questioning, replying, disagree-ing, announcing a verdict, declaring a meeting open areall examples of illocutionary speech acts. Austin believedthat we get an illocutionary act when force is added to alocutionary act. What this adding might amount to is notclear. If I say, ‘I warn you that things are going to change’,I perform a warning. But, in this instance, the content ofthe words I utter determines their force as well, so nothingis added to the mere saying to get something with the forceof a warning. Critics of Austin, however, might be wrongto say that there is no difference between the performanceof a locutionary (rhetic) act, which is merely the sayingof something taking it to have a meaning, and the perfor-mance of an illocutionary act. Arguably, one could utterwords with meaning, as when we find ourselves for noparticular reason voicing a sentence that comes to mind,without thereby performing an illocutionary act of anysort. Austin divided illocutionary acts into five categories:behabitives (like apologising), commissives (like promis-ing), exercitives (like ordering), expositives (like makinga point or explaining a reason) and verdictives (like issu-ing a judgement).

See Perlocutionary act

Imperatives: An imperative sentence is a command.

Implication: The expression is sometimes used to refer to thelogical relation that holds between P and Q when it is notpossible for P to be true and Q false. It is often representedthus: P → Q. Outside logic, the term is sometimes usedto indicate contents that are suggested by an expressionwithout being part of its meaning.

Implicature See Conversational implicature; Conventional

implicature




Impredicativity: A definition or characterisation of a set orcollection is said to be impredicative if it makes a referenceto a totality to which that set belongs. The admission ofimpredicative definitions has been taken by some as themain cause of paradoxes in set theory.

Indeterminacy of translation: A thesis proposed by Quine ac-cording to which in many instances there is no fact ofthe matter about which among competing translationsof foreign sentences is correct. Thus, the thesis is tanta-mount to meaning irrealism or scepticism, the view thatthere are no meaning facts. Quine provides two argu-ments for the thesis. The first, known as the argument

from below, relies on the idea that incompatible transla-tions would equally account for all the evidence based onnatives’ behaviour which would be available to a personengaged in radical translation, which is to say a transla-tion from scratch. In his argument Quine uses the exampleof natives’ utterances of ‘gavagai’, which he claims couldequally be translated as ‘there is a rabbit’, ‘there is anundetached rabbit part’, ‘there is an instance of rabbit-hood’. The reason why these incompatible translationsare all compatible with the natives’ behaviour is that theyappear to have the same stimulus meaning since when-ever a rabbit is present, so is an undetached rabbit part,and so is an instance of rabbithood, and vice versa. Thesecond argument, known as the argument from above,relies on the idea that once all the facts about physicshave been fixed, the facts about translation are still under-determined. However, since, for Quine, physical facts areall the facts there are, if physics does not determine thefacts about translation, then there are no further factsthat need to be determined.

Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 4; Hookway(1987); Quine (1960)




Index: In semiotics, an index is a sign that represents what itstands for by being connected to it by means of a non-semantic relation. A photograph is an example of an in-dex since it is causally connected to what it stands for.The terminology was introduced by Peirce, but it is notvery well defined.

Indexical: A linguistic category, including so-called pure in-dexicals such as ‘I’, ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’, true demon-stratives such as ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘he’ and ‘she’, and otherindexicals such as ‘here’ and ‘now’. It also includes com-plex demonstratives such as ‘that flower’ or ‘this dog’.Sometimes all expressions whose reference shifts fromutterance to utterance are labelled ‘indexicals’. Hence,some philosophers have also argued that the categoryextends further to include all words that indicate tense,modal words such as ‘possibly’, some adjectives such as‘big’ which are context-sensitive (what counts as big whentalking of a mouse is different from what counts as bigwhen talking of an elephant), and even, for a few philoso-phers, all vague expressions, like the predicate ‘bald’. Truedemonstratives such as ‘he’ have their reference in a con-text determined in part by extra-linguistic factors. Thus,if ‘he’ is used demonstratively in an utterance of ‘he isa spy’, the speaker must point to somebody or at leastintend a particular person, when uttering the sentence, ifthe pronoun is to have a reference. The pronoun ‘I’, onthe other hand, is a pure indexical. It always refers to thespeaker himself or herself; no gestures or intention needto be supplied in order to secure a reference. It should benoted that words like ‘she’ have both demonstrative andnon-demonstrative uses. For example, in the sentence‘Mary bought a new house; she was very happy’, thepronoun is not used demonstratively, but anaphorically.Philosophers have so far not being very successful in




explaining how the same word can have these differentfunctions. Most philosophical accounts of indexicals at-tempt to respect the intuition that, for instance, whenBob says ‘I am British’ and Mary says ‘I am British’, thereis a sense in which they both say the same thing, andanother sense in which what they say is different. Theysay the same thing in the sense that they utter the samewords with the same unambiguous linguistic meaning.But, what Bob says is true if and only if Bob is British,and what Mary says is true if and only if Mary is British.Kaplan has developed the most influential view of indexi-cals which respects this intuition. He argues that the con-tent of a sentence like ‘I am British’ changes relative to acontext, so the content of ‘I am British’ when Bob says itis different from its content in the context of Mary utter-ing it. What remains unaltered in the two contexts is thelinguistic meaning of the sentence which Kaplan calls its‘character’.

See Anaphora; Dthat

Indicator semantics: This view proposes that we understandthe notion of representation as a refinement or devel-opment of the notion of indication. Something indicatessomething else if and only if there is a constant connec-tion, typically causal, between the two. Thus, lightning in-dicates thunder because whenever there is lightning thereis thunder. This notion of indication cannot be equivalentto representation since errors in representation, but notin indication, are possible. Fred Dretske, a supporter ofthis approach, proposes that representation is understoodin terms of having the function of indication. A mentalstate might have the function of indicating ice-cream, but,since misfunction is possible, it might sometimes be mis-takenly formed in the presence of sorbet. Dretske explainsthe notion of having the function of indicating something




in etiological terms. A mental state R has the function ofindicating something S if, when the organism first formedR-mental states, they were recruited as part of the organ-ism’s system for indicating S.

See Teleosemantics

Further reading: Neander (2004); Crane (2003), ch. 5

Indirect speech: A report of an utterance without using a di-rect quotation, for example, ‘Galileo said in Italian thatthe earth moves’.

See Parataxis

Indiscernibility of identicals See Leibniz’s law

Individual: The referent of a singular term, typically either aparticular (i.e., a specific concrete thing or person) or anabstract entity, such as, perhaps, an individual number, 2,for instance.

Individualism See Internalism

Individuation: A principle or criterion of individuation com-bines a criterion of identity or identification, which statesthe conditions under which a is the same or different fromb, together with a principle of unity that permits to singleout a and b as countable items. Thus, ‘apple’ (which is acount term and a sortal) supplies a criterion of individua-tion for apples because it provides what we need in orderto be able to count apples, and thus to answer questionssuch as ‘How many apples are in the bag?’ Mass termsprovide criteria of identity but not of individuation, sincewe can identify that this gold is the same as the gold that,say, made up a ring, but gold is not the sort of thing thatcan be counted.





Infelicity: Some speech acts such as orders, promises, and soforth, are not capable of being either true or false. Theycan, however, suffer from infelicity when the necessaryconditions for the successful performance of an act arenot met. Thus, for instance, an utterance of ‘I herebypronounce you husband and wife’ performed by a per-son lacking in the necessary authority do not constitute avalid declaration of marriage; such an utterance thereforesuffers from an infelicity.

Inference: A move from some premises to a conclusion. Theinference is deductive if the truth of the premises estab-lishes the truth of the conclusion. It is inductive if thepremises offer reasons in support of the conclusion. In aninference to the best explanation, the conclusion is offeredas the best explanation for the truth of the premises.

Inferentialism See Semantics, inferentialist

Infinite regress arguments: Infinite regresses are typically con-sidered vicious in philosophy, so any argument whichshows that a view leads to an infinite regress is apowerful objection to that theory. For an example,see Wittgenstein’s argument against thinking that rule-

following is a matter of providing an interpretation.

Information: There are both formal and informal senses ofthis notion. Informally, information covers both naturaland non-natural meaning. In this sense, both the ringson a tree trunk and words convey information. There aremany formal notions of information which do not havemuch in common. Fred Dretske has provided an accountof information in terms of the notion of indication usedin indicator semantics.




Inscrutability of reference: A thesis developed by Quine whichis closely related to his views about indeterminacy of

translation. Quine argues that in many cases there is nofact of the matter about which of several, mutually incom-patible, translations of a foreign sentence is correct. Thus,for example, it would be equally correct to translate ‘gav-

agai’ as either ‘there is a rabbit’ or ‘there is an undetachedrabbit part’. Hence, the reference of ‘gavagai’ is indeter-minate, since there is no fact of the matter whether thisexpression refers to rabbits, to undetached rabbit partsor to instances of rabbithood. Further, Quine claims thatradical translation begins at home. Thus, if there is no factof the matter about which, between mutually incompati-ble interpretations, assigns the correct reference to foreignexpressions, there is also no fact of the matter about thereference of expressions in our native language since it isjust a language like any other.

Further reading: Quine (1969), ch. 2

Intension: The term ‘intension’ is used in more than one way.It is sometimes thought as determining the extension ofthe term. In this sense, intension is similar to Frege’s no-tion of sense. Technically, it is defined as a function thatassigns for each possible world an extension to a term inthat world.

See Connotation

Intensional context: A context is intensional if co-extensionalterms are not inter-substitutable salva veritate. Exam-ples of such contexts are modal contexts, contexts of di-rect quotation and intentional contexts involving propo-

sitional attitude reports. Thus, even though ‘Mark Twain’and ‘Samuel Clemens’ refer to the same person, ‘John be-lieves that Mark Twain was a great writer’ might be true,




while ‘John believes that Samuel Clemens was a greatwriter’ is false.

See De dicto attributions

Intention: There is a variety of philosophical accounts of thenotion of intention. Most philosophers take intention tobe a state of mind which is often involved in future-directed practical reasoning and which, when properlyrelated to an action, makes it appropriate to call that ac-tion intentional.

Intentionality: The feature of mental states in virtue of whichthey are about something. What they are about is called‘the intentional object’ of the state. Such objects may notexist. Thus, Pegasus can be the intentional object of athought which is about it, despite the fact that Pegasus it-self does not exist. For this reason, many philosophers donot think of mental states as involving genuine relationsto their intentional objects.

Internal realism: A position which was adopted by Putnam

in the 1980s. The position is not entirely clear but it isopposed to metaphysical realism. It is the view that thereis no fixed totality of mind-independent objects, but thatquestions about the number and kind of objects that ex-ist can only be answered relative to a theory. Putnamalso links it to the view that there is more than one truedescription of the world, and that truth is some sort ide-alised epistemic warrant.

See Permutation argument; Truth, epistemic theories of


Internalism: A view primarily about the individuation ofproperties, according to which whether an individual hasa property of a given kind depends exclusively on facts




which are internal to the individual in question. In thephilosophy of mind and language internalism is a viewabout what individuates linguistic and mental contents.Internalists argue that only facts which are internal to thesubject can contribute to the determination of the con-tents of that subject’s mental states and to the meanings ofthe subject’s utterances. Supporters of the view offer var-ious considerations in its support. They suggest that thecontents of our own thoughts must be determined solelyby what goes on inside our head because if they werenot, it would be impossible for each one of us to knowby means of introspection alone, as we surely do, whatit is that one is thinking. They also point out that we canconceive of a brain in a vat, fed neural stimuli by a com-puter, having many thoughts and beliefs about all sorts ofthings, even though they have never really encounteredany of them. Hence, if such cases are genuinely conceiv-able, externalism must be wrong. Externalists in replysimply deny the conceivability of the brain in a vat exam-ple. Their response to the first objection is more complex.They acknowledge that there is a sense in which we do nothave privileged access to the contents of our thoughts. Butthey point out that in another sense we have such accessas is demonstrated by our ability to express our thoughtsby means of words without need for empirical evidenceor further observations. In the Twin Earth thoughtexperiment both Oscar and Twin Oscar know by meansof introspection alone that they have thoughts whichthey would express by means of the words ‘that’s water’,what Oscar does not know, and could not know byintrospection, is that his thought is about H2O. The sameconsiderations apply to his twin, and his thought aboutXYZ.

See Broad content; Content; Narrow content





Interpretant: A term coined by Peirce to refer to any item thatmediates the relation between a representation and theobject it stands for. In the case of signs, the interpretantis a mental state.

See Semiotics

Interpretation: (1) Informally, an interpretation is an assign-ment of meanings to expressions of a language. (2) In for-mal semantics the notion of interpretation has a technicalsense first developed by Tarski. In this sense, an interpre-tation for a language consists in specifying a non-emptyset as the domain of discourse or interpretation, and as-signing a reference to all primitive, non-logical vocabu-lary. Thus, each constant will have one object assigned toit as its reference, each monadic (one-place) predicate willhave a class of things assigned to it as its extension, eachdyadic (two-place) relation will have a class of orderedpairs, and so forth. In this manner, it becomes possible todetermine relative to the interpretation whether any givensentence of the language is true or false. Logical truths aresentences which turn out to be true in all interpretations.

Interrogative: An interrogative sentence is a question.

Irrealism See Meaning irrealism

Is: There are three distinct uses to which the verb ‘to be’ is putin English and some other languages. Each has a differentlogical function and is translated differently in logic. Toconfuse them is to risk equivocation. These uses are: (1)Existence, as in ‘God is’. In these cases ‘is’ means existsand it is translated into logic using the existential quanti-

fier. Thus, (∃x) (Gx). (2) Identity, as in ‘Eric Blair is GeorgeOrwell’. In these cases ‘is’ means is identical; it is trans-lated into logic using the identity symbol. Thus, a = b.




(3) Predication, as in ‘London is pretty’. In these cases,‘is’ functions as the copula which in logic is absorbed intothe symbol for the predicate. Thus, Pa.

Isomorphism: Two models or theories are said to be isomor-phic, to have the same structure, if and only if the elementsof one can be put into a one-to-one correlation with theelements of the other. This is to say, that for each elementof the one theory there is exactly one element of the otherthat corresponds to it, and vice versa.

J

Judgement: Judgement is the mental equivalent of assertion.To judge that P (say, that the Moon is the Earth’s onlysatellite) is to assent to P, or to take P to be true. Thenotion plays a crucial role in Immanuel Kant, who wasone the first philosophers to stress the primacy of thepropositional over the subsentential.

Judgement-dependence See Response-dependence

K

Kaplan, David (1933–): An American philosopher, at the timeof writing teaching at the University of California, LosAngeles. He has developed the most influential theoryof meaning for indexicals. Kaplan takes the reference ofdemonstratives to be fixed partly by means of a demon-stration which is a gesture or an intention directed to-wards an object or a person accompanying an utter-ance which includes a demonstrative. Kaplan makes a




distinction between the content and the character of sen-tences which include indexicals. These sentences havecontents with respect to contexts. Thus, the same sentencehas different contents in different contexts, and two dif-ferent sentences might have the same content in differentcontexts. For instance, if Bob says ‘I am British’ and Marysays ‘I am British’, the contents of their utterances are dif-ferent, even though they use the same sentence. What Bobsays is true if and only if Bob is British and what Marysays is true if and only if Mary is British. Further if, whilepointing to Mary, Bob says ‘she is British’ the content ofthis utterance is the same as what Mary has said, eventhough Bob has used a different sentence to express thatcontent. Kaplan takes the contents of sentences relativeto contexts to be propositions which can have individualsas constituents. Propositions like these are called ‘singular

propositions’. The character of a sentence, on the otherhand, can be identified with its linguistic meaning. Thecharacter of a sentence does not vary with the context.Instead, it is a function which yields the content of thesentence, given the context as argument. For Kaplan, in-dexicals are rigid designators; once their reference hasbeen fixed, they refer to the same one thing in all possibleworlds in which that one thing exists. If I say ‘today issunny’, what I say would have been false if today werenot sunny. In other words, whether my claim is true orfalse in a hypothetical situation is determined by whetherin that situation this very same day is a sunny one. Whatthe weather might be like on any other day is irrelevant,even though, of course, during one of these other daysI might also say ‘today is sunny’. Kaplan further claimsthat indexicals have direct reference. In other words, heholds that their contribution to the content of the sen-tence is their referent, the actual thing that they refer to.This is why Kaplan holds that the contents of sentences




including indexicals are singular propositions. Kaplan’stheory of direct reference is not quite Millian because heaccepts that indexicals have characters which contributeto the character of the sentences in which they appear.Thus, the character of ‘I’ is a function which for eachcontext yields as value the speaker in that context. Thecharacter is similar to what could be called the sense ofthe indexical.

See Dthat; Sense

Knowing-how: Practical knowledge such as knowing how toride a bicycle or how to build a nuclear reactor. Somephilosophers argue that practical knowledge can be ex-plained in terms of propositional knowledge (knowing-

that).

Knowing-that: Propositional knowledge which is expressedusing a that-clause. For example, knowing that 2 + 2 =4, that water is H2O, that London is a city are all ex-amples of propositional knowledge. It is still a matterof dispute whether practical knowledge or knowing-how

can be explained in terms of propositional knowledge.

Kripke, Saul (1940–): A contemporary American philosopherwho has made ground-breaking contributions to the phi-losophy of language, to metaphysics and to logic. Inthe philosophy of language, Kripke introduced the no-tion of a rigid designator. He developed some powerfularguments against the description theory of reference,and formulated one of the first versions of the causal

theory of reference. In metaphysics he revived the for-tunes of essentialism. Kripke argued that both individu-als and natural kinds have some of their properties nec-essarily. These arguments lead Kripke to conclude thatthere are many a posteriori truths which are necessarily




true. One such truth is, for example, ‘water is H2O’. Theview that there is a form of necessity which is not log-ical or conceptual was quite revolutionary at the time.Kripke’s contribution to logic is also quite momentoussince he was the first to develop a possible world se-mantics for modal logic. Further, in his book Wittgen-stein on Rules and Private Language (1982), Kripkeprovided a powerful sceptical argument in favour ofmeaning irrealism based on Wittgenstein’s rule-following

considerations.See A posteriori; A priori; Meaning scepticism; Modal-

ity; Reference borrowing; Semantics, possible world

L

Language: Philosophers have provided many different ac-counts of what languages might be. Some think of lan-guages as structured by formal logical relations; othersprefer accounts based on the idea of speech acts. Fewwould deny their existence. Davidson, however, has de-nied the existence of languages if these are understood asgoverned by conventions that determine the connectionsbetween words and what they might mean.

Language acquisition: Several philosophers have made claimsabout what kind of features language must have for itto be learnable by creatures, like us, with finite abilities.Fodor has used these considerations to argue for a lan-

guage of thought, Dummett to argue against semantic

realism, and Davidson to argue for a recursive theory ofmeaning.

