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From Language to Thought: On the Logical Foundations of Semantic Theory
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| 자료유형 | 학위논문 |
|---|---|
| 서명/저자사항 | From Language to Thought: On the Logical Foundations of Semantic Theory. |
| 개인저자 | Sbardolini, Giorgio. |
| 단체저자명 | The Ohio State University. Philosophy. |
| 발행사항 | [S.l.]: The Ohio State University., 2019. |
| 발행사항 | Ann Arbor: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019. |
| 형태사항 | 185 p. |
| 기본자료 저록 | Dissertations Abstracts International 81-02A. Dissertation Abstract International |
| ISBN | 9781085658072 |
| 학위논문주기 | Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Ohio State University, 2019. |
| 일반주기 |
Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 81-02, Section: A.
Advisor: Shapiro, Stewart. |
| 이용제한사항 | This item must not be sold to any third party vendors. |
| 요약 | Sentences have meanings: the things we say, and the things we believe. Semantics is the theory of meaning, and thoughts, i.e. the meanings of sentences, are among the objects of semantic theory. But what are meanings? What is the place of meaning in the natural world? In the discussion below, I shall motivate formal constraints on the logical and metaphysical foundations of semantic theory.Some philosophers have suggested that semantics is a piece of modal metaphysics. The modal approach to meaning covers a lot of empirical and conceptual ground, but imposes a sharp separation between epistemology and metaphysics. The modal approach ultimately fails, since the mechanism invoked to recombine the metaphysical with the epistemic leads to inconsistency. The lesson is that semantics is not modal metaphysics, and that sameness of meaning is a hyperintensional notion.Other intensional paradoxes follow more generally from assuming that thoughts can be individuated to a more or less precise degree, i.e. as the only thoughts having a certain property. These assumptions are often very plausible. Some contemporary accounts of the intensional paradoxes save consistency at the cost of rejecting these plausible assumptions. This puzzling situation leads naturally to wonder about the conditions for referring to thoughts: how do we individuate them?Reference to abstract objects may be achieved by singular terms whose semantic properties are established by abstraction. On this proposal, reference is explained by a criterion of identity for the referents, which is in turn established by an abstraction principle on which sameness of meaning is equated with hyperintensional equivalence. Such notion cannot be as fine-grained as contemporary accounts of structured propositions take it to be, on pain of ruling out a compelling pragmatic account of redundancy in the use of language: speakers naturally take certain pairs of sentences to have the same meaning, so that syntactic complexity does not inevitably amount to semantic difference.Any plausible hyperintensional notion of equivalence faces, in higher-order logic, the Russell-Myhill paradox. However, consistency can be restored by a dynamic understanding of abstraction, on which the truth conditions of identity statements are defined incrementally. From this perspective, there are differences between what is absolutely true, i.e. for any refinement of the identity relation, and what is potentially true, i.e. for some accessible refinement. This distinction tames Russell-Myhill while still leaving room for hyperintensionality, and accommodates plausible assumptions about the individuation of thoughts.On the resulting picture, thoughts are "shadows of sentences", to use an image of W.V.O. Quine, and quantification over thoughts is understood predicatively. This is the logic and metaphysics for the foundations of semantics. |
| 일반주제명 | Logic. Philosophy. Linguistics. |
| 언어 | 영어 |
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