bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Humanitarian intervention
Authors: Wheeler Nicholas J.
Published: September 2018

The legality, legitimacy and morality of humanitarian intervention are matters of great controversy. Disagreements abound over what weight should be placed on the humanitarian motives of intervening states as against the outcomes that such actions produce. Moreover, there is no consensus in the international community, or among commentators, as to what level of human suffering should trigger an armed response. Such controversies are exacerbated by divisions over where to locate legitimate authority for the use of force. Does it rest solely with the United Nations (UN) or are there other sites of legitimation such as the community of liberal democratic states? Beyond this, there is an even more fundamental debate as to whether humanitarian intervention can ever be morally justified. Some believe that it violates the compact between states and citizens; others maintain that state leaders and citizens alike have moral responsibilities to protect endangered peoples; and that on occasions this requires governments to accept the costs and risks of armed rescue.
Secession
Authors: Wellman Christopher Heath
Published: September 2018

Secession occurs when a portion of a state breaks away either to form its own sovereign country or to join with another state. Because secessionist conflicts are essentially contests over territory, theories of state-breaking presuppose various positions regarding political legitimacy. Most theorists now acknowledge that a group might have the right to secede when it has been treated sufficiently unjustly, but a growing minority (especially nationalists who trumpet the importance of political self-determination) now contend that groups sometimes have the right to political divorce even in the absence of injustice.
Legal discourse
Authors: Brown Beverley
Published: September 2018

‘Legal discourse’ signifies a strong interplay between law and language, linking together law as like language and law as itself language. However, unlike other linguistically modelled accounts, this approach involves a strong opposition to formalisms and their mirror-image realisms. Language as used cannot be ‘deduced’ from any pregiven matrix or set of propositions but must be studied in terms of its own modalities. The theory of law-as-discourse takes inspiration from the study of legal rhetoric and from socio-legal analyses of the courtroom, but was developed in its own right in the post-structuralist turn in linguistics. Law-as-discourse requires an understanding of the operation of legal talk in different registers, and gestures towards an intertwining of the social, the legal and the linguistic by focusing on the speaker–hearer situation, locution and action.
Legal realism
Authors: Duxbury Neil
Published: September 2018

‘Legal realism’ is the term commonly used to characterize various currents of twentieth-century legal thought which stand opposed to idealism. (Hence, ‘realism’ in this context ought to be understood not as a body of thought which opposes nominalism, but as an instance of nominalism.) In the Scandinavian countries, legal realism was modelled on Axel Hägerström’s critique of idealist metaphysics, and sought ways to account for legal rights and duties without presupposing or postulating the existence of ideal objects or entities. In the USA, legal realism evolved as a critique of the idealism implicit in the vision of the common law which was promoted by C.C. Langdell, first Dean of the Harvard Law School, and in the laissez-faire ideology of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Supreme Court. Realist jurisprudential sentiments – primarily as articulated in terms of the so-called indeterminacy critique – continue to bear an influence on late twentieth-century critical legal thought.
Legal hermeneutics
Authors: Goodrich Peter
Published: September 2018

Legal hermeneutics studies the interpretation and meaning of written law. By way of contrast with the related discipline of forensic rhetoric, the study of oral argumentation and persuasion in court, legal hermeneutics is best defined as a textual discipline which dates back to the classical codifications of Greek and Roman law. While the term hermeneutics is derived from the messenger god Hermes and is used by Aristotle as the title of a work concerned with the logic of interpretation, Peri hermeneias, legal hermeneutics really only developed with the growth and medieval reception of Roman law. The Roman legal tradition was pre-eminently a tradition of ius scriptum or written law, of codes and codifications. The custody, interpretation and transmission of the great texts of Roman law gave rise to an exemplary discipline of hermeneutics. Its task was that of preserving, collating, translating and applying the archaic, foreign (Latin) and fragmentary texts of the legal tradition to contemporary and vernacular circumstances far removed in time and space from the original contexts of the written law. In later eras and particularly in periods of crisis or renewal of the legal tradition, the problems of text, interpretation and meaning in law have led to the revival of the concerns and traditions of legal hermeneutics.
Sovereignty
Authors: Ford J.D.
Published: September 2018

In legal and political philosophy sovereignty is the attribute by which a person or institution exercises ultimate authority over every other person or institution in its domain. Traditionally, the existence of a final arbiter or legislator is said to be essential if people are to live together in peace and security. The example brought most readily to mind by the word ’sovereign’ is the individual monarch, and the theory of sovereignty was at one time closely linked with the defence of monarchy. But leading theorists of sovereignty, like Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, recognize that authority can be exercised by sovereign bodies of people; and later writers, like Rousseau and Austin, locate sovereignty in the people, to whom the officials of more democratic institutions are ultimately accountable.

