Propositional Attitudes

Propositional Attitudes PDF

Author: Mark Richard

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1990-02-23

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9780521388191

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Beginning with a spirited defense of the view that propositions are structured and that propositional structure is "psychologically real," the author develops a subtle view of propositions and attitude ascription.

Propositional Attitudes

Propositional Attitudes PDF

Author: C. Anthony Anderson

Publisher: Stanford Univ Center for the Study

Published: 1990-01-01

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780937073506

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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.

Structured Meanings

Structured Meanings PDF

Author: M. J. Cresswell

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780262031080

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M. J. Cresswell is a logician and philosopher of language who has been a major continuing influence on the growth and development of formal semantics over the past 15 years or more. This book is the outgrowth of years of work on propositional attitudes, the hardest problem in semantics. In it, he traces the problem to the foundations of semantics and solves it by distinguishing between the result of the composition of the simple parts of complex expressions and structure consisting of the uncomposed parts. Cresswell explains the basis of the great intuitive appeal of structured meanings, and why previous attempts, from Carnap's notion of intensional isomorphism on, to use them to solve the propositional attitudes problem have been unsuccessful. His own formalization is integrated into a model-theoretic framework which is capable of incorporating and extending all the insights obtained from Montague's semantics. M. J. Cresswell is Professor of Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of Logics and Languages, in which he developed an alternative version of Montague Grammar, as well as many articles on possible-worlds semantics; and coauthor with G. E. Hughes of An Introduction to Modal Logicand A Companion to Modal Logic, the standard works in the field. A Bradford Book.

Models for Modalities

Models for Modalities PDF

Author: Jaakko Hintikka

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 9401017115

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The papers collected in this volume were written over a period of some eight or nine years, with some still earlier material incorporated in one of them. Publishing them under the same cover does not make a con tinuous book of them. The papers are thematically connected with each other, however, in a way which has led me to think that they can naturally be grouped together. In any list of philosophically important concepts, those falling within the range of application of modal logic will rank high in interest. They include necessity, possibility, obligation, permission, knowledge, belief, perception, memory, hoping, and striving, to mention just a few of the more obvious ones. When a satisfactory semantics (in the sense of Tarski and Carnap) was first developed for modal logic, a fascinating new set of methods and ideas was thus made available for philosophical studies. The pioneers of this model theory of modality include prominently Stig Kanger and Saul Kripke. Several others were working in the same area independently and more or less concurrently. Some of the older papers in this collection, especially 'Quantification and Modality' and 'Modes of Modality', serve to clarify some of the main possibilities in the semantics of modal logics in general.

Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude

Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude PDF

Author: Gisle Andersen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2000-07-15

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 9027283745

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In interactive discourse we not only express propositions, but we also express different attitudes to them. That is, we communicate how our mind entertains those propositions that we express. A speaker is able to express an attitude of belief, desire, hope, doubt, fear, regret or pretence that a given proposition represents a true state of affairs. This collection of papers explores the contribution of particles and other uninflected mood-indicating function words to the expression of propositional attitude in the broad sense. Some languages employ this type of attitude-marking device extensively, even for the expression of basic moods and basic speech act categories, other languages use such markers sparsely and always in interaction with syntactic form. Both types of language are examined in this volume, which includes studies of attitudinal markers in Amharic, English, Gascon, Occitan, German, Greek, Hausa, Hungarian, Japanese, Norwegian and Swahili. The theoretical emphasis is on issues such as interpretive vs. descriptive use of utterances or utterance parts, procedural semantics, linguistic underdetermination of the proposition expressed and the speaker’s communicated attitude to it, higher-level explicatures in the relevance-theoretic sense, the explicit — implicit distinction, as well as processes of grammaticalization and negotiation of propositional attitude in spoken interaction.

