front cover of Algebraic Semantics in Language and Philosophy
Algebraic Semantics in Language and Philosophy
Godehard Link
CSLI, 1997
The philosophical approach of this volume is mainly structuralist, using logical tools to investigate the formal structure of various kinds of objects in our world, as characterised by language and as systematised by philosophy. This volume mainly analyses the structural properties of collections or pluralities (with applications to the philosophy of set theory), homogeneous objects like water, and the semantics and philosophy of events. This book thereby complements algebraic work that has been done on other philosophical entities, i.e. propositions, properties, relations, or situations. Located in the triangle of language, logic and philosophy, this volume is unique in combining the resources of different ¹elds in an interdisciplinary enterprise. Half of the fourteen chapters of this volume are original papers, complementing the collection of the author's previously published essays on the subject.
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Articulating Reasons
An Introduction to Inferentialism
Robert B. Brandom
Harvard University Press, 2001

Robert B. Brandom is one of the most original philosophers of our day, whose book Making It Explicit covered and extended a vast range of topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language--the very core of analytic philosophy. This new work provides an approachable introduction to the complex system that Making It Explicit mapped out. A tour of the earlier book's large ideas and relevant details, Articulating Reasons offers an easy entry into two of the main themes of Brandom's work: the idea that the semantic content of a sentence is determined by the norms governing inferences to and from it, and the idea that the distinctive function of logical vocabulary is to let us make our tacit inferential commitments explicit.

Brandom's work, making the move from representationalism to inferentialism, constitutes a near-Copernican shift in the philosophy of language--and the most important single development in the field in recent decades. Articulating Reasons puts this accomplishment within reach of nonphilosophers who want to understand the state of the foundations of semantics.

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Dynamic Conceptual Semantics
A Logico-Philosophical Investigation into Concept Formation and Understanding
Renate Bartsch
CSLI, 1998
Presented in this book is a theory of concept formation and understanding that does not make use of a notion of an innate mental language as a means of concept representation. Instead, experimental concepts are treated semantically as stabilising structuring of growing sets of data, which are sets of experienced satisfaction situations for expressions, and theoretical concepts are based on coherent sets of general sentences held true. There are two kinds of structures to be established: general concepts by means of similarity sets under perspectives and historical concepts. This gives rise to a theory of understanding new situations and expressions by integrating new data into established sets of data salva stability, or by extending the conceptual structure in a metaphorical or metonymical way. The theory provides a way to understand what identity between propositional attitudes amounts to, especially how people can have more or less the same belief.
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Introduction to Natural Language Semantics
Henriëtte de Swart
CSLI, 1998
Semantics is defined as the study of meaning expressed by elements of a language or combinations thereof. Utterances are not just noises or scribbles, they are used to convey information, and they are linked with kinds of events and with states of mind.

This text examines what issues semantics, as a theory of meaning, should address; determining what the meanings of words of the language are and how to semantically combine elements of a language to build up complex meanings. Logical languages are then developed as formal metalanguages to natural language. Subsequent chapters address propositional logic, the syntax and semantics of (first-order) predicate logic as an extension of propositional logic, and Generalized Quantifier theory. Going beyond extensional theory, Henri'tte de Swart relativizes the interpretation of expressions to times to account for verbal tense, time adverbials and temporal connectives and introduces possible worlds to model intensions, modal adverbs and modal auxiliaries.

This broad overview of natural language semantics should cover most of the points addressed in an introductory course. Numerous exercises punctuate each chapter and an example exam based on the materials presented is included, making this volume a perfect textbook and resource for any undergraduate or graduate-level introductory course in semantics.
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Linguistic Individuals
Almerindo E. Ojeda
CSLI, 1993
The goal of semantics is the insightful identification of the set of meanings that human language can express- the contruction of what has been called the metaphysics of natural language. A formal attempt to contruct such a metaphysics has generally involved identifying a set of individuals referred to as the universe of discourse. Until recently, however, semanticists have had little to say about the structure of this set. Ojeda argues that the structure of the set of linguistic individuals is a mereology, that is, the domain of discourse is made up of kinds and the instantiations of kinds. His argument forms the four main slections of this work. The first examines the semantics of countability (countable stems, number inflection, adjectives of measure, and determiners); the second explores the semantics of uncountability (the individuation of reference, and non-Boolean mass predicates); the third takes up the semantics of nominality (the mereological homogenetiy of mouns and the constraints on nouns in classifier languages); and the last investigates the semantics of the conceptional neauter, a pronominal category discussed by Otto Jesperson. Ojeda's investigations contribute to the characterization of linguistiv individuals and proide for a new basis for the semantics of individuation. Almerindo E. Ojeda is a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Davis. Center for the Study of Language and Information- Lecture Notes, Number 7
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The Linguistic Turn
Essays in Philosophical Method
Edited by Richard M. Rorty
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The Linguistic Turn provides a rich and representative introduction to the entire historical and doctrinal range of the linguistic philosophy movement. In two retrospective essays titled "Ten Years After" and "Twenty-Five Years After," Rorty shows how his book was shaped by the time in which it was written and traces the directions philosophical study has taken since.

