Showing papers on "Truth condition published in 1996"

Coreference and modality

Abstract: The prevailing view on meaning in logical semantics from its inception at the end of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the eighties has been one which is aptly summarized in the slogan ‘meaning equals truth conditions’. This view on meaning is one which can rightly be labeled static: it describes the meaning relation between linguistic expressions and the world as a static relation, one which may itself change through time, but which does not bring about any change itself. For non-sentential expressions (nouns, verbs, modifiers, etc.) the same goes through: in accordance with the principle of compositionality of meaning, their meaning resides in their contribution to the truth-conditions of the sentences in which they occur. In most cases this contribution consists in what they denote (refer to), hence the slogan can be extended to ‘meaning equals denotation conditions’. Of course, although this view on meaning was the prevailing one for almost a century, many of the people who initiated the enterprise of logical semantics, including people like Frege and Wittgenstein, had an open eye for all that it did not catch. However, the logical means which Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, and the generation that succeeded them, had at their disposal were those of classical mathematical logic and set-theory, and these indeed are not very suited for an analysis of other aspects of meaning than those which the slogan covers. A real change in view then had to await the emergence of other concepts, which in due course became available mainly under the influence of developments in computer science and cognate disciplines such as artificial intelligence. And this is one of the reasons why it took almost a century before any serious and successful challenge of the view that meaning equals truthconditions from within logical semantics could emerge. The static view on meaning was, of course, already challenged from the outside, but in most cases such attacks started from premises which are quite alien to the logical semantics enterprise as such, and hence failed to bring about any radical changes. An important development has been that of speech act theory, originating from the work of Austin, and worked out systematically by Searle and

Meaning's role in truth

Abstract: What words mean plays a role in determining when they would be true; but not an exhaustive one. For that role leaves room for variation in truth conditions, with meanings fixed, from one speaking of words to another. What role meaning plays depends on what truth is; on what words, by virtue of meaning what they do, are required to have done (as spoken) in order to have said what is true. There is a deflationist position on what truth is: the notion is exhausted by a given, specified, mass of “platitudes”, each to the effect that if words said (say) things to be thus, things must be that way. (The thought that thus-and-so is true iff thus-and-so.) These platitudes, and so deflationism, miss that aspect of truth that determines meaning’s role. Truth requires words to have the uses which, given what they mean, they should have in the circumstances of their speaking. Through this link with use, when words would be true is a factor fixing what it is they said.

Reclaiming Truth: Contribution to a Critique of Cultural Relativism

Abstract: Truth, Christopher Norris reminds us, is very much out of fashion at the moment whether at the hands of politicians, media pundits, or purveyors of postmodern wisdom in cultural and literary studies. Across a range of disciplines the idea has taken hold that truth-talk is either redundant or the product of epistemic might. Questions of truth and falsehood are always internal to some specific language-game; history is just another kind of fiction; philosophy is only a kind of writing; law is a wholly rhetorical practice. In "Reclaiming Truth," Norris critiques these fashionable trends of thought and mounts a specific challenge to cultural relativist doctrines in epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, and political theory.Norris presents his case in a series of closely argued chapters that take issue with the relativist position. He attempts to rehabilitate the value of truth in philosophy of science by restoring a lost distinction between concept and metaphor and argues that theoretical discourse, so far from being an inconsequential activity, has very real consequences, particularly in ethics and politics. This debate has become skewed, he suggests, through the widespread and typically postmodern idea that truth-claims must always go along with a presumptive or authoritarian bid to silence opposing views. On the contrary, there is nothing as dogmatic--or as silencing--as a relativism that acknowledges no shared truth conditions for valid or responsible discourse. Norris also offers a timely reassessment of several thinkers--Althusser and Derrida among them--whose reception history has been distorted by the vagaries of short-term intellectual fashion."Reclaiming Truth "will be welcomed by readers concerned with the uses and abuses of theory at a time when such questions are in urgent need of sustained and serious debate.

This might be it

Abstract: Discussions often end before the issues that started them have been resolved. For example, in the late sixties and early seventies, a hot topic in philosophical logic was the development of an adequate semantics for the language of modal predicate logic. However, the result of this discussion was not one single system that met with general agreement, but a collection of alternative systems, each defended most ably by its proponents. Although it would seem that the topic has lost much of its controversial status, this paper adds one more system to the existing stock. It offers a semantics for the language of modal predicate logic, which is new, not in the sense that it proposes a new ontology as an alternative to the possible world paradigm, but new because it characterizes the meaning of a sentence in terms of its information change potential rather than its truth conditions. What we hope to show is that this dynamic twist sheds new light on old

Changing the context: dynamic semantics and discourse

Abstract: Within the logical-semantical tradition, the meaning of a sentence is (often) equated with its truth conditions: to know what a sentence means is to know in which circumstances it is true or false. In more up-to-date approaches, however, the meaning of a sentence is identified with its context change potential: to know the meaning of a sentence is to know how it changes a context. The difference is not that the context dependent nature of interpretation is taken into account. The importance of contextual factors is generally acknowledged within traditional logical semantics, too. Usually, truth conditions are stated relative to both a model of the world, and certain other parameters which provide contextual information, such as the time and place of the utterance, its source and addressee, and possibly other features of the utterance situation. What is new, is the focus on context change: interpretation not only depends on the context, but also creates context. This is why the more fashionable approaches are