See Acquisition argument; Semantics, truth-cond-

itional




Language game: A term coined by Wittgenstein in Philosoph-ical Investigations (1953). It is intended to convey ananalogy between language use and games. It is used todesignate either fragments of actual linguistic practice orimaginary primitive ways of using words. In either case,lessons are learnt about our actual language use by thestudy of these language games.

Language of thought: A view in the philosophy of mind de-veloped by Jerry Fodor. In his view, human cognition in-volves mental representations which are structured likesentences in a language. In favour of this claim Fodorargues that thought, like language, is productive becausewe are able to think novel thoughts we had never enter-tained before, and systematic because the meaning of awhole thought depends in a systematic manner on themeanings of its parts. For Fodor, the mental processingof representations, like the computations of symbols per-formed by a computer, is only sensitive to the syntacticalstructure, and not the meanings, of the representationsprocessed.

Further reading: Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson(1996), ch. 10

Langue See Saussure, Ferdinand de

Leibniz’s law: The principle that states that if a and b areidentical, then they have the same properties (i.e., are in-discernible). It is also known as the principle of the indis-cernibility of identicals. It is not to be confused with itsconverse which would state that if two things have thesame properties, they are identical.

Lewis, David (1941–2001): One of the most influential NorthAmerican philosophers of the twentieth century, Lewis




held positions at the University of California, Los Ange-les and at Princeton University. He visited Australia often,and has left an important mark on the philosophical scenein that country. Lewis’s most important contributions tothe philosophy of language are his semantics for counter-

factuals, his modal realist account of possible worlds, aswell as his innovative account of the notion of convention.He also produced ground-breaking work in metaphysics,epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

See common knowledge

Liar paradox: The standard formulation of the paradox in-volves the self-referential sentence ‘This sentence is false’.Suppose this sentence is true, then what it says is true.Thus, since it says that it is false, it is false. Suppose, then,that the sentence is false. Thus, what it says is false. It saysthat it is false. Thus, it is false that it is false. Therefore,it must be true. In conclusion, if we suppose that thesentence is true, it follows that it must be false. But if wesuppose that it is false, it has to be true. A way out of theparadox might be sought by arguing that the sentence isneither true nor false. This approach does not solve allthe paradoxes in the liar family. In particular, it offers noway out of the strengthened liar paradox concerning thesentence ‘this sentence is not true’. If the sentence is sup-posed to be true, it is not true. If the sentence is supposedto be not true (either false or neither true nor false), then,since it is not true that it is not true, it turns out to betrue.

Linguistic competence: The body of tacit or implicit knowl-edge in virtue of having which speakers are capable ofspeaking the language. It should be distinguished fromlinguistic performance.

See Chomsky, Noam




Linguistic meaning: The meaning of an expression such as asentence. Linguistic meaning is often distinguished fromspeaker meaning, which is roughly what a speaker in-tends to convey by means of an utterance on a specificoccasion. The two easily come apart, for instance, whenthe sentence meaning alone does not determine what thesentence is about, when the speaker uses sarcasm or whenshe uses the wrong word. Thus, I might say the words‘this is nice derangement of flowers’ meaning that it is anice arrangement of flowers. My words mean that this isnice derangement of flowers; this is their linguistic mean-ing. On that occasion, however, what I mean by them,the speaker meaning, is that this is a nice arrangement offlowers.

See Non-natural meaning

Linguistic performance: Facts about speakers’ actual linguis-tic behaviour. Linguistic performance is to be distin-guished from linguistic competence.

See Chomsky, Noam

Linguistic turn: This is said to be a feature of twentieth-century philosophy, characterised by the fact that philoso-phers instead of using language to talk about other things,such as ethics or ontology, have turned their focus on lan-guage itself. Thus, for example, disputes between realistsand anti-realists about any given topic are often framednot directly in terms of the existence of facts of a givenkind, but in terms of various features of the language usedto talk about the topic at issue.

See Anti-realism; Cognitivism; Meaning-scepticism;

Non-cognitivism; Semantic realism

Literal meaning: Philosophical theories of meaning tend to beconcerned with this kind of meaning. It is contrasted with




metaphorical meanings or the kinds of meaning conveyedby means of a variety of attitudes such as irony or sar-casm.

See Metaphor

Locke, John (1632–1704): A prominent early modern Britishempiricist, Locke made extensive contributions to the phi-losophy of mind and to political philosophy; he was apolitical activist and one of the founding fathers of lib-eralism. He proposed a view of language in which themeaning of a linguistic expression is the mental idea thatthe speaker intends to express when uttering the words.This suggestion has many problems; for example, it pre-supposes the notion of intention. It also must be sup-plemented with an explanation of how ideas have theirmeanings. If the suggestion is that ideas are images ofwhat they are ideas of, it is hard to picture what the ideaof ‘and’, the idea of ‘splendidly’, would be like. In anycase the suggestion cannot work. Suppose that the ideaof red is a red idea in the mind. Unless one already knowswhat red is like so that one knows that the mental pic-ture is red, the mere presence of the red item in the mindcould not count as thinking about red. It should be notedthat word meaning rather than sentence meaning is thefocus of Locke’s theory. He did not seem to think aboutsentences as something other than a mere list of words.

See Meaning, ideational theory of

Locutionary act: A kind of speech act defined by J. L. Austin

as the act of saying something. Austin further classifieslocutionary acts into three nested categories. At the low-est level are phonetic acts, which consist in the utteranceof noises. The noises uttered by very small children areexamples of such acts. At the next level are phatic acts,which are utterances of words. For example, to practise




the pronunciation of foreign words is to perform acts ofthis second kind. The highest level is occupied by rhethicacts, which consist in the utterances of words and sen-tences as meaning something. Thus, my utterance of thesentence ‘the cat is on the mat’ could be an example ofa rhetic act. Every performance of a rhetic act, the ut-tering of words with meaning, is also a performance ofa phatic act, the uttering of words, and of a phoneticact, the uttering of noises. It is clearly not possible to ut-ter words with meaning without uttering words, and if‘noises’ is understood broadly to include both scribblesand bodily gestures, it is also not possible to utter wordswithout making noises. The converses, instead, do nothold. So rhetic acts presuppose phatic acts which in turnpresuppose phonetic acts, but not vice versa. These threecategories can be thought of as strata which build on oneanother to produce a complete locutionary act.

See Illocutionary act; Perlocutionary act

Logic: Frege once defined logic as the study of the laws ofthought. It is not the study of how people think, but thestudy of how they ought to think. In contemporary par-lance logic so understood is the study of valid inference.Frege has also proposed a different account of logic as thestudy of the most general truths, namely logical truths.Besides these two different conceptions, a third concep-tion of logic as the study of the properties of a variety offormal languages is also currently a common currency.

Logical atomism: A view endorsed by both Russell in ‘ThePhilosophy of Logical Atomism’ (1918) and Wittgenstein

in the Tractatus (1922), it states that all complex propo-sitional sentences can be analysed in terms of atomicsentences which are made true by atomic facts. Morespecifically, according to this view every complex sentence




can be uniquely analysed as a logical (in Wittgenstein’scase, truth-functional) construction of atomic sentences.Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s versions of the position dif-fered with regard to their understanding of atomic sen-tences and facts. For Russell atomic sentences predicate asimple property or relation of one or more simple particu-lars, and atomic facts consist of simple particulars havingsimple properties or relations. For Wittgenstein, atomicsentences are concatenations of names of simple objects,and atomic facts are combinations of these same objects.The view has now been largely abandoned.

See Analysis

Further reading: Anscombe (1959)

Logical category See Category

Logical empiricism See Logical positivism

Logical form: The logical form of a sentence is its logical struc-ture. It is that in virtue of which the sentence can play therole it does in valid patterns of inference. Thus, because‘John is tall and blond’ follows from ‘John is tall’ and‘John is blond’, but ‘Somebody is tall and blond’ does notfollow from ‘Somebody is tall’ and ‘Somebody is blond’,it follows that ‘John is tall’ and ‘Somebody is tall’ havedifferent logical forms.

See Predicate; Quantifier; Singular term

Logical positivism: A position first developed by the membersof the Vienna Circle, such as Carnap, at the beginning ofthe twentieth century. They adopted a kind of empiricism,and argued that a posteriori sentences were meaningfulonly if verifiable. Thus, they rejected the whole of ethicsand metaphysics as meaningless. Logical positivists de-veloped a verificationist theory of meaning according to




which the meaning of a sentence is given by its methodof verification. However, all the attempts to spell out asatisfactory version of this verification principle endedup in failure. Logical positivists also subscribed to a con-ventionalist account of necessity and the a priori. In theirview all necessary truths were tautologies. They were truesimply in virtue of the conventional meanings of theirconstituent words, and said nothing substantive aboutreality.

See Ayer, A. J.; Meaning, verification theory of

Logically proper name: A singular term whose significance de-pends on the existence of its reference. Logically propernames are thus said to be object-invoking or object-involving since unless the object they purport to refer toexists, the sentences in which the name occurs fail to beeither true or false. Logically proper names are sometimescalled ‘Russellian singular terms’.

M

Malapropism: A misuse of words, such as ‘a nice derangementof epitaphs’, which involves a mistake concerning wordsthat resemble one another. Davidson takes our ability tounderstand what the utterer of a malapropism meant asevidence that linguistic understanding does not rely ona previous tacit knowledge of rules governing the use oflinguistic expressions.

Manifestation argument: This is a challenge, put forwardby Dummett, to semantic realism. Semantic realism isthe view that to understand a sentence is to knowthe conditions under which it is true (its truth condi-

tions), and that these conditions might be such that it is




potentially beyond us to detect whether or not they obtain(that is, the truth conditions are evidence- or verification-transcendent). Dummett argues that what we know whenwe understand a sentence must manifest itself in ouruse of language. That is to say, to understand a sen-tence is to have certain practical abilities that we exer-cise in speaking and listening. But, Dummett continues,if to understand a sentence consisted in knowing someverification-transcendent truth conditions, as the seman-tic realist claims, there would be no actual practical abili-ties that could count as manifesting that knowledge. Thisis because we are not able to detect or recognise evidence-transcendent truth conditions. Hence, our knowledge ofthem could not be manifested in our ability to recognisethem when they obtain. Critics have argued that Dum-mett’s conception of what counts as a manifestation of apiece of knowledge is too narrow.

See Acquisition argument; Communicability argument;

Verification transcendence

Further reading: Hale (1999)

Mass term: A term which, like ‘water’, ‘platinum’ or ‘furni-ture’, refers to a non-countable kind. It is because it makesno sense to ask how many of them there are that fur-niture, water and gold are mass terms. Typically, massterms have the semantic property of referring cumula-tively: the sum of any two parts of it is also a part of it.Thus, the sum of any two parts of water that are water isalso water. It does not follow, however, that any part ofthe mass kind is referred to. Thus, oxygen molecules areparts of water which are not water, and there are parts offurniture which are not in themselves furniture.

See Count term; Matter term; Natural kind term; Sortal

Material adequacy, criterion of See Convention T




Material conditional: The truth functional sentential connec-

tive represented in formal logic by the horseshoe (‘⊃’).Its meaning is given by a truth-table which shows that‘P ⊃ Q’ is false only when P is true and Q is false, and istrue in all other cases. The material conditional is oftentranslated into English as ‘if . . . then . . . ’. However, it isa matter of philosophical controversy whether ordinaryindicative conditionals in English are best understood asmaterial conditionals.

McDowell, John (1942–): A British, Oxford-educated philo-sopher, at the time of writing holding a position at Pitts-burgh University. His contributions to the philosophy oflanguage include his work on singular thoughts and onthe identity theory of truth, as well as his work on themesin Wittgenstein’s philosophy, especially the so-called rule-

following considerations.See Truth, identity theory

Meaning, theories of: A theory of meaning for a languageis a theory that attributes to each expression in the lan-guage its literal meaning. Such a theory would spell outwhat is known by speakers who understand the expres-sions (i.e., their linguistic competence). Philosophers haveadopted numerous approaches. It should be noted thatmany current philosophical theories of meaning do notpresuppose a commitment to the existence of things called‘meanings’. As a matter of fact most contemporary theo-rists of meaning deny that there are such entities. In theiropinion, knowing the meaning of a sentence is not thesame as knowing an object. Rather, it consists in hav-ing a complex set of abilities which are manifested inthe appropriate use of the sentence in question. Philo-sophical theories of meaning can be grouped under thefollowing headings: the ideational theory (Locke’s view




that meanings are ideas in the head); the picture theory(the early Wittgenstein’s view that sentences are picturesof facts with which they share a form); the use theory (thelater Wittgenstein’s view that to ask after the meaning ofan expression often is to ask about its use); psychologicalor communicative-intention theories (Grice’s programmeto reduce the meanings of sentences to the intentions ofspeakers uttering them via a notion of speaker meaning);truth-conditional semantics (including Frege’s account ofhow the truth-values of sentences depend on the refer-ence or denotation of their meaningful parts, Davidson’stheory of meaning as a theory of truth, and more recentversions of possible world semantics); inferentialist se-mantics which identifies meaning with inferential role;verification and assertibility theories (including the logi-cal positivists’ view that the meaning of a sentence is givenby its method of verification, and Dummett’s account interms of the conditions in which one is warranted in as-serting the sentence in question).

See Logical positivism; Meaning, communicative-

intention theory of; Meaning, ideational theory of; Mean-

ing, picture theory of; Meaning, use theory of; Meaning,

verification theory of; Molecularity; Semantics, assertibil-

ity condition; Semantics, inferentialist; Semantics, truth-

conditional

Meaning, communicative-intention theory of: In these theo-ries linguistic meaning is ultimately reduced to the com-municative intentions of speakers; that is, to psychology.The founder of this approach in the 1950s was Grice, whoattempted to reduce linguistic meaning to speaker mean-

ing, and who offered an analysis of speaker meaning interms of communicative intention. The speaker’s com-municative intention which determines what the speakermeans is (a) the intention to induce an effect, typically a




belief, in the audience, (b) the intention that the first in-tention is recognised by the audience, and (c) the intentionthat the audience’s recognition plays a role in the expla-nation of why the effect was produced. Grice also arguedthat the linguistic meaning of a sentence is explained interms of what speakers regularly or conventionally useutterances of that sentence to mean (their speaker mean-ing). There are several problems for this account. First, itcannot easily attribute a meaning to sentences that havenever been uttered. Second, it cannot easily explain thecompositionality of meaning; i.e., the fact that the mean-ing of the constituent parts determines the meaning of thesentential whole.

See Non-natural meaning


Meaning, ideational theory of: The view held by some earlymodern philosophers, like Locke, that the meanings ofwords are ideas in the mind. The view in itself wouldonly postpone the problem of explaining meaning. Someof the same philosophers held that ideas have meanings bybeing pictures that resemble what they are about. Thereare many problems with this view. First, some ideas con-cern abstract notions for which no picture is forthcoming.Second, ideas cannot resemble in all respects what theyare about. For instance, objects have weight and massbut ideas do not. The view requires that ideas resemblein all respects what they represent. Finally, and more se-riously, as Wittgenstein has argued, merely having ideasin the mind cannot be what understanding the meaningof language is about. If I do not know what ‘red’ meansor red is, it will not help to have colour samples, one ofwhich is red, since I would not know which one is red.Similarly, just having coloured ideas in the mind does not




furnish the word ‘red’ with a meaning unless I alreadyknow which is red, and therefore what ‘red’ means.

See Berkeley, George

Meaning, picture theory of: The theory of meaning whichis generally attributed to Wittgenstein in the Tractatus(1922). According to the theory, sentences represent factsin virtue of sharing the same pictorial form with them.Thus, sentences are not really different from diagrams orother pictorial representations of facts. Wittgenstein alsoargues that any attempt to state his theory was bound toend up in nonsense.

See Saying/showing

Further reading: Anscombe (1959)

Meaning, use theory of: The view, wrongly attributed toWittgenstein, that the meaning of an expression is deter-mined by its use. The view has contemporary supporterswho subscribe to various sophisticated versions of dispo-

sitionalism. Arguably Grice’s theory of linguistic meaningis also a kind of use theory.

See Meaning, communicative-intention theory of

Meaning, verification theory of: The view endorsed by thesupporters of logical positivism, and also by Quine, thatthe meaning of an a posteriori sentence is given by itsmethod of verification. For example, the sentence ‘Feuxis a black cat’ has a meaning which is given by thekind of observation which would be required to verifyit conclusively. Logical Positivists relied on this theory torule out sentences of metaphysics, theology or ethics aslacking any factual meaning.

See Verification principle





Meaning fact: A fact which constitutes a sentence meaningwhat it does. Meaning facts are also called semantic facts.Supporters of meaning irrealism do not believe in the ex-istence of any such facts.

Meaning irrealism: The view that there are no distinctive factsabout meaning. Thus, supporters of the view would saythat there is no fact of the matter about what any sen-tence means. A semantic irrealist does not hold that allsentences are meaningless, since if that were true, it wouldbe a fact about them. Instead, a supporter of the viewholds that there is no special realm of meanings and othersemantic properties which is described by those sentenceswhich are about other sentences and appear to attributemeanings to them. Thus, the sentence ‘ “la neve e bianca”means that snow is white’ does not state a semantic fact(that is, its meaning that snow is white) about the Italiansentence ‘la neve e bianca’. Instead, it might be used toconvey how the Italian sentence is usually translated intoEnglish, although a different translation could be equallycompatible with the facts. This view has been adopted,for different reasons and using different arguments, byKripke and Quine.