"All too rarely an anthology is put together that reflects imagination, command, and comprehensiveness. Rorty's collection is just such a book."—Review of Metaphysics
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Logic and Representation
Robert C. Moore
CSLI, 1993
Logic and Representation brings together a collection of essays, written over a period of ten years, that apply formal logic and the notion of explicit representation of knowledge to a variety of problems in artificial intelligence, natural language semantics, and the philosophy of mind and language. Particular attention is paid to modeling and reasoning about knowledge and belief, including reasoning about one's own beliefs, and the semantics of sentences about knowledge and belief. Robert C. Moore begins by exploring the role of logic in artificial intelligence, considering logic as an analytical tool., as a basis for reasoning systems, and as a programming language. He then looks at various logical analyses of propositional attitudes, including possible-world models, syntactic models, and models based on Russellian propositions. Next Moore examines autoepistemic logic, a logic for modeling reasoning about one's own beliefs. Rounding out the volume is a section on the semantics of natural language, including a survey of problems in semantic representation; a detailed study of the relations among events, situations, and adverbs; and a presentation of a unification-based approach to semantic interpretation. Robert C. Moore is principal scientist of the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International.
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Logic, Language, and Meaning, Volume 1
Introduction to Logic
L. T. F. Gamut
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Although the two volumes of Logic, Language, and Meaning can be used independently of one another, together they provide a comprehensive overview of modern logic as it is used as a tool in the analysis of natural language. Both volumes provide exercises and their solutions.

Volume 1, Introduction to Logic, begins with a historical overview and then offers a thorough introduction to standard propositional and first-order predicate logic. It provides both a syntactic and a semantic approach to inference and validity, and discusses their relationship. Although language and meaning receive special attention, this introduction is also accessible to those with a more general interest in logic.

In addition, the volume contains a survey of such topics as definite descriptions, restricted quantification, second-order logic, and many-valued logic. The pragmatic approach to non-truthconditional and conventional implicatures are also discussed. Finally, the relation between logic and formal syntax is treated, and the notions of rewrite rule, automation, grammatical complexity, and language hierarchy are explained.
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front cover of Logic, Language, and Meaning, Volume 2
Logic, Language, and Meaning, Volume 2
Intensional Logic and Logical Grammar
L. T. F. Gamut
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Although the two volumes of Logic, Language, and Meaning can be used independently of one another, together they provide a comprehensive overview of modern logic as it is used as a tool in the analysis of natural language. Both volumes provide exercises and their solutions.
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Making It Explicit
Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment
Robert B. Brandom
Harvard University Press, 1994

What would something unlike us--a chimpanzee, say, or a computer--have to be able to do to qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as a key to this condition. Making It Explicit is an investigation into the nature of language--the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures--that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language. Making It Explicit is the first attempt to work out in detail a theory that renders linguistic meaning in terms of use--in short, to explain how semantic content can be conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices.

At the center of this enterprise is a notion of discursive commitment. Being able to talk--and so in the fullest sense being able to think--is a matter of mastering the practices that govern such commitments, being able to keep track of one's own commitments and those of others. Assessing the pragmatic significance of speech acts is a matter of explaining the explicit in terms of the implicit. As he traces the inferential structure of the social practices within which things can be made conceptually explicit, the author defines the distinctively expressive role of logical vocabulary. This expressive account of language, mind, and logic is, finally, an account of who we are.