A Companion to the Philosophy of Language

A Companion to the Philosophy of Language PDF

Author: Bob Hale

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-02-15

Total Pages: 1176

ISBN-13: 1118972082

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“Providing up-to-date, in-depth coverage of the central question, and written and edited by some of the foremost practitioners in the field, this timely new edition will no doubt be a go-to reference for anyone with a serious interest in the philosophy of language.” Kathrin Glüer-Pagin, Stockholm University Now published in two volumes, the second edition of the best-selling Companion to the Philosophy of Language provides a complete survey of contemporary philosophy of language. The Companion has been greatly extended and now includes a monumental 17 new essays – with topics chosen by the editors, who curated suggestions from current contributors – and almost all of the 25 original chapters have been updated to take account of recent developments in the field. In addition to providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts, and debates, each essay introduces new and original contributions to ongoing debates, as well as addressing a number of new areas of interest, including two-dimensional semantics, modality and epistemic modals, and semantic relationism. The extended “state-of-the-art” chapter format allows the authors, all of whom are internationally eminent scholars in the field, to incorporate original research to a far greater degree than competitor volumes. Unrivaled in scope, this volume represents the best contemporary critical thinking relating to the philosophy of language.

The Measure of Mind

The Measure of Mind PDF

Author: Robert J. Matthews

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2010-04-29

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0191615048

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The Measure of Mind provides a sustained critique of a widely held representationalist view of propositional attitudes and their role in the production of thought and behaviour. On this view, having a propositional attitude is a matter of having an explicit representation that plays a particular causal/computational role in the production of thought and behaviour. Robert J. Matthews argues that this view does not enjoy the theoretical or the empirical support that proponents claim for it; moreover, the view misconstrues the role of propositional attitude attributions in cognitive scientific theorizing. The Measure of Mind goes on to develop an alternative measurement-theoretic account of propositional attitudes and the sentences by which we attribute them. On this account, the sentences by which we attribute propositional attitudes function semantically like the sentences by which we attribute a quantity of some physical magnitude (e.g., having a mass of 80 kilos). That is, in much the same way that we specify a quantity of some physical magnitude by means of its numerical representative on a measurement scale, we specify propositional attitude of a given type by means of its representative in a linguistically-defined measurement space. Propositional attitudes turn out to be causally efficacious aptitudes for thought and behaviour, not semantically evaluable mental particulars of some sort. Matthews' measurement-theoretic account provides a more plausible view of the explanatorily relevant properties of propositional attitudes, the semantics of propositional attitude attributions, and the role of such attributions in computational cognitive scientific theorizing.

Evolutionary Psychology and the Propositional-attitudes

Evolutionary Psychology and the Propositional-attitudes PDF

Author: Alex Walter

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-02-14

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13: 9400729693

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The two essays provide a critical examination of theory and research in the field of evolutionary psychology. The view advanced here is that philosophical materialism and minimalist assumptions about adaptation serve Darwinian psychology better than the more popular alternative view that relies on cognitive dualism and propositional-attitude psychology to formulate evolutionary psychology theory. A commitment to cognitive dualism is destined to undermine the physical basis of behavior upon which evolutionary theory depends. Many evolutionary psychologists do not see this but are seduced by the easy way in which hypotheses can be formulated using the ‘propositional-attitude’ model. The challenge is to develop a materialistic and mechanistic approach to understanding human cognition and behavior, including linguistic and social behavior.

Attitude Reports

Attitude Reports PDF

Author: Thomas Grano

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-03

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1108423280

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A critical survey of key issues in the analysis of propositional attitude reports, a central topic in natural language semantics.

The Pragmatics of Propositional Attitude Reports

The Pragmatics of Propositional Attitude Reports PDF

Author: Katarzyna Jaszczolt

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0585474478

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This volume, the fourth in the Current Research in Semantics/Pragmatics Interface series, is a collection of nine papers dealing with the topic of reporting on beliefs and other attitudes, and in particular with the issue of the semantics-pragmatics boundary dispute which is the core topic of the current research in the field. Written by highly-regarded philosophers of language and linguists working on theoretical semantics and pragmatics, it brings together works in the mainstream tradition of logical form and the contextualism-anticontextualism debate and the research on the role of intentions, conventions, goals, plans and cultural stereotypes in attitude ascriptions. The editor's introductory chapter gives a valuable overview of the work, discussing the importance of all these aspects of propositional attitude research and stressing their compatibility and interdependence.