See Indeterminacy of translation; Meaning scepticism

Meaning scepticism: There are two versions of scepticismabout meaning. The first was developed by Quine as partof his argument for the indeterminacy of translation. Thesecond was developed by Kripke in his book Wittgen-stein on Rules and Private Language (1982). In this bookKripke provides a sceptical argument for the claim thatthere is no fact of the matter about what any sentencemeans. Kripke claims to find the root of this paradox-ical conclusion in Wittgenstein’s rule-following consid-erations. Kripke’s argument proceeds by considering all




the candidate facts which might determine the meaningof various expressions, and showing that they fail to dothe job. Having considered all plausible candidates andshown that they fail in the task, Kripke concludes thatthere are no facts that constitute the meaning of any ex-pression. Kripke uses an example concerning the sign +.Imagine that a person has never previously performed ad-ditions with numbers larger than 56, he is then presentedwith ‘68 + 57 = ?’ and answers ‘125’. It would seem thattwo kinds of facts make his answer correct: the arith-metical fact that 125 is the sum of 57 plus 68, and thesemantic fact that he means addition by +. Kripke raisessceptical questions about the existence of this second kindof fact; he does not take issue with mathematical facts.He challenges us to provide a fact that determines thatin the past that person meant addition by + rather thanquaddition, where quaddition is like addition for num-bers smaller than or equal to 56 but gives ‘5’ as a resultof being applied to numbers larger than 56. He shows thatwe cannot answer by citing facts about the person’s pastbehaviour, about general rules, about the images or oc-current thoughts in that person’s head, or even facts aboutthe person’s dispositions to use that sign. Kripke has twoobjections against the proposal that equates facts aboutmeaning with dispositions to use the sign. First, he claimsthat dispositions are finite. Second, he claims that mean-ing is normative. Facts about the meaning of an expres-sion are facts about how the expression ought to be used,but facts about dispositions only tell us how it would beused. Kripke’s sceptical paradox concludes that there areno facts about meanings, and consequently all sentencesabout what other expressions mean are neither true norfalse. His sceptical solution rescues talk of meaning. Al-though when we talk about meanings we do not describeany facts, this kind of talk is not pointless since it can




help when teaching the language to newcomers. Furtheralthough such sentences do not have truth conditions be-cause they do not state any facts, they have assertibilityconditions, that is to say conditions under which theirassertion is warranted. Critics have objected that Kripkeappears to suggest that there are facts about such assert-

ibility conditions, but such facts would seem to be thekind of facts about meanings that are said not to exist.

See Dispositionalism; Meaning irrealism

Further reading: Miller (1998), chs 5 and 6

Meinong, Alexius (1853–1920): An Austrian philosopher,and a student of Brentano, who taught at the Univer-sity of Graz. He is famous for believing that there are ob-jects like Pegasus that, although they fail to instantiate theproperty of existence, have nevertheless other properties.He adopted this counterintuitive position as a solution ofsome puzzles about intentionality. In his view the ideathat there are some non-existent objects explains whythoughts about Pegasus, for instance, are about some-thing even though Pegasus does not exist. Russell’s the-ory of definite descriptions is intended as a solution ofthis puzzle that does not make reference to non-existentobjects.

Mentalese See Language of thought

Mention: A term is mentioned, as opposed to used, whenthe term itself is the topic of discussion. Thus, the term‘Milan’ is used in the sentence ‘Milan is a city in Italy’but mentioned in the sentence ‘ “Milan” has five letters’.In order to mention a term, we normally use its name.

See Use; Use–mention distinction

Meta-language: This is contrasted in logic with the object lan-guage. Whilst the object language is the logical language




in use, the meta-language is the language used to talkabout the object language. The distinction between ob-ject and meta-language was introduced in order to avoidthe paradoxes generated by permitting the existence ofself-referential sentences such as the Liar sentences.

See Liar paradox

Metaphor: ‘The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the wa-ters’ is an example of a metaphor. Some philosophers haveargued that metaphors have metaphorical (as opposed toliteral) meanings and express metaphorical truths. David-

son has denied these claims. For him, metaphors onlyhave literal meanings, and are literally true or false. Whatis distinctive about metaphors, for Davidson, is not theirmeaning but their use. Their point is to cause us to noticesomething but not by stating what that something is.

Further reading: Moran (1999); Davidson (1991),ch. 17

Minimalism: To take a minimalist attitude towards an areaof discourse is to believe that that kind of talk refers onlyto merely formal properties with no metaphysical natureor hidden structure. The best-known form of minimalismis minimalism about truth, a view first developed by PaulHorwich.

See Truth, minimalist theory of

Missing-explanation argument: An argument developed byMark Johnston to show that our ordinary conceptsof secondary qualities are not response-dependent con-cepts. Consider, for example, the concept of redness.We think that statements of the form ‘x looks red(or more precisely: x is disposed to look red to stan-dard observers in standard conditions) because it is red’can be perfectly good, true empirical explanations. Yet,Johnston claims these statements would be trivial, and




good explanations would go missing, if the concept ofredness were a response-dependent concept. If the con-cept of red were response-dependent, to be told that some-thing is disposed to look red to standard observers in stan-dard conditions because it is red would be tantamountto being told that something is disposed to look red tostandard observers in standard conditions because it isdisposed to look red to standard observers in standardconditions. This is not informative. Peter Menzies andPhilip Pettit defend response-dependent accounts againstthis argument. They argue that the good explanations, in-voked by Johnston, explain why something is manifestinga disposition (and so looks red) in terms of its possessionof that disposition (is red).

See Response-dependence; Secondary qualities

Modal operator: These are operators such as ‘necessarily’ and‘possibly’.

See Modality

Modality: There are four main cases of modality: neces-

sity, impossibility, possibility and contingency. Therealso are different kinds of modality: alethic modality(concerned with what must or can be true), epistemicor doxastic (concerned with certainty and uncertaintyin belief) and deontic (concerned with permissions andobligations).

See De dicto modality; De re modality

Model: A model for a theory is an interpretation (in the tech-nical sense of the term) that assigns the value true to allthe sentences in the theory.

Modus ponens: This is a deductively valid form of argumentwith the structure: If P, then Q; P. Therefore, Q. An




example is given by the following argument: If John runsregularly, he will improve his level of fitness. John runsregularly. Hence, he will improve his level of fitness.

See Validity

Modus tollens: This is a deductively valid form of argumentwith the structure: If P, then Q. Not Q. Therefore, not P.An example is given by the following argument: If youstrike the match it will light. The match is not lit. There-fore, you did not strike the match.

See Validity

Molecularity: In Dummett’s view adequate theories of mean-ing must be based on a molecular view of language. Theymust give explanatory priority to the grasping of indi-vidual concepts or of the meanings of sub-sentential ex-pressions over the grasping of the language as a whole.Dummett contrasts this molecular view with holism.

Mood: A surface grammatical feature of verbs indicatingwhether the sentence seems to serve a fact-stating purpose(indicative) or expresses a counter-to-fact consideration(subjunctive). ‘Went’ is a verb in the indicative mood;‘would be rich’ is one in the subjective.

Moore, G. E. (1873–1958): A British philosopher and one ofthe fathers of analytic philosophy, Moore’s main contri-butions to the philosophy of language consist in his ac-count of the notion of analysis and his discussion of thenaturalistic fallacy involved in deriving an ought from anis.

See Normativity of meaning; Rule-following

Morpheme See phoneme




N

Name: In ordinary parlance names are contrasted with verbsand adjectives. They include expressions such as ‘Lon-don’, ‘Tony Blair’, ‘gold’, ‘tiger’, ‘woman,’ and so forth.These terms can play different logical roles in differentcontexts and thus are said to belong to different logicalcategories in different contexts of use. Thus, ‘woman’ isa logical subject in ‘woman is the equal of man’, but thesame word (orthographically understood) is a predicatein ‘Margaret Thatcher is a woman’. Similarly ‘Vienna’ isa singular term in ‘Vienna is the capital of Austria’ butfunctions rather differently in ‘Trieste is no Vienna’ whereit is intended to convey the idea that Trieste is not a so-phisticated metropolis. For this reason, philosophers donot think of ‘name’ as a useful category, instead they uselogical categories such as singular term and predicate andassign different uses of names, as ordinarily understood,to different categories.

See Category; Predicable

Naming: The act by means of which objects are assigned aname. Kripke in his causal theory of reference has devel-oped the idea that a kind of baptism plays an importantrole in fixing the reference of singular terms and natural

kind terms.

Narrow content: A notion of content that is contrasted withbroad content. It is a matter of dispute whether narrowcontents exist. Supporters of externalism deny that theydo. Supporters of narrow contents, known as internal-ists or individualists, have provided different accounts ofwhat they might be. A standard definition states that thenarrow content of a psychological state is that content ofthe state that is individuated exclusively in terms of the




intrinsic properties of that state. The notion of an intrinsicproperty used here is that adopted by Lewis according towhich any property that must be shared by duplicates isintrinsic. Thus, by analogy, being a magnet would countas an intrinsic property of some objects according to thisdefinition, since if one thing is a magnet, then its exactduplicate is also a magnet. Thus, the property is intrin-sic despite the fact that being a magnet is a dispositionalproperty since what makes a magnet what it is a matterof its power to attract iron and steel.

See Internalism; Twin Earth

Further reading: Brown (2002)

Natural kind term: These are names for natural kinds. Theyinclude mass terms such as ‘gold’ and ‘water’ and count

terms such as ‘tiger’ and ‘tulip’. Kripke argues that thereference of these terms must be understood in terms of acausal theory of reference according to which these termsare not abbreviations for descriptions formulated in termsof the observable properties of samples belonging to thosekinds. Instead, the reference is fixed through original con-tacts with samples of these kinds which are identified bytheir chemical compositions or biological natures. For re-alists the distinctions between natural kinds cut nature atits joints.

Natural meaning: A label used by Grice to refer to those usesof the verb ‘to mean’ in which it expresses a natural (ornon-conventional) relation. The sentences ‘Those cloudsmean rain’ and ‘The current budget deficit means thatincome tax will have to be raised’ are examples of usesof ‘means’ to express natural meaning. Grice contraststhis notion of meaning with the notion of non-natural

meaning, which is attributed to language and to otherconventional signs.




Necessary condition: Any condition which is necessary for theobtaining of something else. Thus, for example, being ahuman being is a necessary condition for being a woman.That is, in order to be a woman it is necessary that one is ahuman being. Necessary conditions, however, might notbe sufficient. Thus, it is not sufficient to be a human beingto be a woman, since some human beings are men. Suf-ficient and necessary conditions are expressed by meansof conditionals. Thus, we can state that being a human isnecessary for being a woman, by saying: something is awoman only if it is a human being.

See Sufficient condition

Necessity: There is more than one kind of necessity. Epistemicnecessity expresses lack of uncertainty. Alethic necessity isinstead concerned with necessary truths. A proposition issaid to be necessarily true if and only if it cannot be false.This idea is often reformulated in terms of possible world

semantics. Thus understood, a necessary truth is true inall possible worlds. It is a matter of dispute whether thereis more than one kind of alethic necessity. Some necessi-ties are broadly logical or conceptual, and their denial is acontradiction. However, following Kripke, some philoso-phers have argued for the existence of a special kind ofmetaphysical necessity exemplified by claims such as thatwater is H2O. What makes these necessities special is thattheir negations are not contradictions, and their truth isonly discoverable a posteriori.

See De dicto modality; De re modality; Possibility

Further reading: Kripke (1980); Plantinga (1974)

Negation: When discussed by analytic philosophers, nega-tion is conceived as a truth-functional sentential connec-

tive expressed by ‘not’. In classical logic, the negation ofa true proposition is false, and the negation of a false




proposition is true. In some other logics, the negation ofa true proposition is not true. However, in these logics tobe ‘not true’ is not the same as being false.

Nominalism: The view that denies the existence of universals.

Non-cognitivism: To be a non-cognitivist about a given areaof discourse is to hold that judgements made in that areado not express beliefs and do not purport to describefacts. Expressivism, emotivism and quasi-realism are allspecies of non-cognitivism. Non-cognitivism is opposedto cognitivism.

See Frege–Geach problem


Non-extensional context See Intensional context

Non-natural meaning: A label used by Grice to refer to thoseuses of the verb ‘to mean’ in which it expresses a non-natural (or conventional) relation. In Britain as a matterof convention, double yellow lines painted by the side ofthe road mean that parking is not permitted there. Sim-ilarly, it is a matter of convention that in English ‘red’means red rather than yellow. These are all examplesof non-natural meaning. Grice contrasts this notion ofmeaning with the notion of natural meaning, which isattributed to natural signs.

Normativity of meaning: Meaning seems to be a normativenotion, since to use a term in accordance with its meaningis to use it correctly or to use it as it ought to be used.Some philosophers, typically supporters of dispositional-

ism, argue that meaning can be reduced to non-normativenotions. In particular, they argue that facts about mean-ing are reducible to some combination of facts about how




we are disposed to use linguistic expressions. Others denythese claims and argue that the normativity of meaningis irreducible.

See Meaning scepticism

Noun See Name

Noun-phrase: A phrase, headed by a pronoun, a demonstra-tive or a noun, that functions like a name, such as ‘thatwoman in the corner’.

O

Object: For Frege an object is the referent of a proper name orsingular term. Thus, in the sentence ‘London is the capitalof the UK’, ‘London’ is a singular term whose referent isthe city of London.

See Concept

Object-language: The language that is being talked about, asopposed to the meta-language which is the language usedto talk about the object language.

See Meta-language

Objectual quantification: The dominant interpretation of thequantifiers. Thus understood, the sentence ‘something isred’, for example, is true if and only if there is at least oneobject which is red. And the sentence ‘everything is red’is true if and only if every object is red. The quantifiers,given this objectual interpretation, are seen as second-order functions which take predicates (i.e., first-orderfunctions) as their arguments and yield truth-values (trueor false) as their values. For instance, the sentence ‘ev-erything is red’ is paraphrased as ‘For anything x, x is




red’, where ‘For anything x, x . . . ’ is the universal quan-tifier and ‘. . . is red’ is its argument. We can now refor-mulate the initial point about the interpretation of thesequantifiers in the language of formal semantics. Existen-tial sentences like ‘something is red’ are true if an onlyif there is at least one object which satisfies the relevantfirst-order function (in our example ‘. . . is red’). Universalsentences like ‘everything is red’ are true if and only if ev-ery object satisfies the relevant first-order function. Giventhe objectual interpretation, quantified sentences cannotbe equivalent to sentences that are not quantified, sincethere might be objects for which we have no name. Nosentence without quantifiers could be construed as beingabout the nameless, but since quantified sentences coverthese cases also, the two cannot be equivalent.

See Quantification; Substitutional quantification

Observation sentence: A sentence used to report an observa-tion such as ‘this flower is red’. Observation sentences arecontrasted with theoretical sentences. Observation sen-tences can be verified by means of observations, whiletheoretical sentences can only be verified indirectly bymeans of the verification of those observation sentencesthey entail.

See Logical positivism

Occasion sentence See eternal sentence

Ontological commitment: Theories have ontological commit-ments to the existence of some entities. The entities a the-ory is committed to are those which have to exist if thetheory is to be true. Quine has argued that we do notlook at the names in a theory to find out the theory’sontological commitments. Instead, in his view a theoryis committed only to those entities which must be in the




universe of discourse for the quantified sentences in thetheory to be true.

See Interpretation; Quantifier

Further reading: Quine (1948)

Opacity: A construction that changes a position whichwould be available for substitution salva veritate of co-referential terms into one that is not so available. Thus,for example, ‘Mary believes that . . . ’ is an opaque con-struction. In the sentence ‘Cicero was a Roman orator’,the name ‘Cicero’ can be substituted with ‘Tully’ (anothername of the same man) without changing the truth-value

of the sentence. However, if Mary does not know thatCicero was also called Tully, the sentence ‘Mary believesthat Cicero was a Roman orator’ might be true, whilst thesentence ‘Mary believes that Tully was a Roman orator’is false. A construction that is not opaque is transparent.Opaqueness is not the same as non-extensionality, sincethe modal construction ‘it is necessary that . . . ’ is not ex-tensional, but it is transparent.

Open sentence: An open sentence is not a genuine sentence;rather it is the result of substituting in a sentence a variable

for a singular term. Thus, ‘X is the capital of Wales’ is theopen sentence obtained by substituting the variable X forthe name ‘Cardiff’ in the sentence ‘Cardiff is the capitalof Wales’.

Open texture: The term was introduced by Friedrich Wais-mann to refer to a phenomenon which he took to becommon to most linguistic expressions. In his view, theapplication of our empirical concepts is only partially de-fined. For example, our definition of the concept of a catleaves it open whether a creature capable of speech butthat is like a cat in other respects is a cat. This lack of




precision in our concepts is not thought by Waismann tobe a problem, since any concept can be made more preciseif the need arises.

Operator: A functional expression such as a quantifier or anexpression of modality or tense.

Operator shift fallacy: A fallacy in reasoning involving anincorrect shift in the scope of an operator such as a quan-tifier or a modal operator. Examples of such fallaciousthinking are concluding that a white wall is necessarilywhite from the premise that necessarily a white wall iswhite, or concluding that somebody must be the motherof everybody from the premise that everybody has some-body as his or her mother.

Oratio obliqua See Indirect speech

Ordinary language philosophy: An approach to philosophy,popular in Britain in the 1950s, which focused on the var-ious ways in which words are used. Austin, a proponentof the approach, engaged in complex taxonomies of theordinary uses of words. The approach is characterised bya distaste for metaphysics and for formal approaches tolanguage.

Ostension: The gesture of pointing or indicating. Wittgenstein

has argued that the referent of a term cannot be fixed byostension alone. He quipped that when somebody pointsto the moon, the fool looks at the finger. More seriously,if I utter the sentence ‘I call that “Morning Glory”’ andI point in the direction of a steamship, the pointing andmy utterance alone do not determine that the ship, ratherthan, say, its burning furnace, is what ‘Morning Glory’refers to. What is also needed is the use of a sortal as in‘I call that ship “Morning Glory”’.




P

Paradigm case argument: A form of argument much inuse among supporters of ordinary language philosophy,which concludes from the fact that there are paradigmaticuses of an expression of a concept to the conclusion thatthere are instances that satisfy the concept. Thus, for in-stance, Antony Flew argued for the existence of free willon the basis of the fact that there are actions which areparadigmatic cases for the use of the word ‘free’. Thisform of argumentation, together with the kind of phi-losophy that sustained it, is not generally practised thesedays.

Paradox: We have a paradox whenever by means of seem-ingly valid reasoning we move from true premises to afalse conclusion. There are various kinds of paradoxes.In mathematics, Russell’s paradox concerning the classof all classes that are not members of themselves forcedthe rejection of naıve class theory. In the philosophy oflanguage a variety of paradoxes has proved recalcitrantto any attempted solution. These include the liar paradoxand the sorites paradox.

Paraphrase: As used by philosophers, paraphrase serves thepurposes of explication and logical simplification. Thus,the paraphrase of an expression should convey the samemeaning as the paraphrased expression but have a lessmisleading logical structure, wear its ontological com-

mitments on its sleeve and serve as an explication for theparaphrased expression.

Parataxis: A grammatical construction that involves no sub-ordinate clauses. Davidson has offered a paratactic in-terpretation of indirect speech, which normally would




seem to involve subordinate clauses. In his view, the sen-tence ‘Galileo said that the earth moves’ is understoodas composed of two self-standing sentences: ‘Galileo saidthat’ where ‘that’ functions as a demonstrative; and ‘theearth moves’, where this second sentence provides thereference for the demonstrative in the first. The result isthat the initial complex utterance has the significance of‘an utterance of Galileo said-the-same-as this: the earthmoves’. The approach offers a neat solution to the secondof Frege’s puzzles.