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Meaning, Intentions, and Argumentation
Kepa Korta and Garmendia
CSLI, 2008
What is the relationship between words and reality? Which are the best ways to convince or persuade other people? Besides philosophy and grammar, ancient Greeks developed rhetoric to answer these questions. The twentieth-century brought the birth of semantics and pragmatics for a systematic study of linguistic meaning and linguistic acts. Meaning, Intentions, and Argumentation brings together the work of leading contemporary scholars approaching those issues from various perspectives—from the old disciplines of philosophy and rhetoric to the newest thinking on semantics and pragmatics—to illuminate crucial aspects of meaning, communication, argumentation, and persuasion.
 
 
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A Paradigm for Program Semantics
Power Structures and Duality
Chris Brink and Ingrid Rewitsky
CSLI, 2001
This book provides a synthesis of four versions of program semantic—srelational semantics, predicate transformer semantics, information systems, and domain theory—showing, through an exhaustive case study analysis, that it is possible to do back-and-forth translation from any of these versions of program semantics into any of the others, and demonstrating that while there are many variations of each, in principle they may be thought of as intertranslatable.
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Philosophical Remarks
Ludwig Wittgenstein
University of Chicago Press, 1980
When in May 1930, the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, had to decide whether to renew Wittgenstein's research grant, it turned to Bertrand Russell for an assessment of the work Wittgenstein had been doing over the past year. His verdict: "The theories contained in this new work . . . are novel, very original and indubitably important. Whether they are true, I do not know. As a logician who likes simplicity, I should like to think that they are not, but from what I have read of them I am quite sure that he ought to have an opportunity to work them out, since, when completed, they may easily prove to constitute a whole new philosophy."

"[Philosophical Remarks] contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mind and of mathematics. Principally, he here discusses the role of indispensable in language, criticizing Russell's The Analysis of Mind. He modifies the Tractatus's picture theory of meaning by stressing that the connection between the proposition and reality is not found in the picture itself. He analyzes generality in and out of mathematics, and the notions of proof and experiment. He formulates a pain/private-language argument and discusses both behaviorism and the verifiability principle. The work is difficult but important, and it belongs in every philosophy collection."—Robert Hoffman, Philosophy

"Any serious student of Wittgenstein's work will want to study his Philosophical Remarks as a transitional book between his two great masterpieces. The Remarks is thus indispensible for anyone who seeks a complete understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy."—Leonard Linsky, American Philosophical Association
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Propositional Attitudes
The Role of Content in Logic, Language, and Mind
Edited by C. Anthony Anderson and Joseph Owens
CSLI, 1990
These papers treat those issues involved in formulating a logic of propositional attitudes and consider the relevance of the attitudes to the continuing study of both the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. C. Anthony Anderson is professor of philosophy and Joseph Owens is assistant professor of philosophy, both at the University of Minnesota.
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Pursuit of Truth
W. V. Quine
Harvard University Press, 1990

In Pursuit of Truth W. V. Quine gives us his latest word on issues to which he has devoted many years. As he says in the preface: “In these pages I have undertaken to update, sum up, and clarify my variously intersecting views on cognitive meaning, objective reference, and the grounds of knowledge.”

The pursuit of truth is a quest that links observation, theory, and the world. Various faulty efforts to forge such links have led to much intellectual confusion. Quine’s efforts to get beyond the confusion begin by rejecting the very idea of binding together word and thing, rejecting the focus on the isolated word. For him, observation sentences and theoretical sentences are the alpha and omega of the scientific enterprise. Notions like “idea” and ”meaning” are vague, but a sentence—now there’s something you can sink your teeth into. Starting thus with sentences, Quine sketches an epistemological setting for the pursuit of truth. He proceeds to show how reification and reference contribute to the elaborate structure that can indeed relate science to its sensory evidence.

In this book Quine both summarizes and moves ahead. Rich, lively chapters dissect his major concerns: evidence, reference, meaning, intention, and truth. “Some points,” he writes, “have become clearer in my mind in the eight years since Theories and Things. Some that were already clear in my mind have become clearer on paper. And there are some that have meanwhile undergone substantive change for the better.”

This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life’s work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth century. The book is concise and elegantly written, as one would expect, and does not assume the reader’s previous acquaintance with Quine’s writings. Throughout, it is marked by Quine’s wit and economy of style.