The puzzle of names in Ockham’s theory of mental language

Abstract: In his writings on semantics and logic, William of Ockham combines two very strong claims about mental language: that mental terms are naturally prior to and determinative of the signification of conventional signs and that mental language contains neither synonymous nor equivocal terms.(1) The first claim represents the role mental language has in explaining the origins, structure, and content of thought and language. Ockham was, as many commentators have observed, a conceptual empiricist but it would be a mistake to think that he was primarily concerned with the psychological processes that underlie our representational system. The second claim indicates that the theory of mental language is primarily a theory of signification or a semantics. The notion of a redundancy-free mental language is an idealization crafted for its explanatory role in Ockham's semantics. The notion of a mental language devoid of synonymous and ambiguous terms raises puzzles which threaten the internal coherence of the project. These puzzles concern a species of categorematic terms in mental language, Ockham's absolute terms, and are not unlike the puzzles about proper names in Kripkean semantics. Although I am skeptical that Ockham's theory is adequate to the dual tasks of being a semantics as well as a psychological thesis, I shall argue that the wrong response to these puzzles is to forfeit the theory's status as a semantic theory by giving up the commitment to parsimony. The Basic Principles of Ockham's Theory of Terms. When John Trentman referred to Ockham's notion of mental language as analogous to the ideal languages of early twentieth-century analytic philosophy, he focused our attention on how Ockham, in both word and methodology, was committed to the notion of a redundancy-free mental language.(2) Trentman was replying to Geach who had incautiously accused Ockham of maintaining the absurd position that Latin was the language of thought.(3) Trentman simply pointed out Ockham's practice of pruning from mental language all features which, although present in conventional languages, do not add to the significative power of those languages. In this way, Ockham eliminates gender, declension, corgugation, and inflection from his characterization of mental language and considers whether it is necessary to have mental correlates of both participles and verbs.(4) Ockham's strategy for eliminating features from the mental language is always the same: if the difference between two (or more) terms in spoken or written language is not a difference in signification (and hence substitution of one for the other in a sentence preserves the truth value of the sentence) then there is no corresponding pair of synonyms in mental language and no grammatical feature corresponding to the feature which distinguishes the terms in spoken language. As Ockham justifies this procedure, it is because whatever is signified by all synonyms can be sufficiently ex pressed by one of those terms, and therefore a multitude of concepts does not correspond to such a plurality of synonyms.(5) So, for example, if the Latin verbs rogare and petere are synonymous in meaning "to ask," the fact that they belong to different corjugations does not entail that they will have distinct correlates in the mental language. Compare this to differences in mood, number, tense, voice, and person, regarding verbs, and case and number, regarding nouns which do affect the truth conditions of sentences.(6) Ockham concludes that synonymy in spoken and written language is largely a matter of ornamentation.(7) What is striking about Ockham's discussion of what grammatical features are and are not to be found in mental language is the idea that signification is the definitive characteristic of mental terms. Mental terms are defined only by their semantic properties. Where there is no difference in signification between terms there cannot be more than one mental correlate. …

Connectionism and Meaning: From Truth Conditions to Weight Representations

Abstract: This book is a theoretical investigation into meaning - computationally driven, philosophically inspired and psychologically motivated. Concepts from formal and psychological semantics, the philosophy of mind and computational theory are examined and combined within the burgeoning new framework of connectionist cognitive science. Unashamedly connectionist in spirit, the book draws upon the novel properties of networks of simple computing elements as its usefulness of admitting representations defined over weights, in addition to representations defined over units, into the cognitive scientists theoretical armatarium. This duality of representational resource in connectionism is a theme pursued throughout the book.

Beyond representation: Poetry and truth-conditions

Abstract: Paul Celan writes, in “Tubingen, Janner”: “Should, should a man, should a man come into the world, today, with the shining beard of the patriarchs: he could, if he spoke of this time, he could only babble and babble, over, over, againagain.” I am inclined to call this utterance true. What do I mean by this? Do I mean anything like what I mean when I call Einstein's theory of relativity true? Talk of truth in poetry is liable to upset both philosophers and literary theorists. Literary theorists often feel that to ask whether a poem is “true” or not is seriously to miss its point – that poems are about much more than truth, that literature is not bounded by the question, “But is it true?” Philosophers are wary, on the other hand, of the notions of truth that poets are liable to come up with. Valery suggests that poetry breaks us of our ordinary use of language so we can “confront things as they really are, unmediated as far as possible by the veil of language.” One does not have to have done much philosophical thinking about language and concepts to find this notion of a primordial, immediate contact with the things of the world incoherent. Yet we do say, “that's true,” or, “there's a deep truth to that,” about lines in poetry; we praise certain poets for their honesty or insight; and we say we have learned from poems and poetic utterances. So what is the relationship between truth in poetry and truth in science?

Relativism and anti-realism

Abstract: I characterise a relativist account of truth as one according to which the truth value of a sentence can vary without its meaning changing. Relativism is to be contrasted with absolutism, which states that the truth values of sentences cannot change, so long as their meanings remain constant. I argue that absolutism follows from the realist account of meaning and truth conditions. According to realism, the meaning of a sentence consists in objective truth conditions and sentences are true if and only if certain objective conditions obtain. Relativism is a consequence of anti-realism. Anti-realists believe that the meanings of sentences consist in recognisable conditions and that sentences are true if and only if certain recognisable conditions obtain. I contrast the sorts of relativism which results from partial, empiricism-based anti-realisms, and global anti-realism, which is linked to a coherence theory of knowledge. I offer a few remarks on how global anti-realists can restrict the scope of their relativism.