Further reading: Davidson (1991), ch. 7

Parole See Saussure, Ferdinand de

Particular: A concrete specific thing or person; London,Mount Everest, David Beckham are all examples of par-ticulars. Thus, particulars are those individuals which arenot abstract.

See Abstract entity; Individual

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914): He was one of thefounders of American pragmatism and of semiotics (thescience of signs). Peirce’s main contribution to logic ishis formulation of the distinction between three kinds ofinference: deductive, inductive and abductive (inferenceto the best explanation). He also developed an extensivecategorisation of different kinds of signs including thedistinction between icon, index and symbol. Finally, healso provided one of the first explicit characterisations ofthe type–token distinction.

Performance, linguistic See Linguistic performance

Performative: Austin coined the term to refer to utteranceswhich are not truth-evaluable, and are examples of ways




of doing things by means of words. For instance, in thecontext of a wedding, ‘I do’ can be a performative ut-terance, since in saying it one is thereby getting married.Perfomatives are contrasted with constative utterances.

See Speech act

Perlocutionary act: A term coined by Austin for acts that con-sist in the production of certain effects in one’s audienceby one’s utterance. For example, annoying somebody bytalking non-stop is an example of a perlocutionary act.Surprising, frightening, startling a person by one’s utter-ances are also examples of this category.

See Illocutionary act; Locutionary act; Speech act

Perlocutionary intention: The intention of a speaker to bringabout an effect in his or her audience by means of anutterance. Typically, the effect is to make the audience dosomething or believe something.

See Grice, H. P.; Speaker meaning

Permutation argument: An argument formulated by Putnam

against metaphysical realism. The argument is sometimesalso called ‘Putnam’s model-theoretic argument’. Thereis more than one version of the argument. Metaphysicalrealism is the view that the world consists of a fixed num-ber of mind-independent objects, that there is only onetrue description of the way the world is and that truthis correspondence to reality. As a result, supporters ofmetaphysical realism are committed to the claim that ascientific theory, which is by human standards epistemi-cally ideal, might none the less be false. Putnam’s argu-ment against the view depends on showing that languagecannot stand in the kind of determinate referential rela-tion to reality which the view requires. Putnam’s basicidea is that there is always more than one interpretation




that assigns all the correct truth conditions to the sen-tences constituting our complete theory of reality. In otherwords, we can permutate or change the universe of dis-course of the theory, and thus change the assignments ofreference to the names and predicates used in the theorywithout changing the truth-values at each possible worldfor the sentences in the theory. Thus, reference cannot befixed in the way required by metaphysical realism. Ear-lier versions of the argument relied on model-theoreticalresults known as Lowenheim-Skolem theorems to arguethat any theory that has an interpretation which makesall the sentences in the theory come out as true (i.e., amodel) also has other models with domains that havea different number of things in it. Thus, again, the ref-erential relations between names, predicates, things andtheir collections cannot be uniquely determined. Criticshave pointed out that Putnam’s is not a knock-out ar-gument, it is more a challenge to the metaphysical real-ist to provide an account of what determines referentialrelations.

See Inscrutability of reference; Internal realism

Further reading: Hale and Wright (1999); Putnam(1981)

Phenomenalism: The view that statements about ordinary ob-jects can be analysed without remainder into statementsabout actual and possible perceptions. It is also some-times stated as the view that ordinary objects are logicalconstructions of our sense data. This view does not havemany current supporters, but it was once championed byCarnap and also Ayer. It is a very radical form of empiri-

cism.

Phoneme: Basic unit of sounds that compose words (mor-phemes).




Platitude: A trivial truth. Common-sense functional defini-tions of concepts usually begin by stating a number ofplatitudes that are part of the common understanding ofthe concept. The concept is not empty if and only if thereis one kind of thing that plays all the roles listed by theplatitudes. Thus, for instance, belief might be thought aswhatever together with desire provides reasons for ac-tion, and provides reasons for other beliefs, and can bejustified by perception, and so forth. Beliefs exist if andonly if there is one kind of state that plays all of theseroles.

Platonism: A view that is committed to the existence of mind-independent entities which are not spatiotemporally lo-cated and are knowable by some sort of non-perceptualintuition.

See Grasping a thought

Possibility: There is more than one kind of possibility. Epis-temic possibility expresses uncertainty. Thus, when I saythat the postman might have delivered the parcel, whatI mean is that as far as I know it is possible that he has.Alethic possibility concerns instead what is possibly true,which is to say true in some possible world. Thus, whenI assert that I might not have been born in Italy, I do notexpress doubt about my place of birth; I am expressingthe fact that I could have been born elsewhere.

See Necessity


Possible world: The notion of a possible world has been in-troduced in philosophy to provide a semantics for modaldiscourse, which is to say discourse that is concerned withnecessity and possibility. A possible world is a completeway in which things might have been. Thus, when I think




that I could have won the lottery, what I am thinkingis that there is a possible world in which I have wonthe lottery. There is a debate among philosophers aboutthe nature of possible worlds. Several take them as de-scriptions, complete stories about how the whole universemight have been. Others take them to be abstract entitiesof some sort. A minority follows Lewis in believing thatthey are real universes, like the one in which we live. Eachof these universes is completely isolated from the others.

See Counterpart; De dicto modality; De re modality

Further reading: Divers (2002)

Possible world semantics: Possible worlds have been used todevelop a semantics for modal sentences about necessity

and possibility and counterfactuals. Thus, a necessaryproposition is true if and only if it is true in all possi-ble worlds; a possibility is true if and only if it is true insome possible world. While counterfactuals are thoughtto be true if at the closest possible world in which theantecedent is true, the consequent is also true. Counter-factuals with impossible antecedents, which are false atall possible worlds, are true by default.

Further reading: Lewis (1986b)

Postulate: It is either an assumption or, in mathematics, a ba-sic principle such as an axiom.

Pragmatics: There are different views of what this area ofstudy involves. Some understand it as the study of thosefeatures of language which are not covered in semantics,the study of syntax and phonology. An alternative viewis to take pragmatics as the study of those propertiesof linguistic expressions which the expressions have invirtue of their context broadly construed. Some philoso-phers, who oppose formal semantics, argue that linguistic




expressions have their meaning in virtue of their contexts.These philosophers thus argue that pragmatics ratherthan semantics offers the materials for a satisfactory ac-count of meaning.

Further reading: Travis (1999)

Pragmatism: A North American school of thought first de-veloped by Peirce and William James in the nineteenthcentury which rejects abstraction in favour of practicalutility. They reject views that have no practical conse-quence or distinctions that make no difference in prac-tice. Pragmatists are well known for supporting a viewaccording to which truth is what works. In contempo-rary philosophy, Rorty is the most prominent advocateof pragmatism.

Further reading: Murphy (1990)

Predicable: An expression that produces a proposition aboutsomething when attached to another expression thatstands for that thing. Thus, ‘woman’ is a predicable be-cause by attaching it to the expression ‘Queen ElizabethII’, which refers to Queen Elizabeth II, we form the propo-sition ‘Queen Elizabeth II is a woman’ which is aboutthat same individual. In this proposition, the predicable‘woman’ plays the role of predicate. But, predicables donot always play the role of predicates in propositions inwhich they appear. ‘Woman is the equal of man’ is anexample. This piece of terminology was introduced byGeach.

Predicate: The logical category of expressions used to at-tribute properties and relations to things. The extensionof a predicate is the class of things (or of ordered pairsor triplets and so forth) that fall under it. Hence, the ex-tension of the predicate ‘is red’ is the class of red things,




while the extension of the relation ‘is the capital of’ is theclass of ordered pairs whose first member is a capital cityand whose second member is the related country.

See Concept; Interpretation

Predication: The problem of predication is also known as theproblem of the unity of the proposition. A sentence or aproposition is not a list of names, it has a kind of unity.If, in the sentence ‘Tony Blair is British’, we think of thesubject as a name for a particular and the general termas a name for a universal, we need to explain how thetwo are connected. It will not help to say that they are re-lated by the relation of instantiation because this answeronly gives rise to a further question about the connectionbetween Tony Blair, Britishness and instantiation. Frege

claimed that the unity is given by the fact that the pred-icate is not a name for a universal. Instead, its referenceis a concept which is meant to be unsaturated by nature.More recently, some philosophers have rescued the ideathat the predicate names a universal and located the un-saturatedness which unifies the proposition in the copula.

Presupposition: This notion has two senses: one logical, theother pragmatic. The logical notion is used to refer to asentence or statement whose truth is a necessary condi-tion for another statement to have a truth-value. Thus,the sentence ‘The mayor of Newport is a woman’ pre-supposes the sentence ‘Newport has a mayor’. The prag-matic notion refers to a feature of speakers whose presup-positions are the propositions they believe constitute thebackground information in their current conversations.

Further reading: Stalnaker (1974); Strawson (1949)

Primary quality: A perceptible property of things such asshape, size and weight which is not a matter of a relation




between the thing and the perceiver. Primary qualities arecontrasted with secondary qualities, like colour, whichare typically thought to be so dependent.

See Secondary quality

Private language: A logically private language would be a lan-guage that only one person could speak and no one elsecould either learn or understand. It is thus different froma solitary language, which is the language of only oneperson, but which could at least in principle be under-stood or learnt by others. Wittgenstein’s private language

argument is intended to show that private languages areimpossible.

Private language argument: In the Philosophical Investiga-tions (1953) Wittgenstein argues that private languagesare impossible. A logically private language would be alanguage that only one person could speak and no oneelse could either learn or understand. Wittgenstein asksus to imagine a person developing a language to name herinner sensations. Thus, when the person has a sensation,she coins a name for sensations of that kind. Let us saythat the name is ‘S’. This language would be private; noone else could learn it, because they could not know what‘S’ stands for since they have no way of individuating thekind of sensation which corresponds to it. The solitaryspeaker of the language, instead, is meant to be able byintrospection alone to tell when she experiences the samesensation again and reapply the name ‘S’ to it. However,Wittgenstein points out, this would be an illusion. Theproblem is not that the agent might misremember whatthe sensation is like, and therefore make mistakes whenapplying the name ‘S’. The problem is rather that whatmakes two sensations instances of the same kind is sim-ply the agent’s saying so. Consequently, the very idea that




the subject could be wrong as to whether the name ‘S’applies to a sensation is incoherent. But if mistakes areimpossible, there is no difference between thinking thatan application is correct and the application being cor-rect. However, Wittgenstein claims, if the idea of usingthe name incorrectly makes no sense here, the idea of us-ing it correctly makes no sense either. Consequently, whatwe have here is not a genuine name, not a real language.

See Rule-following

Further reading: Hacker (1993)

Productivity: A feature which is often attributed to linguisticunderstanding.

See Compositionality; Language of thought

Projectivism: The view that we project onto the externalworld some features which are in fact inner to the agent.Thus, for David Hume we project necessary connectionsonto the world, even though the world includes only regu-larities or constant conjunctions. A projectivist, however,does not need to hold that all our beliefs about the rele-vant area of discourse are false. Instead, he might adoptquasi-realism, defend the utility and correctness of thesort of talk under scrutiny, and explain why it seems tostate facts when in reality it expresses attitudes.

Pronoun: An expression like ‘he’ or ‘it’ or ‘I’. These have twokinds of uses: (1) as demonstratives or indexicals; and(2) as expressions standing in cross-referencing (oranaphoric) relation to nouns. There are three kinds ofanaphoric uses of pronouns: the so-called lazy use, asin ‘When John came for dinner, he brought a bottle ofwine’; the e-type use, as in: ‘Someone picked up the glass.He made a toast’; and, finally, the quantificational use,such as ‘For every number there is a number which is




greater than it’. The first kind of use is called lazy be-cause in these instances the name could be substituted forthe cross-referencing pronoun; not so in the other twocases. In the e-type, however, the pronoun can be substi-tuted with a noun-phrase constructed from the context.Thus, in the example above we can substitute ‘the per-son who picked up the glass’ for the pronoun ‘he’. In thequantificational case, which is so called because the an-tecedent of the anaphor is an expression that functionsas a quantifier, it is not possible to substitute a name ora noun-phrase for the pronoun.

See Anaphora

Proper name See Singular term

Proposition: Propositions are what sentences express. Thesame sentence can in different contexts express differentpropositions. For instance, the sentence ‘I am hungry’ ex-presses different propositions when it is uttered by dif-ferent people at different times. Thus, if Tony Blair saysit, it expresses the proposition that Tony Blair is hungryat that time. If, instead, George W. Bush says it, the sen-tence expresses the proposition that George W. Bush ishungry at that time. Propositions are also generally takento be the primary bearers of truth and falsity. Sentenceswould be true or false only in the derivative sense of ex-pressing a true or false proposition. Some philosophersdo not take talk of propositions very seriously. They useit for convenience’s sake, but do not really believe thatthere exist entities called ‘propositions’. Other philoso-phers believe in their existence. Some take propositions assets of possible worlds. Thus, the proposition expressedby the sentence ‘George W. Bush is the US Presidentin 2006’ is the set of possible worlds in which GeorgeW. Bush is the US President in 2006. A problem for this




view of propositions is that it discriminates them verycoarsely. It is a counterintuitive consequence of the viewthat all tautologies, such as ‘all triangles have three sides,’and ‘all squares have four sides’, express the same propo-sition, since they are both true in every possible world.In order to avoid this problem, some philosophers havesuggested that propositions are instead structured enti-ties which typically have things, properties and relationsamong their components. These are called ‘structured

propositions’.See Singular proposition; Truth-bearer

Further reading: McGrath (2006)

Propositional attitude: A psychological relation, such as in-tending, believing, desiring, knowing, wanting, knowing,discovering, and so forth, which is usually understood asa two-place relation between a person and a proposition.Belief, for example, would be a relation of believing thatholds between a person (the believer) and a proposition,which is what is believed.

See propositional attitude reports

Propositional attitude reports: Sentences used to attribute apropositional attitude to a person. Thus, ‘John believesthat Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens’ is a propositionalattitude report, since it is used to report that John hasthe propositional attitude of belief toward the proposi-

tion which is expressed by the sentence ‘Mark Twain isSamuel Clemens’. These reports give rise to one of Frege’s

puzzles.Further reading: McKay and Nelson (2005)

Prosentence: Supporters of the prosentential theory of truthtake expressions such as ‘that is true’ and ‘it is true’ tobe prosentences. Prosentences are standardly considered




semantically atomic; their parts are not thought to beindependently meaningful. This point can be made bywriting the prosentence thus: ‘that-is-true’. Prosentencesrelate to tokens of sentences in the same way in whichpronouns relate to tokens of nouns. This relation, whichis called anaphora, is one of cross-referencing.

See Truth, prosentential theory of

Psychologism: A view of the nature of logic which Frege ve-hemently opposed. According to this view, logic is thebranch of psychology concerned with describing patternsof inference used by human beings in reasoning.

Putnam, Hilary (1926–): At the time of writing Emeritus Pro-fessor of Philosophy at Harvard University, Putnam hasmade numerous contributions to the philosophy of lan-guage. Before the 1980s he developed his celebrated Twin

Earth and brain in a vat thought experiments in favour ofsemantic externalism. At that time he was a supporter ofthe causal theory of reference and a metaphysical realist.In the 1980s he abandoned these views. He formulatedhis well-known permutation argument, and developeda position he called internal realism. In his later yearsPutnam’s views have become more sympathetic to prag-

matism.

Q

Qua-problem: A problem for a purely causal theory of ref-

erence. According to this view names would be initiallyintroduced into the language by baptisers who first per-ceive the object so named. These people are not meantto associate any description with the name. Instead, theyare assumed to succeed in referring to the object, and




name it, merely in virtue of being causally related to it.But at any one time there are many different things thebaptisers are equally causally related to. Suppose they ut-ter the noise ‘gatto’ when in the presence of a cat. Theycould be naming that particular cat, they could be intro-ducing the general name ‘cat’, they could be introducingthe general name ‘feline’, they could even be introduc-ing the general term ‘tail’ or ‘whisker’. Nothing coulddetermine whether they are referring to the cat qua-cator qua-feline, since when one perceives a cat one alsoperceives a feline. What this problem shows is that inorder to be able to name something, it is not enough topoint to it and utter a word. Reference can be fixed only ifwe associate a description or a general term (sortal) withthe newly introduced name. We succeed in referring tothe particular cat if we use the description ‘that cat’ whenintroducing the cat’s name.

Quantification: It concerns the use of quantifiers. These areexpressions of generality; they are the means to talk abouta collection of things. ‘All’, ‘any’, ‘every’, ‘there is’, ‘most’,‘many’, ‘few’, ‘at most one’ are all examples of quantifiersin English. The two main quantifiers used in logic arethe universal and the existential quantifier, which can betranslated respectively as ‘every’ and ‘some’.

See Quantifying-in

Quantifier: First introduced by Frege, quantifiers are used toexpress general sentences in logic. There are two mainquantifiers: the universal (symbolised as (x) or (∀x)) andthe existential (symbolised as (∃x)). Either of the two canbe defined in terms of the other, together with negation.The universal quantifier is used to translate expressionssuch as ‘all’, ‘every’ and ‘any’, the existential quantifierto translate expressions like ‘some’ and ‘there is’, ‘there




are’, ‘exist’. Quantification can be unrestricted, when thequantifiers are intended to range over everything thereis. It can also be taken to be restricted where the quan-tifier is taken to range over part of what there is, i.e., aclass of things. Some philosophers have argued that nat-ural languages have expressions such as ‘some flowers’,‘all animals’, ‘someone’ which are best read as restrictedquantifiers ranging respectively over flowers, animals andpeople. However, since most philosophers believe that allrestricted quantification can be paraphrased away usingthe unrestricted quantifiers, they use unrestricted quantifi-cation to translate sentences from natural languages. Anexception is Geach, whose support of a notion of relative

identity has as a consequence the irreducibility of re-stricted to unrestricted quantification. Unrestricted quan-tifiers have been interpreted in two ways. The first substi-tutional interpretation, which is largely discredited, takesa sentence like ‘Something is tall’ to be true if and only ifthere is a name, say ‘John’, which can be substituted in theargument place of the predicate ‘. . . is tall’, to yield a truesubject–predicate sentence such as ‘John is tall’. The sec-ond dominant interpretation of the quantifiers is calledobjectual. Thus understood the sentence ‘Something istall’ is true if and only if there is at least one object whichis tall.

See Objectual quantification; Substitutional quantifica-

tion; Variable

Quantifying-in: In some sentences involving quantifiers, thequantifier is said to be quantifying-in to a context. Theseare non-extensional contexts such as modal contexts(about possibility and necessity) or doxastic contexts(about belief). Thus, for example, the sentence ‘Every-thing red could have been blue’ can be paraphrased ‘Forany object, if it is red, then it is possible that it is blue’. In




this example, we have a modal context (it is possible thatit is blue) which includes a pronoun which cross-refers toa quantified expression (‘everything’) outside the modalcontext. The quantifier, which is outside, is therefore saidto be quantifying inside the context. In formal logical lan-guages we express this point by saying that there is in thenon-extensional context a variable which is bound by aquantifier that is outside that context.