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Pursuit of Truth
Revised Edition
W. V. Quine
Harvard University Press, 1992

In Pursuit of Truth W. V. Quine gives us his latest word on issues to which he has devoted many years. As he says in the preface: "In these pages I have undertaken to update, sum up, and clarify my variously intersecting views on cognitive meaning, objective reference, and the grounds of knowledge?'The pursuit of truth is a quest that links observation, theory, and the world. Various faulty efforts to forge such links have led to much intellectual confusion. Quine's efforts to get beyond the confusion begin by rejecting the very idea of binding together word and thing, rejecting the focus on the isolated word. For him, observation sentences and theoretical sentences are the alpha and omega ofthe scientific enterprise. Notions like "idea" and "meaning" are vague, but a sentence-now there's something you can sink your teeth into.

Starting thus with sentences, Quine sketches an epistemological setting for the pursuit of truth. He proceeds to show how reification and reference contribute to the elaborate structure that can indeed relate science to its sensory evidence.In this book Quine both summarizes and moves ahead. Rich, lively chapters dissect his major concerns-evidence, reference, meaning, intension, and truth. "Some points;' he writes, "have become clearer in my mind in the eight years since Theories and Things. Some that were already clear in my mind have become clearer on paper. And there are some that have meanwhile undergone substantive change for the better." This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life's work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth century. The book is concise and elegantly written, as one would expect, and does not assume the reader's previous acquaintance with Quine's writings. Throughout, it is marked by Quine's wit and economy of style.

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Reference and Reflexivity
2nd Edition
John Perry
CSLI, 2012
In this volume John Perry develops his “reflexive-referential” account of indexicals, demonstratives, and proper names. For this new second edition, Perry has added a new preface and two chapters on the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and on attitude reports. He reveals a coherent and structured family of contents—from reflexive contents that place conditions on their actual utterance to fully incremental contents that place conditions only on the objects of reference—reconciling the legitimate insights of both the referentialist and descriptivist traditions.
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Referencialismo critico
le teoria reflexivo-referencial del significado
John Perry
CSLI, 2006

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The Semantic Conception of Theories and Scientific Realism
Frederick Suppe
University of Illinois Press, 1989
"An authoritative account of
  the semantic conception of theories by one of its chief developers. Suppe has
  always seen the semantic conception as providing a way of moving beyond empiricist
  philosophies of science. This book provides the definitive account of his views
  not only on the issue of realism, but also on a variety of other issues central
  to the philosophy of science."
  -- Ronald N. Giere, author of Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach
 
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Situations and Attitudes
Jon Barwise and John Perry
CSLI, 1983
In this provocative book, Barwise and Perry tackle the slippery subject of "meaning," a subject that has long vexed linguists, language philosophers, and logicians. Meaning does not exist solely within words and sentences but resides largely in the situation and the attitudes brought to it by those involved. The authors present an unusually lucid treatment of important innovations in the field of natural semantics, contending that the standard view of logic (as derived from Frege, Russell, and work in mathematics and logic) is inappropriate for many of the uses to which it has been put by scholars. In Situations and Attitudes they provide the basics of a realistic model-theoretic semantics of natural language, explain the main ideas of the theory, and contrast them with those of competing theories.
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Studies in the Way of Words
Paul Grice
Harvard University Press, 1989

This volume, Paul Grice’s first book, includes the long-delayed publication of his enormously influential 1967 William James Lectures. But there is much, much more in this work. Grice himself has carefully arranged and framed the sequence of essays to emphasize not a certain set of ideas but a habit of mind, a style of philosophizing.

Grice has, to be sure, provided philosophy with crucial ideas. His account of speaker-meaning is the standard that others use to define their own minor divergences or future elaborations. His discussion of conversational implicatures has given philosophers an important tool for the investigation of all sorts of problems; it has also laid the foundation for a great deal of work by other philosophers and linguists about presupposition. His metaphysical defense of absolute values is starting to be considered the beginning of a new phase in philosophy. This is a vital book for all who are interested in Anglo-American philosophy.

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Words and Contents
Richard Vallée
CSLI, 2018
The papers collected in Richard Vallée’s Words and Contents span twenty-one years of research. Beginning with referring expressions and later addressing context sensitivity, the book examines how specific words contribute to the contents of utterances and the philosophical issues that surround them. Within these papers, Vallée navigates the discovery and exploration of different modes of expression and perspectives on language.
 
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