See Anaphora

Quasi-realism: A form of anti-realism. In the realm of moraldiscourse this view has been developed by Blackburn. Heholds, with the supporters of expressivism, that the mainpurpose of moral discourse is to express emotions andattitudes. It is not to make statements. The quasi-realist,however, acknowledges that ordinary moral discourseseems to be used to make claims which are true or falserather than being merely a way of conveying approvalor disapproval. The quasi-realist intends to explain thisphenomenon. He wants to show that moral discourse canseem to involve making claims about moral reality when,as a matter of fact, it provides a sophisticated way ofexpressing approval and disapproval. One of the greatestchallenges for a quasi-realist is to provide a satisfactoryanswer to the Frege–Geach problem.

See Non-cognitivism

Further reading: Blackburn (1993)

Quietism: The approach taken by those philosophers whoaim to deflate metaphysical controversies, especially thedebate between realism and anti-realism. Typically, qui-etists are happy to use the same vocabulary as realists.Thus, they will assert that entities such as stars would ex-ist even though we had never been around, and that state-ments are true when they correspond to reality. However,




quietists also add that they can make these assertionswithout thereby committing themselves to the substan-tive metaphysics of realism.

Quine, W. V. O. (1908–2000): A very influential Americanphilosopher, Quine spent most of his academic life atHarvard University. He made several ground-breakingcontributions to the philosophy of language. He is par-ticularly well known for his debunking of the analytic–

synthetic distinction for his arguments in favour of the in-

determinacy of translation, and his scepticism about de remodality.

Further reading: Quine (1951), (1960) and (1969)

Quotation: It involves the use of quotes to mention a wordor expression.

See Disquotation; Quote name; Use–mention distinc-

tion

Quote name: The name of a word, an expression or a sentenceobtained by putting that word, expression or sentencewithin quotes. ‘Rome’, ‘Tony Blair’, ‘snow is white’ areall quote names. ‘Rome’ names the name, not the city.Thus, it is true to say that ‘Rome’ has four letters, andthat ‘snow is white’ is composed of three words.

See Use–mention distinction

R

Radical interpretation: A notion introduced by Davidson

which bears a close relation to Quine’s radical transla-

tion. The radical interpreter provides an interpretation ofthe sentences uttered by other speakers without presup-posing that they mean the same things by their words asthe interpreter means by hers. The problem faced by the




interpreter is that belief and meaning are interdependent.She cannot figure out what a person might mean by hiswords unless she knows what he believes, and she hasno other access to his beliefs besides his verbal reportsof what they are. The interpreter succeeds in providingan interpretation by deploying the principle of charity.She assumes that the individuals she interprets mostlyhold beliefs which are true. That is, she takes belief tobe constant, to be something she shares with those sheinterprets. The interpreter can presuppose that most ofher beliefs and most of the beliefs held by the people sheinterprets are true because omniscient interpreters, whosebeliefs are true, would also assume that they share mostof their beliefs with the individuals whose speech they in-terpret.

See Humanity, principle of

Further reading: Davidson (1991), ch. 9

Radical translation: An idea introduced by Quine in the con-text of his arguments in favour of the indeterminacy of

translation. Quine imagines an anthropologist encounter-ing a group of people, who had been completely isolatedup to that point. The anthropologist attempts to translatethe native language from scratch, relying at the beginningexclusively on prompting the natives in various circum-stances with expressions of their language to see whetherthey assent or not. So, the anthropologist might try out theexpression ‘gavagai’ with the natives both when rabbitsare present and when they are not, in order to see whether‘gavagai’ means rabbit. Quine points out that even if na-tives only and always assent to ‘gavagai’ in the presenceof rabbits, ‘gavagai’ might mean undetached rabbit partrather than rabbit.

See Argument from above; Argument from below;

Stimulus-meaning

Further reading: Quine (1960)




Ramsey sentences: These are existentially quantified sen-tences. They are the result of a method developed by F. P.Ramsey for producing explicit definitions while avoidingcircularity. Thus, for instance, suppose that the definitionof a state makes reference to other states whose defini-tions make reference to the first. In such an instance wewould have a case of circularity. This can be avoided bysubstituting all the names for the other states in one’s def-inition with variables which are bound by the existentialquantifier. For example, suppose one wishes to providea definition of a mental state such as the desire to havea beer (let us call it M1). The definition will make a ref-erence to other mental states. Thus, John is in state M1

(desires a beer) if and only if John is in state M2 (believesa beer is present) and in state M3 (believes that he canreach the beer), . . . , and in state Mi. The Ramsey sen-tence for this definition is: John is in state M1 (desires abeer) if and only if there is an x2, there is an x3, . . . andthere is an xi, such that John has x2 and John has x3 and,. . . . John has xi, and (x2, x3, . . . xi) are mental states. Inlogical notation this Ramsey sentence reads as follows:(∃x2) (∃x3) . . . (∃ xi) [John has x2 and John has x3 and. . . John has xi, and M (x2, x3, . . . , xi).

Realism: A realist about a given area of discourse believes thattalk about objects and properties in that area of discoursecan be true because those objects and properties haveobjective, mind-independent existence. A scientific realistis typically also committed to the view that the objects ofcurrent scientific theories exists independently of us andactually have most of the properties we take them to have.

See Anti-realism

Further reading: Devitt (1991)

Recognition transcendence See Verification transcendence




Reference: The reference of an expression is what it standsfor. Thus, the reference of a proper name or a definite

description is the thing named or designated. Hence, thereference of ‘the Queen of England in 2004’ is a person,Elizabeth II. Frege uses the expression Bedeutung, whichhas been variously translated into English as reference,designation or meaning to indicate that for which a lin-guistic expression stands. Currently, two different theo-ries of reference are widely debated: the description orcluster theory and the causal theory. According to thefirst, the reference of a name is secured by means of a de-scription which uniquely identifies the referent. Accord-ing to the second, the reference is secured by a causal linkto the thing referred to.

See Causal theory of reference; Description theory

of reference; Inscrutability of reference; Semantic value;

Sense

Reference borrowing: This occurs when speakers use theirwords in order to borrow their references from the usesof those words made by other, generally more compe-tent, speakers. Thus, even somebody who knows almostnothing about Kurt Godel can use the name ‘Godel’ andsucceed in referring to him. In this instance, the speakerwhen using the name defers to the authority of othersin order to have the reference fixed. Supporters of thecluster theory of reference rely on this phenomenon toexplain how we can use names to refer to their bearers,even though we do not associate an individuating clusterof descriptions to each name. Supporters of the causal

theory of reference also use the notion of reference bor-rowing in order to explain the dependence of uses of aname by later speakers on the use made by initial dub-bers of the names. Supporters of the causal view explainreference borrowing in terms of a causal chain.




Reflexivity: The relation a thing has with itself.See Equivalence relation

Regimentation: It involves translating a piece of ordinary lan-guage into the canonical notation of a formal language,thus allowing the logical form of the piece of languageunder consideration to be made explicit.

Relation: There are different sorts: ‘. . . is a brother of . . . ’is an expression for a two-place (dyadic) relation; ‘. . .gives . . . to . . . ’ is an expression for a triadic relation. Re-lations can have any number of places. It is generallythought that in order for the relation to exist, its re-lata (the things it relates) must also exist. Some makeexception for intentional relations such as believing orthinking, since it is possible to think about what does notexist. Others rely on the same facts to conclude that talkof thinking and believing does not express a genuine re-lation to what is believed or thought about.

See Intentionality

Relative identity: A notion that has been defended by Geach,who puts forward two distinct theses on this topic. First,he argues that it is not possible for any language to expressthe standard absolute notion of identity. Instead, he statesthat any claim that a is identical with b is in fact a short-hand for the claim that a is the same F as b where Fis a sortal, such as ‘apple’ or ‘gold’. For Geach relativeidentity cannot be explained in terms of absolute identity.In his opinion the claim that a is the same F as b cannotbe understood as saying that a is F and b is F, and ais identical with b. Second, Geach also claims that it isperfectly possible for a and b to be the same F, but also tobe different Gs. Geach offers a variety of arguments forthe truth of this second thesis, some of which presupposethe notion of a sortal, but some that do not.




See Quantifier; Sortal

Further reading: Noonan (1999)

Representation: Words and pictures are representations be-cause they represent something. Arguably, thoughts arealso representations. There are different kinds of repre-sentations. Thus pictures, for example, represent by re-sembling that of which they are a picture. Linguistic rep-resentations do not resemble what they represent, insteadthey depend on conventions. Thus, it is in virtue of aconvention that the English word ‘cat’ represents cats.Some philosophers attempt to explain these conventionsin terms of associations between words and ideas in themind. Thus, the word ‘cat’ would represent cats, becauseit is associated with the mental idea of a cat. Philosopherswho adopt this approach take the notion of mental rep-resentation to be basic.

See Indicator semantics; Teleosemantics


Response-dependence: Intuitively, a property is said to bejudgement- or response-dependent if and only if havingthat property is a matter of the judgements or responsesissued by suitable subjects in suitable conditions. Thus,response-dependent properties do not exist independentlyof subjects’ responses or judgements. For example, onemight hold that red is a response-dependent property, andclaim that being red is simply a matter of looking red tostandard observers in standard conditions. As a matter ofcontrast one might claim that being square is response-independent because it is not true that to be square isnothing over and above being judged to be square bysuitable subjects in suitable conditions. These intuitivenotions have been made precise by Wright by means of theidea of provisional equations. Wright uses these equationsto clarify the notion of a judgement-dependent predicate.




The equation for the predicate ‘red’ would state that un-der ideal conditions, the predicate ‘ . . . is red’ co-varieswith the predicate ‘a suitable subject S judges . . . to bered’. In other words, in those conditions, whenever some-thing is red, S would judge it to be red, and vice versa. Themere existence of a co-variation between being red andbeing judged to be red does not settle whether the sub-jects’ judgements infallibly track mind-independent red,or – on the contrary – the judgements themselves con-stitute what being red is. For this reason, Wright claimsthat a predicate is judgement-dependent if and only ifits provisional equation satisfies four conditions. (1) Thea-prioricity condition requires that the equation must betrue a priori. (2) The substantiality condition requires thatthe ideal conditions are not specified in a trivial way. (3)The independence condition requires that it must be pos-sible in each case to ascertain whether the ideal conditionsobtain independently of the truth of any attributions ofthe predicate whose status as response-dependent is un-der consideration. (4) The extremal condition requiresthat there is no better account for why the covariancepresented by the provisional equation obtains than thehypothesis that the judgements in question determine theextension of the relevant predicate rather than merely re-flect its pre-determined extension.

See Missing-explanation argument

Further reading: Wright (1992), Appendix to ch. 3

Restricted quantification See Quantification

Rigid designator: An expression that refers to the same en-tity in all possible worlds in which that entity exists,and has no reference otherwise. Proper names such as‘Tony Blair’, ‘London’, ‘Ben Nevis’ are often consideredexamples of rigid designators. They are contrasted with




non-rigid designators of which many common definite de-

scriptions are examples. Thus, ‘the Prime Minister of theUK in 2006’ is not rigid because it could have referred toGordon Brown. ‘Gordon Brown’ would instead be rigidbecause it always refers to him or to nothing if he did notexist. Some definite descriptions, however, are rigid. ‘Thesum of 2 + 2’ is a rigid definite description since it refersto the number 4 in all possible circumstances. ‘The actualwinner of the Tour de France in 2004’ is also rigid since itrefers to Lance Armstrong in all possible worlds in whichhe exists. Kripke makes a distinction between de jure andde facto rigid designators. The first are those designatorsthat are stipulated to refer to a single object, Kripke thinksproper names are like this. De facto rigid designators, onthe other hand, are those definite descriptions which re-fer only to one thing because in every possible world thesame thing is the one thing which satisfies the descrip-tion.

See Causal theory of reference; Cluster theory of ref-

erence; Description theory of reference; Direct reference;

Reference

Further reading: Kripke (1980)

Rigidifying expression: An expression which, when used toqualify a non-rigid designator such as a definite descrip-tion, transforms it into a rigid one. ‘Actual’ is one suchrigidifying expression. For example, ‘the President of theUnited States in 2005’ refers to George Bush, but it couldhave referred to somebody else had the outcome of the2004 presidential elections been different. On the otherhand, ‘the actual President of the United States in 2005’ isa rigid designator, if Bush is the actual President in 2005,nobody else could be the actual President in 2005.

Rigidity: The semantic property of being a rigid designator.




Rorty, Richard (1931–): He is an American philosopher whohas held posts at Princeton University and at the Uni-versity of Virginia. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Na-ture (1980) Rorty argued that philosophy since the earlymodern period has been mired by a picture of the mindas containing representations that mirror reality. Rortydescribes himself as a supporter of pragmatism; he alsodefends deflationism about truth. He has written manyarticles on topics ranging from politics and deconstruc-tion, to Davidson’s views on truth and epistemology.

Rule: A norm which is usually taken to be codified by meansof an explicit formulation. Lewis Carroll offered a neatargument why not all norms can take the form of ex-plicitly formulated rules. Consider the following argu-ment, which has the form of modus ponens: 1. If today isSunday, tomorrow is Monday; 2. Today is Sunday. There-fore, 3. tomorrow is Monday. Carroll wants us to imaginesomebody who accepts 1 and 2 but rejects 3. One mighttry to convince this person by stating the following rule:4. If ‘if P then Q’ and ‘P’ are true, then ‘Q’ is also true.The interlocutor, however, can accept 4 as well as 1 and2, and still reject 3, and the addition of further rules tothe premises will be of no help in getting him to accept theconclusion. What is required is the acceptance of a ruleor norm of inference which cannot itself take the form ofa premise of the argument.

Rule-following: This issue was first discussed by Wittgen-

stein in the Philosophical Investigations (1953) and sub-sequently revived by Kripke inWittgenstein on Rules andPrivate Language (1982). Wittgenstein made several im-portant remarks about rules and connected these to hisprivate language argument. First, Wittgenstein points outthat following or obeying a rule is different from acting ina way that accords with it. He also notes that to think that




one is following a rule is not the same as following it, andthat the two notions should not be allowed to collapseinto one other. Finally, Wittgenstein shows that when try-ing to elucidate the idea of following or obeying a rulewe are tempted by two equally unsatisfactory accounts.The first account would explain rule-following in terms ofoffering an interpretation of the rule. The account fails,as Wittgenstein shows, because it generates an infiniteregress. In order to interpret the rule, we need an inter-pretation of how to interpret the interpretation, and afurther interpretation to interpret that interpretation, andso forth ad infinitum. The second account attempts to ex-plain rule-following in terms of regularities of behaviour.This account also fails because it cannot ground the dis-tinction between behaviour that accords with the rule andbehaviour that follows it. Any account in terms of regu-larity might explain what the person will do but not whatit ought to do, and it is the second normative notion thatis required by any satisfactory account of rule-following.

See Dispositionalism; Meaning scepticism; Normativ-

ity of meaning

Further reading: McDowell (1998), ch. 11

Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970): A British philosopher andcommitted pacifist, Russell was educated at CambridgeUniversity where he subsequently lectured. His main con-tributions to the philosophy of language are his accountof definite descriptions, his version of the correspondencetheory of truth, and some features of his account ofthought that has inspired others to develop the notion ofRussellian thoughts. He is perhaps most famous for hiscontributions to mathematical logic, and in particular forhis formulation of the paradox of the class whose mem-bers are all the classes which do not have themselves asa member, and for his solution to this paradox by meansof his theory of types.




Russell’s principle: The principle attributed by Evans toRussell according to which ‘in order to be thinking aboutan object . . . one must know which object it is one is think-ing about’. For Evans, Russell took his principle to implythat one must be able to distinguish that object from allother objects.


Russellian proposition See Singular proposition

Russellian singular term See Logically proper name

Russellian thought: A thought is said to be Russellian if andonly if it has, as one of its constituents, the object itis about. Thus, Russellian thoughts would be a kindof singular or object-involving thought since their exis-tence depends on the existence of the objects the thoughtspurport to be about. These thoughts are called ‘Russel-lian’ because sentences used to express their contents in-volve what Evans has labelled a ‘Russellian singular term’,namely a logically proper name which is a singular termwhose meaning depends on it having a reference. There isdisagreement even among supporters of the existence ofsingular thoughts as to whether Russell’s account of theirconstituents is correct.

See Demonstrative thought; Descriptive thought; sin-

gular proposition

S

Salva veritate: A Latin expression meaning ‘saving thetruth’. Two expression are said to be intersubstitutablesalva veritate when one can be substituted for the other




in the context of a given sentence without changing thetruth or falsity of that sentence.

See Extensional context

Satisfaction: A notion developed by Tarski as part of his the-ory of truth.

See truth, semantic theory of

Satisfaction condition See Truth, semantic theory of

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913): A Swiss linguist, theforefather of structuralism, who famously held that themeaning (signified) of a word (signifier) is determined bythe relations between that word and other parts of lan-guage, rather than by connections to extra-linguistic real-ity. There are two kinds of intra-linguistic relations: syn-tagmatic and paradigmatic. Syntagmatic relations holdbetween a word and other words with which it can beconjoined in a syntactically correct string (syntagm). Forinstance, ‘a’ and ‘dog’ can form the syntagm ‘a dog’ andthus are syntagmatically related. Paradigmatic relationshold between words which can be inter-substituted instrings without damaging their syntactical correctness.For instance, ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ are thus related. He also drewa distinction between a rule-governed abstract linguisticsystem (langue) and its manifestation in the behaviour ofactual speakers of the language (parole). This distinctionbears significant similarities to Chomsky’s distinction be-tween linguistic competence and linguistic performance.Saussure’s most influential work, the Cours de linguis-tique generale (1916), was published after his death andconsists mainly of amalgamated lecture notes taken byhis students.

Further reading: Devitt and Sterelny (1999), ch. 13.

Saying/showing: A distinction that plays an importantrole in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1922). In that book




Wittgenstein appears to claim that there are features ofreality and of language that show themselves but cannotbe said. Any attempt to put them into words is destinedto end up as nonsense.

See Elucidation; Meaning, picture theory of

Scepticism about meaning See Meaning scepticism

Scope: Functions, operators and quantifiers when used incomplex expressions have a scope which is the part ofthe expression to which they apply. Thus, in (5 + 3) − 4,the whole expression is within the scope of the subtrac-tion, whilst addition has a narrower scope which is in-dicated by the brackets. Similarly, in the sentence ‘Noteverybody smokes’, the negation has a wider scope thanthe universal quantifier.

Secondary quality: A perceptible property of things, likecolour or texture, which is in some sense relative to aperceiver. John Locke thought of secondary qualities aspowers or dispositions of things to cause in us a certainexperience. More recently, secondary qualities have beenthought to be response-dependent. Thus, the property ofbeing red is defined in terms of looking read to standardperceivers in standard circumstances.

See Primary quality; Response-dependence

Sellars, Wilfrid (1912–89): He was an American philoso-pher who held posts at the University of Minnesota andthe University of Pittsburgh. His most significant con-tribution to philosophy has been his sustained attackon the myth of the given. Sellars provided an accountof meaning in terms of functional classification and forthis reason he has been seen as one of the forefathers ofinferentialism.




Semantic anti-realism: A view first formulated by Dummett

in terms of its opposition to semantic realism. A seman-tic anti-realist about any given area of discourse claimsthat sentences in that area of discourse should not be seenas being made true or false by verification-transcendenttruth conditions, which is to say conditions whose ob-taining or failure to obtain might be undetectable by us.Dummett has provided several arguments against seman-tic realism and in support of anti-realism. These includethe acquisition argument and the manifestation argu-

ment.Further reading: Wright (1993)

Semantic ascent: A common move in recent analytic philoso-phy. It involves an ascent to language. It is a shift awayfrom using certain terms to talk about the terms them-selves. Thus, semantic ascent is involved when disputesabout ethics, for example, are reformulated as disputesabout the function and truth conditions of ethical dis-course.

Semantic externalism See Externalism

Semantic irrealism See Meaning irrealism

Semantic naturalism: The view that semantic properties suchas meaning are instantiated in virtue of the instantiationof natural properties expressible in the vocabulary of thenatural sciences. Supporters of the view believe that se-mantic properties are therefore ultimately explainable innaturalistic terms. They might, for example, attempt toexplain them in terms of the causal relations between bitsof reality and mental states.

See Indicator semantics




Semantic realism: A supporter of semantic realism about agiven area of discourse holds that sentences in that areaof discourse have verification-transcendent truth condi-tions; that is to say, truth conditions whose obtaining canoutstrip our ability to recognise or verify them. Semanticrealism is opposed by supporters of semantic anti-realism.Dummett’s acquisition argument and manifestation argu-

ment are intended as global arguments against semanticrealism.


Semantic value: The semantic value of an expression, a name,predicate or sentence, is the contribution that expressionmakes to the determination of the truth or falsity of the(possibly complex) sentences of which that expression isa part. Thus, for example, the semantic value of a nameis the thing named, that of a sentence is its truth-value

(true or false). The semantic value of a predicate has beenthought by Frege to be a concept, a property or a relation;others have taken it to be its extension.

See Bedeutung; Reference

Semantics: In recent years semantics has come to mean thestudy of formal theories of meaning rather than simplythe study of the semantic (world-language) propertiesof some expression. Paradigmatically, a formal seman-tics for a fragment of a natural language consists first inassignments of semantic values to various subsententialportions of the language, such as objects to names andextensions to predicates, and truth functions to variousoperators. Second, the semantic theory provides interpre-

tations for complex sentences relative to a time, possible

worlds and index. The notion of an index is crucial tothe interpretation of sentences including indexical terms,whose reference is not fixed independently of a context.

See pragmatics




Semantics, assertibility conditions: It is Dummett who firstelaborated an account of meaning in terms of the assert-ibility conditions associated with statements or sentences.Roughly speaking, the meaning of a statement is what isknown by the person who understands it. Dummett con-tends that what that person would have knowledge of isthe conditions that warrant asserting that statement; inother words, its assertibility conditions.

See Assertibility conditions; Meaning, theories of

Further reading: Dummett (1996), chs 1–6; Wright(1993)

Semantics, conceptual role: A theory that explains the con-tents of mental states in terms of their conceptual con-nections to other mental states. More specifically, thecontents thus attributed to mental states are a matter ofthe conceptual roles played by those states in the wholeeconomy of mental states. Conceptual roles are often ex-plained inferentially in terms of the roles played by thestates in reasoning, their connections to perceptual inputsand behavioural outputs. The content thus attributed typ-ically is understood as a narrow content.

See Semantics, inferentialist

Semantics, inferentialist: A theory that explains the meaningof a sentence or utterance in terms of its inferential con-nections. Thus, the meaning of ‘Leo is a mammal’ is un-derstood in terms of its entailing ‘Leo is an animal’, beingincompatible with ‘Leo is a plant’, and being entailed by‘Leo is a lion’. This is a version of meaning holism be-cause the meaning of each sentence is determined by itsconnections to the meanings of other sentences.

Semantics, possible-world: First elaborated by Kripke, poss-ible-world semantics provides a way of assigning truthconditions to, and understanding the logical relations




between, sentences expressing counterfactuals or involv-ing various modalities. Thus, for instance, necessarytruths are interpreted as being true in all possible worlds.

Further reading: Divers (2002)

Semantics, situational: A formal semantics that deploys thenotion of a situation which is a partial representation ofthe universe.

Further reading: Barwise and Perry (1983)

Semantics, truth-conditional: Includes all formal theories ofthe meanings of linguistic sentences or utterances in termsof their truth conditions. The basic idea is that if a personknows that the Italian sentence ‘la neve e bianca’ is trueif and only if snow is white, one knows what that sen-tence means. Davidson developed this idea in detail. Heargued that any adequate formal theory of meaning for anatural language such as English or Italian should gener-ate T-sentences for each sentence of the target languageas theorems. Thus, an adequate theory of meaning forItalian formulated in English should have as theorems,T-sentences such ‘“la neve e bianca” is true if and onlyif snow is white’, ‘“l’erba e verde” is true if and onlyif grass is green’, and so forth for each sentence in thelanguage. It has been objected that Davidson’s adequacyrequirement is too lax. It would seem possible to have atheory which generates T-sentences which are all true butwhich, intuitively, do not seem to capture the meanings ofthe relevant sentences. Thus, for example, the followingT-sentences are all true: ‘“la neve e bianca” is true if andonly if snow is white’; ‘“la neve e bianca” is true if andonly if snow is white and 2 + 2 = 4’; ‘“la neve e bianca”is true if and only if grass is green’. Yet they cannot allbe giving the meaning of the Italian sentence. These dif-ferent sentences are all true because any sentence of the




form ‘P if and only if Q’ is true provided P and Q areboth true or both false. In this instance the biconditional

T-sentences are equivalent because it is true that snowis white, that grass is green, and that snow is white and2 + 2 = 4. Davidson has replied to this objection by argu-ing that in his view the T-sentences must be generated bya recursive theory. As a result it generates T-sentences inwhich parts of sentences such as the noun ‘neve’ (‘snow’)make the same contribution to the meanings of the sen-tences in which it occurs. Thus the theory respects theprinciple of the compositionality of language, and rulesout the two rogue T-sentences above. Davidson also ar-gues that a theory of meaning as a theory of truth is anempirical theory, evidence for which must be found whenengaged in the project of radical interpretation.

See Convention T

Further reading: Davidson (1991), chs 1–5

Semiology See Semiotics

Semiotics: The most general science of signs was called ‘se-meiotic’ by Peirce. For Peirce, signs are one kind of rep-resentation, namely those whose interpretant is a mentalcognition. Contemporary semiotics is best seen as a de-velopment of Saussure’s linguistics rather than Peirce’ssemeiotics.

Sense (Sinn): A notion introduced by Frege to solve a puzzleabout identity statements. He offered several, not exactlyequivalent, accounts of the notion of sense. About propernames he writes that the sense is the mode of presentationof the thing named. For Frege, all kinds of expressionshave a sense as well as a reference. Thus, more gener-ally, he characterises the sense of an expression as whatdetermines the reference of that expression. Further, the




sense of an expression is identified as that expression’scontribution to the cognitive content of the sentences ofwhich the expression is a part. Thus, Frege writes thatthe sense of a sentence is a thought, and that such sensedetermines the reference of the sentence, which is its truth-

value (the true or the false). For Frege, expressions mighthave a sense without a reference. An example is providedby names such as ‘Pegasus’. Since Pegasus does not exist,this name lacks a referent. However, sentences in whichthe name occurs still have content, they express thoughts,although they lack a truth-value. Hence, the name musthave a sense which contributes to these thoughts. If thesense of a proper name is understood as the mode of pre-sentation of the thing named, it is hard to see, as Evans

pointed out, how names could have a sense while lackinga reference. If a thing does not exist, there could not be amode of presentation of that thing either.

See Frege’s puzzles; Semantic value

Further reading: Frege (1892a)

Sentence: A complex linguistic expression typically consti-tuted by, at least, either a singular term and a predicate ora quantified expression and a verb. It is the smallest unitof speech by means of which it is possible to perform aspeech act.

Sentence meaning See Linguistic meaning; Word meaning

Sign See Semiotics

Signified: The meaning of a linguistic expression.See Saussure, Ferdinand de

Signifier: Any word or linguistic expression.See Saussure, Ferdinand de




Singular proposition: A singular proposition is a proposition

whose identity is a function of the object it concerns, sothat the proposition exists only if the object does. In itssimplest Russellian version a singular proposition has anactual object as a constituent. The proposition would thusbe about that object in virtue of having it as one of itsconstituents. It is a matter of dispute, over and beyondthe dispute of whether propositions exist, whether thereare any singular propositions. Those who believe in theirexistence take them to be expressed by sentences such as‘Mount Everest is over 8,000 metres high’, ‘Tony Blair isa man’, and ‘He [while pointing to Bob] is British’. Theycontrast these propositions with those expressed by sen-tences such ‘Whales are mammals’, which are about aclass of things rather than a particular one, and sentencessuch as ‘The Prime Minister of the UK in 2004 was a man’which express propositions about particulars, but wherethe particular is singled out by means of a description.The sentence ‘Tony Blair is a man’ is true in any actualor counterfactual situation if and only if in that situationTony Blair exists and he is a man. The sentence ‘The PrimeMinister of the UK in 2004 was a man’ is true in any actualor counterfactual situation if and only if in that situationthe UK had one and only one Prime Minister in 2004 andthat person, whoever it might be, was a man. So the twosentences can plausibly be said to express different propo-sitions, and the proposition expressed by the second is notabout the same person in all possible circumstances, andthus cannot be said to involve one specific person.

See Indexical; Rigid designator; Sense; Singular

thought; Structured proposition; Thought

Further reading: Fitch (2002)

Singular term: An expression that refers to one object and istranslated into logic as a constant. Kripke takes ordinary




names like ‘London’ or ‘David Beckham’ as singularterms. Russell, instead, thought of them as abbreviationsof definite descriptions, which are in his view quantifiedexpressions.

Singular thought: A thought which is object-involving in thesense that the thought’s existence depends on the exis-tence of the object it is about. Thus, for example, thesentence ‘That [while pointing to Fido] is a dog’ couldbe said to express a singular thought about Fido. Thethought would exist only if Fido exists, so that if onewere hallucinating Fido’s existence, and uttered the words‘That is a dog’, these words would express no thought atall. The view that at least some thoughts are singular isnot universally accepted. There is also a certain amountof variation in the terminology used by those discussingthese topics. Thus, the expression ‘singular proposition’ issometimes used interchangeably with ‘singular thought’since in their Fregean conception thoughts, which are thesenses of declarative sentences, are basically the same aspropositions. Also, it is not uncommon to see singularthoughts referred to as Russellian thoughts, although notall supporters of singular thoughts agree with Russell intaking the object itself to be a constituent of the thought.Finally, a few have used the expression ‘singular thought’simply to mean the thought expressed by a propositioncontaining a singular term.

See Demonstrative thought; Descriptive thought; Rus-

sell’s principle


Sinn See Sense

Sorites paradox: Also known as the heap paradox. It was firstformulated by Eubulides of Miletus a contemporary of




Aristotle (circa 350 BCE). It is obvious that one grainof sand is not a heap, and it seems true that adding onegrain to something which is not a heap does not turn itinto a heap. However, by repeated applications of thisprinciple we are led paradoxically to conclude that evenone million grains of sand do not make a heap. The sameparadoxical results can be obtained when thinking aboutsubtracting one grain of sand from a heap; we are forcedto conclude that even one grain of sand alone is a heap.The root of this paradox is the vagueness of the termheap.

Sortal: A term like apple or book which supplies a criterion

of identity or identification for the individuals that fallunder it. It is a matter of dispute whether mass termscount as sortals or if only count terms are to be included.Mass terms do supply criteria of identification, but donot supply criteria of individuation, and that is why somephilosophers do not consider them to be sortals.


Soundness: This notion has two separate senses: (1) In thefirst sense, it is arguments that are said to be sound orunsound. An argument is sound if and only if it is validand has true premises. So all sound arguments are valid,but not all valid arguments are sound, because some validarguments have at least some false premises. (2) In the sec-ond sense, it is formal systems that are said to be soundor unsound. A formal system is sound if and only if onlyvalid arguments are provable in it. Otherwise, the for-mal system is unsound. A formal system, however, can besound without being complete. That is to say, there mightbe valid arguments for which no proof can be providedin the system.

See Completeness; Validity




Speaker meaning: A notion used by Grice to refer to what aspeaker means by his or her words in a specific utterance,which is to say what the speaker intends to convey bymeans of the utterance. On many occasions the speakermeaning and the linguistic meaning of the expression usedcan be quite different. For instance, I may sarcasticallyutter the words ‘that’s great’ to mean quite the opposite.Also, out of ignorance or due to a temporary lapse, I mayuse a word to mean something when its linguistic mean-ing is quite different. Grice analyses speaker meaning interms of the speaker’s intention to produce a certain ef-fect in his or her audience by his or her utterance, herintention that the first intention is recognised by the au-dience, and that this recognition plays a role in the ex-planation of why the effect was produced. Typically, theeffect that the speaker intends to produce in the audi-ence is coming to believe something, or doing something.Thus, for example, by uttering the words ‘The book be-longs to John’ I mean that the book in question belongsto John if and only if in uttering those words I intendto produce in my audience the belief that the book be-longs to John, I also intend my audience to recognise thatthat is my intention in making that utterance, and finallyI intend that the audience’s recognition of my intentionplays a part in the explanation of why they produce thebelief in question. Grice did not assume that speakers areconscious of these complex intentions. Instead, he tookthese intentions to be tacit. There are, however, coun-terexamples to this account of speaker meaning. For in-stance, John Searle proposes the case of an American cap-tured by Italian soldiers during the Second World Warwho tries to pass off as a German by uttering aloud inGerman a line of poetry from Goethe in which the poetasks the audience whether they know the land where thelemon blooms. By his utterance, the American intends




the Italians to believe he is German, he intends them torecognise his intention and this recognition plays a part inthe explanation why they come to believe he is German.Yet, arguably, he does not mean by his words that he isGerman.

See Meaning, communicative-intention theory of; Nat-

ural meaning; Non-natural meaning

Speech act: Warning, apologising, baptising, sentencing, or-dering, quoting and asserting are among the things thatcan be done with words. These are all called speech acts.‘Speech’ is here understood in a broad sense to cover ev-ery employment of language, including writing and sign-ing (in sign language). Similarly, talk of uttering wordsand sentences is intended also to cover cases in whichthe words or sentences are either signed or written down.There is no simple one-to-one correlation between speechacts and sentences. The same sentence, like ‘the gate isopen’, can be used to make a statement or issue a warn-ing, and these are speech acts of different kinds. Similarly,the same speech act can be performed by uttering differ-ent sentences. For instance, it is possible to make an apol-ogy either by saying ‘I apologise’ or ‘I am sorry’. Austin

classified speech acts into locutionary, illocutionary andperlocutionary.

See Illocutionary acts; Locutionary act; Perlocutionary

act


Statement: This notion is closely related to that of assertion. Itis notoriously ambiguous. Sometimes ‘statement’ is usedto mean what is stated or asserted, typically a proposi-tional content expressed by an indicative sentence. Onother occasions, ‘statement’ is used to refer to the speechact itself. Thus, when two people say the same thing, they




have in the first sense of the term made the same state-ment, but in the second sense what we have are two dif-ferent statements with the same content.

Stimulus-meaning: A notion introduced by Quine. Thestimulus-meaning of an expression is the ordered pairconsisting first of all of the sensory stimulations thatprompt native speakers to assent to an expression, andsecond of the sensory stimulations that prompt nativedissent from the expression. Hence, for example, thestimulus-meaning of ‘there is a blue flower here’ con-sists of an order pair whose first member is the sensorystimulations as of a blue flower, and whose second mem-ber is sensory stimulations as of a yellow flower, or arabbit, or a person, and so forth. For Quine, while thenotion of stimulus-meaning is scientifically respectable,the notion of meaning is not. Further, for Quine sincemeaning is not determinate by stimulus-meaning, it isindeterminate. Hence, Quine is a supporter of meaning

irrealism.See Indeterminacy of translation; Inscrutability of ref-

erence

Strawson, P. F. (1919–2006): A British philosopher at OxfordUniversity, Strawson is perhaps best known for his workon Kant and descriptive metaphysics. He was a supporterof ordinary language philosophy, and developed an alter-native to Russell’s account of definite descriptions basedon the notion of a logical presupposition. For Strawson,an assertion of the King of France is bald is neither truenor false since it presupposes (but does not state) falselythat there is one King of France.

Further reading: Strawson (1950)

Strengthened liar paradox See Liar paradox




Structuralism: This label covers a broad range of views inanthropology and continental philosophy as well as lin-guistics. It originates in Saussure’s account of language interms of its internal relations. Saussure offered a view oflanguage as a formal structure which can be understoodin terms of relations between elements in the structure,without any need to establish referential relations be-tween the structure and anything outside. Structuralistsapply this methodological approach to all meaningfulpractices, institutions, rituals and systems.

Structured proposition: According to this view, propositionsare complex entities that have parts. Supporters of theview trace its lineage to Russell. There are different ver-sions of the view, but typically its supporters argue thatthe parts of a structured proposition are the semantic

values of words or phrases occurring in the sentence ex-pressing the proposition. Thus, for example, the struc-tured proposition expressed by the sentence ‘John shakesFred’s hand’ has as parts John, Fred’s hand and the rela-tion of shaking. If propositions are structured, the propo-

sitions expressed respectively by the sentences ‘all trian-gles have three sides’ and ‘all squares have four sides’are different because, among other things, one has theproperty of being a triangle as one of its parts and theother does not. Hence, this account avoids one of theproblems besetting the view that propositions are sets ofpossible worlds, since it is capable of explaining how log-ically equivalent sentences (i.e., sentences which are trueat exactly the same possible world) can nevertheless ex-press different propositions. Supporters of direct refer-

ence have used the notion of a structured proposition tocharacterise a directly referential expression as one thatonly contributes its referent to the structured propositionexpressed by the sentence of which it is a part.




Subject: This term has two distinct meanings: (1) In some in-stances it is used as a synonym of ‘agent’. (2) Elsewhereit indicates a distinct grammatical category. The subjectin a sentence is the expression which refers to the objector objects the sentence is about.

Subjunctive conditional: Conditionals such as ‘If the presi-dent were to reduce the level of taxation, the countrywould be bankrupt in no time at all’. All of these con-ditionals have the auxiliary verb ‘would’ in the conse-quent. Some of these conditionals involve an antecedentwhich is known or conceded to be false. These are knownas counterfactuals. Subjective conditionals are contrastedwith indicative conditionals.

Substantival term: An expression introduced by Geach as alabel for those general terms for which ‘the same’ gives acriterion of identity. Thus, ‘cat’ is a substantival term be-cause the expression ‘the same cat’ supplies a criterion of

identity. Names like ‘red thing’ are not substantival. ‘Thesame red thing’ supplies no criterion of identity. ImagineI have a red jumper, it is unclear how many red things Ihave. Is one of its sleeves a red thing? Is the thread usedto stitch it another?

See Relative identity

Substitutional quantification: One of two interpretations ofthe quantifiers. According to this interpretation, a sen-tence like ‘something is red’ is true if and only if there isa name, say ‘John’, which can be substituted in the ar-gument place of the predicate ‘. . . is red’, to yield a truesubject – predicate sentence such as ‘John is red’. A uni-versally quantified sentence such as ‘everything is red’ istrue if and only if for each and every name the sentence




that results by substituting that name in the argumentplace of the predicate ‘. . . is red’ yields a true sentence.Hence, quantified sentences are treated as shorthand forlong (perhaps infinitely so) sentences without quantifiers.The sentence ‘everything is red’ is interpreted as short-hand for the sentence ‘a is red, and b is red, . . . , and nis red, . . . ’ where ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘n’, and so forth are the namesof each thing there is. The sentence ‘something is red’ istaken as shorthand for the sentence ‘either a is red, or b isred, . . . , or n is red, . . . ’. This interpretation of the quan-tifiers is largely discredited because of the problem of thenameless. There are more things than there are names forthem, so there are bound to be things without a name.The long sentences without quantifiers cannot refer tothem; hence, they are not about everything. The quan-tified sentences, on the other hand, are meant to coverthese nameless things as well.

See Objectual quantification; Quantification

Sufficient condition: Any condition which is sufficient for theobtaining of something else. Thus, for example, being awoman is a sufficient condition for being a human being.That is, in order to be human it is enough or sufficient thatone is a woman. Sufficient conditions, however, might notbe necessary. Thus, it is not necessary to be a woman inorder to be a human being since men are also humanbeings. Sufficient and necessary conditions are expressedby means of conditionals. Thus, we can state that beinga woman is sufficient for being a human by saying: ifsomething is a woman, then it is a human being.

See Necessary condition

Superassertibility: A statement is said to be superassertible ifand only if it is warranted, and its warrant would surviveno matter how closely we scrutinise its pedigree and how




much further information we acquire. Thus, superassert-ibility is a stable property because a statement that has itcannot lose it. The notion was developed by Wright as aplausible candidate for a notion of truth as an epistemicnotion.

See Truth, epistemic theories of

Further reading: Wright(1992), ch. 2

Supervaluation: A valuation is an assignment of a truth-valueto a sentence or of an extension to a predicate. A su-pervaluation is a quantification over valuations. Thus, asupervaluation is the assignment of truth (or super-truth)to a sentence if and only if the sentence is true in all val-uations, false (or super-false) if and only if the sentenceis false in all valuations, and neither true nor false in allother cases.

Further reading: Williamson (1996), ch. 5

Supervenience: There are various notions of supervenience(weak, strong, global and local), but the basic idea is thatsome facts or properties supervene on other facts or prop-erties (base) if and only if there cannot be any differencein the supervenient facts unless there is a difference inthe base facts. Thus, if moral facts are supervenient uponphysical facts, two acts could not differ morally, unlessthere is also some physical difference in the surroundingcircumstances.

Symbol: In semiotics, a symbol is a sign that represents whatit stands for by being connected to it by means of a con-ventional relation. Words are the paradigmatic exampleof symbols.

Syncategorema: A term used by medieval logicians to referto expressions that have no meaning by themselves but




only acquire a meaning when they are linked to otherexpressions.

Synonymy: Two expressions are synonymous if and only ifthey have the same meaning. Quine has argued in ‘TwoDogmas of Empiricism’ (1951) that both this notion andthe notion of an analytic statement stand on an unsoundfooting. These days few would adopt Quine’s stark posi-tion.

Syntax: Contrasted with semantics and pragmatics, syntaxconcerns the formal and grammatical features of linguis-tic structures.

Synthetic: A statement, claim or sentence which is true (false)partly in virtue of how things are. For instance, ‘there isa cat on the mat’ is, if true, a synthetic truth. Synthetictruths are opposed to analytic truths whose truth dependsonly on the meanings of the words. Until recently, it wasnot uncommon for philosophers to assume that all andonly analytic truths were necessary, and also that all andonly analytic truths were knowable a priori.

See Synthetic a prioriFurther reading: Miller (1998), ch. 4

Synthetic a priori : Claims, statements or sentences which aretrue or false not merely in virtue of the meanings of thewords, and yet are knowable a priori. Kant believed in theexistence of such claims partly because he had a very nar-row understanding of the notion of an analytic truth. Thenotion, or something like it, has been revived by Kripke.In his view the statement ‘S is a metre long’, where Snames the standard metre, is a contingent truth whichis knowable a priori. It is contingent truth because thatvery object S might not have been one metre in length,




and yet since it is the standard metre, we do not need tomeasure it to know its length. Kripke’s notion of the syn-thetic a priori is significantly different from what Kanthad in mind.

See Contingency

Systematically misleading expressions: In his paper ‘System-atically Misleading Expressions’ (1932) Gilbert Ryle ar-gued that many ordinary linguistic expressions are sys-tematically misleading about their logical form. Thus theexpression ‘the thought of going to hospital’ misleadinglyappears to refer to an object when it is appears in the sen-tence ‘Jones hates the thought of going to hospital’. Mis-leading formulations can be substituted by paraphrasesof the original sentence that are not equally liable to mis-lead.

Systematicity: A feature which is often attributed to linguisticunderstanding.

See Compositionality; Language of thought

T

T-schema: The schema first used by Alfred Tarski to formu-late his convention T. The schema is: S is True in languageL if and only if p. There are different accounts of whatcan be put in place of the place-holders S and p depend-ing on whether the schema is thought to apply directly tosentences of a language or propositions. If sentences, thenthe place of p is to be occupied by a sentence, and thatof S by a structural description or a quote name of thatsentence. If propositions, what replaces S is the name ofthe proposition that is expressed by the sentence that re-places p. The following are instances of T-schemes: ‘La




neve e bianca’ is True in Italian if and only if snow iswhite; ‘Snow is white’ is True in English if and only ifsnow is white; or given the second account: The propo-sition that snow is white is True if and only if snow iswhite. Tarski claimed that any materially adequate theoryof truth should have all the instances of the T-schema astheorems. This schema has also been used by Davidson

to develop a theory of meaning as a theory of truth.See Semantics, truth-conditional; Truth, semantic the-

ory of

T-sentence: Instances of the T-schema.See Convention T

Tacit knowledge: Some philosophers, such as Dummett, haveinvoked this notion to explain the relation that holds be-tween competent speakers of a language and a theoryof meaning, consisting of axioms and theorems for thatlanguage. Speakers are said to know these axioms andtheorems, although their knowledge of them is tacit be-cause they might not be able to formulate them or evenrecognise them as axioms or theorems when presentedwith them. Evans has argued that such knowledge thatspeakers are credited with cannot be taken as a genuinepropositional attitude because it does not interact in theappropriate way with other propositional attitudes heldby speakers. Instead, Evans proposed a dispositional ac-count.

See Semantics, truth-conditional


Tarski, Alfred (1901–83): A Polish logician whose permanentcontribution to philosophy is his formal definition of thesemantic concept of truth.

See Truth, Semantic theory of




Tautology: A logical truth in propositional logic, such aseither Cardiff is in Wales or Cardiff is not in Wales. Thissentence can be symbolised in propositional logic as ‘P ornot-P’ which is a logical truth because it is true no matterwhat is actually the case in the world.

Teleosemantics: One kind of reductive naturalistic account ofthe semantics of mental representations. Reductive natu-ralistic accounts aim to explain the meanings of mentalstates by showing that they are nothing over and abovesome combination of non-normative states or propertiesof the organism which can be accounted for in scientificterms. The basic idea behind the teleosemantic approachis to explain the content of some of the most basic mentalstates, typically the most basic desires for food, water orshelter in terms of biological functions. Supporters of theview claim that at least some mental states have biologi-cal purposes (teleology), which consist in bringing aboutsituations that enhance the survival of the organism. Theyalso claim that these situations give the contents or mean-ings of these mental states. Thus, the state whose biologi-cal function is to bring about that one has water is under-stood as a desire whose content is that one wants water.This approach has some distinctive advantages over someof its rivals because arguably it avoids both the misrep-resentation problem, since it allows for the possibility oferror and the disjunction problem. It does, however, facesome serious difficulties. First, its supporters need to of-fer a different kind of account of the contents of moresophisticated desires that appear to have no evolutionarypurpose, such as the desire to buy a Prada bag. Typically,they will account for these sophisticated desires by build-ing on the content of basic desires. Second, the theoryrules out the possibility of minds that have not evolved;yet it seems to be possible, albeit extremely unlikely, that




a mind might emerge suddenly by chance. Third, sup-porters of the view need to provide substantial evidencefor their claim that the contents of desires are explainedin terms of the biological purposes of the desires them-selves. This claim requires evidence in support because itgoes beyond stating only that at least some of our desireshave evolutionary origins, or even that some desires haveevolutionary purposes, since it states that these allegedpurposes explain the contents of the desires.

See Indicator semantics

Further reading: Neander (2004)

Tense: Tensed expressions such as the verbs ‘was’ or ‘willlaugh’ are used to indicate time. There are structural par-allels between the logic of tense and that of modality.There are also similarities between tensed sentences andsentences containing indexicals.

See De se attribution

Further reading: Galton (2003)

Term: A subsentential expression. Before modern logic wasdeveloped it was thought of as the primary logical unit.

Tertium non datur, principle of: The logical principle thatthere is no third truth-value besides truth and falsity.Some systems of logic reject this principle and have othertruth-values, such as indeterminate or neither true norfalse.

See Excluded middle, law of

Thought: For Frege, a thought is the objective content thatwe grasp when thinking. Thoughts, in Frege’s view, arenot psychological entities since they exist independentlyof our ability to think them. Further, thoughts are publicso that different individuals can literally have the same




thought, rather than having thoughts which are onlyexactly alike. Thus, for Frege a thought is a proposition.A thought, so understood, is the sense of a declarativesentence and has as its constituents the senses, or modesof presentation, of the logical parts of that sentence. Analternative to Frege’s theory can be found in Russell’swork. Russell takes at least some propositions, withwhich Fregean thoughts have been identified, to haveobjects and properties (rather than their modes of presen-tation) as their constituents. These are known as singular

propositions. It has been argued by John McDowell

that it is possible to wed a Fregean theory of thought ashaving modes of presentation as its constituents with theview that some thoughts are singular or object-involving.McDowell claims that some senses or modes of presenta-tion (Fregean thought-constituents) are object involvingsince the singular terms, whose senses they are, have nosemantic value if the objects they purport to refer to donot exist. He thus rejects the idea that these singular termscould have genuine senses when they lack a referent.

See Descriptive thought; Demonstrative thought;

Russellian thought; Singular thought

Token: The type–token distinction was introduced by Peirce.

It is a distinction between sorts of things (types) and theirinstances (tokens). The sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’consists of six word tokens and five word types (becauseit includes two tokens of the type ‘the’).

Tone: A term attributed to Frege by Dummett used to refer toany feature of the meaning of an expression that makesno difference to the truth or falsity of the sentences inwhich it occurs. Thus, the difference between ‘dead’ and‘deceased’ or between ‘sweat’ and ‘perspiration’ are dif-ferences in tone only. Tone, sense and force are the threeingredients of meaning as ordinarily understood.




Transformative grammar: It consists of rules of transforma-tion which transform the product of the generative gram-mar into sentences with the surface structure of language.

See Chomsky, Noam

Translation: This issue has been discussed by Quine, who ar-gued that it is indeterminate.

See Indeterminacy of translation; Radical translation

Truth: There is a vast array of different philosophical theoriesof truth: robust theories which take truth to be a propertywith a substantive metaphysical nature, and deflationaryor minimalist views which either deny that truth is a prop-erty or take it to have no substantive nature.

See Truth, deflationary theories of; Truth, robust theo-

ries of

Further reading: Alston (1996); Kirkham (1992)

Truth, as what works: Classical pragmatists defined truth aswhat is good in the way of belief. In their view, the truthof a belief is a matter of its practical utility on the wholeand in the long run. In other words, they think that ‘true’is the label we use for beliefs that, on the whole and inthe long run, work to get us what we want. Critics pointout that it is not inconceivable that some beliefs mightbe useful and yet false. They might also add that it is thetruth of a belief that might explain its utility, and not, asclassical pragmatists would have it, the other way round.

See Pragmatism; Truth, epistemic theories of

Further reading: Kirkham (1992), chs 3.2 and 3.3

Truth, coherence theory of: The view that truth is a matterof coherence. It is one of the oldest theories of truth go-ing back at least to the nineteenth-century neo-Hegelianphilosopher F. H. Bradley. According to this view, truthis primarily a property of a whole system of beliefs or




claims. Individual beliefs (claims) are said to be true onlyin so far as they belong to a system which is true. Thesystem is true if and only if the beliefs (claims) it includescohere with one another. This notion of coherence is noteasy to spell out. At the very least it requires consistency,since a system that includes contradictions is not coher-ent. But consistency alone is not enough. It is usually sup-plemented with ideas of mutual support, comprehensive-ness, explanatory power, and so forth. Thus, a systemof beliefs (claims) is said to be true if and only if it con-tains no contradictions, it has great power of explanation,it is comprehensive, the beliefs contained in it mutuallysupport each other to a high degree, and so forth. Sincethe notions of mutual support and of explanatory powerare epistemic concepts, the coherence theory belongs tothe family of the epistemic theories of truth. A persistentobjection to this theory consists in the fact that we canalways conceive of a system of beliefs (claims) that pos-sesses all these good epistemic features, but is neverthelessfalse. If such a system is genuinely conceivable truth can-not be the same as these good epistemic features, becausesomething can have these features but lack truth.

See Truth, epistemic theories of; Truth, robust theories

of

Further reading: Kirkham (1992), chs 3.5 and 7.4

Truth, correspondence theory of: The view that truth is a mat-ter of a relation of correspondence between sentences, ut-terances, beliefs, or propositions and reality. Thus, this isnot an epistemic theory of truth. It is the oldest theory oftruth which was arguably endorsed by Aristotle with hisclaim that ‘to say that that which is, is, and that which isnot is not, is true’. There are several versions of the cor-respondence relation which is intended to explain truth:correlation and congruence are the two most common.




The first takes correspondence to be a relation involvingexclusively whole sentences, claims, beliefs or proposi-tions and whole facts or states of affairs. Aristotle’s claimmight be an expression of this view. The second takes cor-respondence to involve also relations between the parts ofsentences, claims, beliefs or propositions and the parts ofthe facts or states of affairs which are said to correspondto them. This is the view put forward by Russell. Thecorrespondence theory of truth has intuitive appeal. Itsmain problems lie with providing a detailed specificationof the notions of fact or state of affairs and of correspon-dence so as to make fully clear what it means to say thatsomething corresponds to the facts.

See Truth, identity theory of; Truth, robust theories of

Further reading: Kirkham (1992), ch. 4

Truth, deflationary theories of: A family of theories of truthincluding the redundancy theory, the disquotational the-ory and the prosententional theory. These theories denythat ‘true’ refers to a substantive property. Some of thesetheories also include the claim that, despite contrary ap-pearances, ‘is true’ is not a predicate. Arguably, minimal-ism about truth, which is committed to treating truth asa merely formal property, belongs at least in spirit to thedeflationist family.

See Deflationism; Minimalism; Truth, disquotational

theory of; truth, minimalist theory of; Truth, prosenten-

tial theory of; Truth, redundancy theory of; Warranted

assertibility

Further reading: Stoljar (1997); Kirkham (1992) ch.10;

Truth, disquotational theory of: Supporters of this view claim‘is true’ is a disquotational device. Thus, for example,

A. ‘snow is white’ is true




has the same content asB. snow is whitesince the sole function of ‘. . . is true’ is to cancel out

the effect of the quotation marks.See Disquotation; Truth, deflationary theories of

Truth, epistemic theories of: These are robust theories thatidentify truth with a property which is, at least in part,epistemic. Epistemic properties are those that concernjustification, warrant, evidence or knowledge. Many dif-ferent theories belong to this family, including coheren-tism, verificationism and pragmatism. Epistemic theoriesof truth are typically associated with various forms ofanti-realism.

See Truth, as what works; Truth, coherence theory of;

Truth, verificationist theory of

Further reading: Alston (1996), ch. 7

Truth, identity theory: The view that the contents of thoughtsare identical with the facts that make them true.

Further reading: Hornsby (2001)

Truth, minimalist theory of: The view developed by Paul Hor-wich that involves thinking of truth as a merely formalproperty with no hidden structure. Consequently, theminimalist theory of truth consists of nothing more thana list of all the (uncontroversial) instances of the equiva-lence or T-schema: it is true that p if and only if p. In otherwords, the theory would consist of a list which includes:it is true that snow is white if and only if snow is white;it is true that London is in England if and only if Londonis in England; and so on and so forth.

See Deflationism; Minimalism; Truth, deflationary the-

ories of





Truth, prosentential theory of: A theory of truth which de-nies that the expression ‘. . . is true’ is a predicate, andconsequently also denies that truth is a property. Instead,supporters of the view claim that in all its uses ‘true’ ap-pears as a syncategorematic fragment of a prosentencesuch as ‘that is true’ or ‘it is true’. The advantage of thistheory over other versions of deflationism is its ability tocope with sentences such as ‘everything the pope says istrue’ which the prosententialist analyses as ‘for anythingthat can be said, if the pope said it, it is true’. The theorycannot be applied to uses of the noun ‘truth’.

See Anaphora; prosentence; Truth, deflationary theo-

ries of


Truth, redundancy theories of: All those theories that takethe expression ‘true’ to be redundant. Earlier versionstook ‘true’ to be force redundant, they stated that tosay that p is true is equivalent to asserting p, for anysentence p. These theories fail because, as Frege pointedout, they cannot explain embedded uses of ‘true’. Forexample, in the conditional ‘If it is true that today isWednesday, tomorrow is Thursday’, the sentence ‘todayis Wednesday’ which is said to be true, is not asserted.Later versions of this approach took ‘true’ to be content-redundant; they stated that the content or meaning of‘it is true that p’ is the same as the content of ‘p’ forany sentence p. The disquotational theory of truth isan example of a content-redundant theory of truth. Allredundancy theories are examples of a deflationist ap-proach to truth since they take truth to be metaphysicallyunimportant.

See Truth, deflationary theories of; Truth, disquota-

tional theory of





Truth, robust theories of: A theory of truth is robust when ittakes truth to be a property which has a substantial na-ture. Robust theories of truth are opposed to deflationaryaccounts that deny that ‘true’ stands for any property atall, and to minimalist accounts which hold that truth isa mere formal property with no nature or hidden struc-ture. Robust theories of truth include accounts of truthas correspondence, as coherence or theories that identifytruth with a suitable epistemic property.

See Truth, as what works; Truth, coherence theory of;

Truth, correspondence theory of; Truth, deflationary the-

ories of; Truth, verificationist theory of

Truth, semantic theory of: This theory was developed byTarski during the first half the twentieth century. Tarskitakes truth to be a semantic concept which is to be de-fined in terms of another semantic concept: satisfaction.For Tarski any correct theory of truth will have to meeta criterion of material adequacy which is known as con-

vention T. A theory of truth in L is materially adequateif and only if the theory entails for each sentence p of thelanguage, the corresponding T-sentence: S is True-in-L ifand only if p (where S is the name of p). If the languageonly had a finite number of sentences, the conjunctionof the corresponding T-sentences would provide an ade-quate theory of the truth predicate in that language. Forlanguages with an infinite number of sentences recursiverules are necessary. However, one cannot directly offera recursive theory of truth because some sentences, like‘Something is white’, which are not atomic, have con-stituents that are not sentences. Instead, they are obtainedfrom the open sentences and quantifiers. These compo-nents are not sentences and therefore do not have a truth-value. Tarski uses the notion of satisfaction of an opensentence or a sentence by a sequence of objects in order




to define truth. The intuitive idea of satisfaction is sim-ple: the open sentence ‘x1 is in England’ is satisfied by asequence of objects that has London in its first place, ifand only if London is in England. Open sentences are sat-isfied by some sequence and not others, but if a sentenceis satisfied by a sequence, it is satisfied by all sequences,and if it is not satisfied by a sequence, it is satisfied by nosequence. Hence, Tarski defines truth as satisfaction byall sequences.

Further reading: Kirkham (1992), ch. 5; Tarski (1944)and (1969)

Truth, verificationist theory of: It is the view that truth is amatter of verification. The main idea behind this posi-tion is that there is a close connection between the evi-dence available for a claim and its truth, such that truthcannot in principle outstrip verification. This idea can befleshed out thus: to say that a sentence is true is to say thatthere is a warrant to assert it. This view was first devel-oped by Dummett. It constitutes one of the main planksof the kind of anti-realism he has articulated in severalarticles.

See Acquisition argument; Manifestation argument;

Verification transcendence

Further Reading: Alston (1996), ch. 4; Kirkham(1992), ch. 8

Truth aptness: Sentences in an area of discourse such as ethicsor aesthetics are said to be truth apt if and only if theycan be assessed for their truth or falsity. Some support-ers of non-cognitivism about a given area of discoursedeny that sentences in that area are truth apt, so that intheir view nothing either true or false can be said in thatarea.





Truth-bearer: It is what is said to be true or false. More specif-ically, it is the object of which the property truth is pred-icated. Philosophers disagree about the nature of theseobjects. Some argue that propositions are the primarytruth-bearers, and that sentences or statements are saidto be true only in so far as they express true propositions.Others, who think that propositions are dubious entities,prefer to take the truth-bearers to be linguistic entitiessuch as utterances.

See truth-maker

Truth condition: The condition which must be satisfied forthe sentence or utterance, whose truth condition it is, tobe true. For instance, the truth condition of the sentence‘snow is white’ is snow’s being white.

See semantics, truth-conditional

Truth function: A function which takes truth-values as its ar-guments and yields truth-values as its values. Negation,disjunction, conjunction, the material conditional and thematerial biconditional are the best-known examples oftruth-functions.

See Conditional

Truth-functional sentential connective: A part of speech, suchas ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’ and ‘if . . . then . . . ’ which connects sen-tences. It is said to be truth-functional because the truthor falsity of the resultant composite sentence is a func-

tion of, or completely determined by, the truth-values ofthe component sentences. Thus, for instance, the com-posite sentence ‘Edinburgh is in Scotland and Cardiff isin Wales’ is true because both its component sentences aretrue. The meaning of a truth-functional sentential connec-tive is given by its associated truth-table.

See Truth function




Truth-maker: What makes a truth true. Thus, for instance, thetruth-maker of a sentence (say, ‘Pussy, the cat, is on themat’), or of one of its an utterances, or of the propositionit expresses is something – a fact (that Pussy is on the mat)or a thing (Pussy) – which makes that sentence, utteranceor proposition true. Not everybody agrees that every truthrequires a truth-maker. Rather, this is a view held only bysome of those philosophers who believe that truth is ametaphysical property with an interesting nature.

See Truth, robust theories of; Truth-bearer

Further reading: Armstrong (2004)

Truth-table: A table which provides all the possible com-binations of the truth-values taken by complex truth-functional sentences given the values assigned to theiratomic sentential constituents. For instance, a truth-tableshows that the conjunction of the sentences ‘it is raining’and ‘it is windy’ is true when it is both raining and windy,and false in all other cases. Thus:

It is raining It is windy It is rainingand it is windy

T T TT F FF T FF F F

Truth-tables are used to illustrate the meaning of truth-

functional sentential connectives. They also offer an ef-fective method for testing the validity of arguments inpropositional (sentential) logic.

See Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Truth-value: The value yielded by a function like a predicateor like a truth function for a given argument or argu-ments. Classically, there are only two truth-values: the




true and the false. More recently, non-classical logicianshave explored other types of truth-value such as both trueand false, neither true nor false, and indeterminate.

Truth-valueless sentence: A sentence is said to be truth-valueless if it lacks a truth value. Strawson introducedthis idea when he argued that sentences whose subjectfails to denote (e.g., Pegasus is a winged horse) can onlybe used to make pseudo-statements which lack a truth-value.

Twin Earth: The term is now used to refer to a family ofthought experiments the first of which was formulatedby Hilary Putnam. Putnam used the thought experi-ment to defend the slogan that meanings are not in thehead. This is the view, now known as semantic exter-

nalism, which proposes that physical and environmen-tal factors external to a speaker contribute to the in-dividuation of the meanings of her utterances. In histhought experiment, Putnam asks us to imagine a far-away planet, which he calls Twin Earth, that is an ex-act duplicate of Earth with the exception that on TwinEarth what fills the lakes, and is the odourless colour-less liquid drunk by the inhabitants of the planet, hasthe chemical composition XYZ and not H2O. Inhabi-tants of Twin Earth use the word ‘water’ when talkingabout this stuff. Putnam asks us to imagine an earthling,Oscar, and his doppelganger on Twin Earth, Twin Os-car, both living in 1750. Oscar points to the contents ofa glass and utters the words ‘That’s water’. Twin Os-car also points to the contents of a glass and utters thewords ‘That’s water’. Since they live in 1750 when chem-istry had not been developed, neither has any knowl-edge of the chemical composition of the stuff they pointto. Putnam’s intuition is that the stuff on Twin Earth is




not water, it is something else, let us dub it ‘twater’. Healso thinks that both Oscar and Twin Oscar say some-thing true by means of their utterances. Therefore, heconcludes that their words have different meanings. Os-car’s word ‘water’ is an English word that refers to water,namely H2O. Twin Oscar’s word ‘water’ is a word in TwinEnglish that refers to twater, namely XYZ. But now, sinceOscar and Twin Oscar are exactly alike, what gives theirwords different meanings must be not a matter of whatgoes on in their heads, but the result of differences (al-though these are undetectable by them) in their physicalenvironments.

See Broad content; Content; Individualism


Type See Token

U

Understanding: Contemporary philosophers tend to assim-ilate understanding, especially linguistic understandingwith knowledge. Thus, they provide accounts of whatspeakers must know in order to count as understandingthe language.

See Tacit knowledge

Universal: The existence of universals is a matter of dispute.If they exist, they are those abstract entities which are thereferents of general terms such as ‘red’ or ‘apple’. Thereare two versions of realism about universals. Some be-lieve universals to transcend particulars and to be capableof existing uninstantiated. Thus, the universal could existeven though no particular instance or example of it wouldexist. Others believe that universals only exist when




instantiated in particulars. Supporters of nominalism

deny the existence of universals.See Abstract entity

Universal grammar: First defined by Chomsky as the initialstage of the language faculty, he later characterises it as aset of innate universal principles combined with parame-ters whose settings vary from language to language.

Universe of discourse See Domain

Univocal meaning: Said of an expression when it is used withonly one meaning.

Unrestricted quantification See Quantification

Use: Wittgenstein famously remarked in the Philosophical In-vestigations (1953) that for the most part when we askabout the meaning of a term we are seeking instructionsabout how to use it. Subsequently, some philosophershave interpreted this remark to indicate that facts aboutmeaning can be reduced to facts about use. Others dis-agree because they think that meaning is irreducibly nor-mative. That is, they argue that the meaning of a termdetermines how it ought to be used (its correct use) ratherthan how it is used (its actual use).

See Berkeley, George; Dispositionalism; Meaning, use

theory of; Normativity of meaning

Use–mention distinction: In the sentence, ‘Cardiff is the capi-tal of Wales’, the words ‘Cardiff’ and ‘is’ are used. In thesentences ‘“Cardiff” has seven letters’ and ‘“Is” is a verb’those words are mentioned. Thus, to mention a word orexpression is to talk about the word or expression itself,rather than to use the word or expression to talk about




something else. In standard English quotations are typ-ically used to indicate that an expression is mentionedrather than used. The distinction between use and men-tion is not always mutually exclusive. At times expres-sions are both used and mentioned simultaneously. Con-sider, for example, the following: Davidson writes thatin lectures the introduction of quotation ‘was accompa-nied by a stern sermon on the sin of confusing the useand mention of expressions’. In this sentence the wordswithin the quotation marks are mentioned since they arepresented as Davidson’s words, but they are also usedsince the whole sentence is not about those words them-selves but what they convey.

Utterance: It consists in the writing or speaking of a sentenceor an expression by one individual at a specific time. Whatis uttered in an utterance is a token of a word, expressionor sentence type. Some philosophers, who are not keenon propositions, take utterances to be the primary truth-

bearers.

V

Vagueness: A term is said to be vague if its range of appli-cation has borderline cases. Thus, for instance ‘bald’ isvague since there are individuals who are neither clearlybald nor clearly not bald. The phenomenon of vaguenessis complicated by the existence of higher-order vague-ness. We have higher-order vagueness when the demar-cation of borderline cases is also vague. Thus, we do notjust have borderline cases of application, we have alsoinstances where it is a borderline case whether the caseis a borderline case. There are competing philosophicalaccounts of vagueness. Some see vagueness as a feature




of reality itself; others take it to be a feature of languageor a consequence of human ignorance.

Further reading: Williamson (1996)

Validity: An argument is said to be valid if and only if itspremises offer the right kind of support for its conclu-sion. The most common notion of validity is deductivevalidity, which is the validity of a deductive argument.There are two definitions of this latter notion. An argu-ment is deductively valid if and only if it is not possiblefor the conclusion to be false when all the premises aretrue. Alternatively, an argument is deductively valid if andonly if it is necessarily the case that if all the premises aretrue, the conclusion is also true. In classical logic thesedefinitions are equivalent.

Value: In mathematics and in logic the output of a function.For example, the value of the addition function for thearguments 2 and 3 is 5.

Value-range (Werthverlaufe): A technical term used by Frege

to refer to the extension of a function. A concept is forFrege a one-place function from objects to truth-values.Thus, for instance, the concept of being a cat is a functionthat yields the values true or false for each object in theuniverse. Its extension is the class of all things for whichthe function takes the value true. In other words, its ex-tension is the class that has as a member each and everycat. Frege’s value-range for this concept is identical tothis class. It is understood in terms of the range of values,true or false, associated by the function with each objectin the universe. But, for Frege, all sorts of functions, notonly concepts, have value-ranges that give their extension.Different functions can have the same value-range or ex-tensions. Thus, the mathematical functions x2 − 4x and




x (x − 4) have the same value-range, because they yieldthe same course of values for each argument. Similarlythe concepts of being a trilateral closed figure and being atriangular closed figure have the same extension becauseany closed figure with three sides has three angles, andvice versa.

Variable: In logic, variables are place-holders. They offer aconvenient means of representing gaps in sentences orarguments which can be filled by a name or a sentence.Thus, in ‘x runs’, ‘x’ is variable for which a name ‘John’,for instance, can be substituted. In predicate logic, the oc-currences of variables are distinguished between free andbound. A bound occurrence of a variable is one that isassociated with a quantifier. For example, in logic, ‘ev-erything has a mass’ is rendered ‘for everything x, x hasa mass’. The variable ‘x’ is in this instance bound by thequantifier everything. The occurrence of ‘x’ in ‘x runs’,on the other hand, is free because it is not bound by aquantifier. Sentences do not have free variables as com-ponents.

Verdictive: A term coined by Austin for a type of (illocution-

ary) speech act which consists in the giving of a verdictor the exercising of judgement. The acquittal of a defen-dant by a jury by uttering the words ‘Not guilty’ is theparadigmatic example of a verdictive.

Verification condition: The verification conditions of a state-ment are the conditions under which it would be verified.Thus, the existence of a black swan is the condition thatverifies the statement that some swans are black. Logi-cal positivists have developed accounts of the meaning ofstatements in terms of their verification conditions.

See Logical positivism; Meaning, verification theory of




Verification principle: The principle according to which themeaning of any a posteriori sentence or statement isgiven by its method of verification. The principle wasfirst formulated in terms of conclusive verification, sothat only statements that could actually be conclusivelyverified were thought to be meaningful. The statementthat Boston is in Massachusetts would have a mean-ing, according to this view because the observation thatBoston is in Massachusetts conclusively verifies it. Thereare, however, many other statements which would failto have a meaning in accordance with this formulationof the principle. Some of these seem legitimate scientificstatements. They include all universal statements sincethese could always be falsified by a future observation,and are therefore never conclusively verified. They alsoinclude statements about any part of the universe whichin practice or in principle is not accessible to observation.Ayer has attempted to provide weaker formulations ofthe principle which would treat statements such as theseas meaningful. He took statements to be meaningful ifthey could be weakly verified, which is to say if there arepossible observations which would render the truth ofthe statement probable. Unfortunately, this formulation,once made more precise, allows for far too many state-ments to count as meaningful. Critics of the view oftencomplain that any statement of the verification princi-ple fails by its own lights to be meaningful since thereare no possible observations which would make its truthprobable. Supporters might reply that the principle is notintended as a factual statement.

See Logical positivism; Meaning, verification theory of


Verification transcendence: The truth conditions of a propo-sition are said to transcend verification if and only if even




in ideal conditions we are not in a position to tell whetherthey obtain or not. For Dummett this account of the truthconditions of sentences in a given area of discourse is atrademark of semantic realism.

Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 9.3

Verificationism See Meaning, verification theory of

W

Warranted assertibility: A sentence has this property whenone is entitled to its assertion. Wright has argued thatsupporters of deflationism about truth are committed tothe identification of truth with warranted assertibility. Healso claims that such an identification is mistaken. Heconcludes that deflationism is untenable.

See Superassertibility

Further reading: Wright (1992), ch. 1

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951): Born in Austria,Wittgenstein spent most of his life in Britain. He waseducated at Cambridge where he studied with Russell.He soon held teaching positions at Cambridge, wherehe taught the next generation of British philosophers.Wittgenstein had an uneasy relation with philosophyand with Cambridge. He volunteered to fight for Austriain the First World War, and subsequently he abandonedacademia to be become a school teacher and thena gardener. He returned to Cambridge in 1929 andlectured in the 1930s, before volunteering as a medicalorderly in Newcastle during the Second World War. Hefinally resigned from Cambridge in 1947. Wittgenstein’scontribution to philosophy is immense. In his earlywork the Tractatus (1922) he developed the idea of




truth-tables as well as the picture theory of meaning. Inthe Philosophical Investigations (1953) he formulatedthe private language argument, his rule-following con-siderations discussed the relation of meaning to use, anddeveloped the vocabulary of language games and family

resemblances.See Meaning, picture theory of; Ostension; Saying-

showing

Further reading: Kenny (1975)

Word: The individuation of word-types is much harder thanit might appear at first sight. Take the sentence ‘Britishleft waffles on Falkland Islands’. This sentence is open totwo interpretations. In one of them ‘waffles’ functions asa verb, in the other as a name. If we were to translatethe sentence into logic we would use different symbolsfor ‘waffles’ depending on whether it is a verb or a name.There are many examples of this phenomenon (knownas homonymy) which indicate that we cannot rely onorthography (or phonetics) alone to individuate words,that is to recognise for any two signs whether they aretokens of the same or of different words.

Word meaning: Many philosophers, following Frege’s con-

text principle, argue that sentential meaning is primaryin any philosophical account of meaning. The meaningsof words, according to this view, are derivative; it is amatter of the contributions made by the words to themeanings of the sentences in which they can occur. Onthe other hand, the compositionality of language suggeststhat the meaning of a sentence is determined by the mean-ings of its constituent words together with facts about thesentence’s structure. This position suggests that wordmeaning is primary and sentence meaning is derivative.




Wright, Crispin (1942–): A British philosopher who is at thetime of writing working at the University of St. Andrewsand at Columbia University. He is well known for his re-vival of Frege’s logicism in arithmetic, for his refinementof Dummettian semantic anti-realism and for his elabo-ration of the notion of response-dependence.

Z

Zeugmas: This is a figure of speech in which one word whichqualifies other words in the sentence is used with two dif-ferent senses. Gilbert Ryle’s famous example of a zeugmais: ‘She came home in a sedan chair and a flood of tears’.The use of ‘in’ in that sentence is zeugmatic because it doestwo jobs: it indicates what she travelled in, and the emo-tional state she was in. These are different senses of ‘in’.


EUBK026-Tanesini.cls-Sabon September 30, 2006 14:20

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