Traditionally, too, it is deduced from the nature of the state or law that the sovereign’s authority must be absolute, not limited by conditions; perpetual, not merely delegated for a time; and indivisible, not distributed between different persons or institutions. It is further deduced that the sovereign must be independent from external domination as well as internally supreme. All these inferences have been subjected to criticism, not least because they can be difficult to reconcile with the actual practice of states and legal systems.
Austin, John (1790–1859)
Authors: Moles Robert N.
Published: September 2018

Although written in the early nineteenth century, Austin’s is probably the most coherent and sustained account of the theory of legal positivism. The complex relationships between legal positivism and the concepts of morality and politics are explored by him but are often neglected or misunderstood in modern commentaries.
Bartolus of Sassoferrato (or Saxoferrato) (1313/14–57)
Authors: Gordon William M.
Published: September 2018

The Bartolist school of civil lawyers or ‘commentators’ dominated university law teaching from the fourteenth century. Challenged by the humanists in the sixteenth century, they remained influential in practice. Bartolus excelled among them in the ability to devise solutions to practical problems and provide clear and workable doctrines applying the civil law texts to legal and political problems.
Blackstone, William (1723–80)
Authors: Simmonds N.E.
Published: September 2018

Blackstone produced the first systematic exposition of English law as a body of principles. His enterprise was founded upon the assumption that the detailed rules of English law embodied and enforced natural law. Blackstone’s invocation of natural law has frequently been regarded as ornamental rather than substantial, but there is no good reason for taking this view. Blackstone is now remembered as much for Bentham’s attacks upon him as for his own contribution.
Fuller, Lon Louvois (1902–78)
Authors: La Torre Massimo
Published: September 2018

Lon Louvois Fuller was a leading US legal philosopher and contracts lawyer who in his controversies with H.L.A. Hart and with US ‘legal realists’ advanced a version of ‘procedural natural law’ deriving an ‘inner morality of law’ from the formal properties of law. At the same time, through his insistence that legal interpretation must always consider the essentially purposive character of legal activity, he forms an intellectual bridge between earlier pragmatist accounts of law and the late twentieth-century interpretivist approach associated particularly with Ronald Dworkin.
Grotius, Hugo (1583–1645)
Authors: Ford J.D.
Published: September 2018

Scholar, lawyer and statesman, Grotius contributed to a number of different disciplines. His reputation as the founder both of a new international order and of a new moral science rests largely on his De iure belli ac pacis (The Law of War and Peace) (1625). Though the tendency today is to regard Grotius as one figure among others in the development of the concept of international law, he is increasingly regarded as one of the most original moral philosophers of the seventeenth century, in particular as having laid the foundations for the post-sceptical doctrine of natural law that flourished during the Enlightenment.
Kelsen, Hans (1881–1973)
Authors: Bankowski Zenon
Published: September 2018

Hans Kelsen was one of the foremost (positivist) legal theorists of the twentieth century. He taught in Vienna, Cologne, Geneva and Paris, and finished his life in America, teaching in Chicago, Harvard and Berkeley. He wrote widely, on legal philosophy, constitutional and international law, and political philosophy. Kelsen is best known for his Pure Theory of Law (Reine Rechtslehre) (1934). This is the basis of a theory which, with many changes, he espoused till he died.
Millar, John (1735–1801)
Authors: Loughlin Martin
Published: September 2018

John Millar elevated law teaching from mere instruction in technicalities to the level of a genuinely liberal subject, largely by using his teaching to educate students in the science of legislation. A pupil and disciple of Adam Smith, Millar, through his teaching and writing, established his reputation as a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment movement.
Pothier, Robert Joseph (1699–1772)
Authors: MacCormick Neil
Published: September 2018

Robert Joseph Pothier was one of the most influential of modern civilian jurists. At the end of a long period of rationalistic natural law thought, he produced a rational reconstruction of the civil law on the basis of which the transition from law as reason based on custom to law as product of the rational legislative will could be accomplished.
Renner, Karl (1870–1950)
Authors: Kinsey Richard , MacCormick Neil
Published: September 2018

Karl Renner was a leading contributor to democratic-socialist legal theory within the Neo-Kantian ‘Austro-Marxist’ interpretation of socialism that developed in late nineteenth-century Vienna. For Renner and his associates, law is a fundamental and universal institution in any ordered human society. Given the universal necessity of law, the development of socialism may well proceed in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary manner – and certainly, within the context of Viennese social democracy, it would proceed better by evolution.
Ross, Alf (1899–1979)
Authors: Pattaro Enrico
Published: September 2018

Famous for his contribution to Scandinavian legal realism, Alf Niels Christian Ross was among the major philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. He was Kelsen’s ideal successor and on a par with H.L.A. Hart in terms of notoriety and international influence.
Stair, James Dalrymple, Viscount (1619–95)
Authors: Styles Scott C.
Published: September 2018

An outstanding lawyer, senior judge, politician, and the founding father of modern Scots Law, Stair is also an interesting, if minor, philosopher of law of the seventeenth century. Stair believed that law is an inherently rational discipline and that its content can be derived from the principles of natural law which are self-evident to all humans. Stair led an active life at the heart of public affairs in seventeenth-century Scotland, finishing up as the chief judge of the supreme civil court. Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, he became a teacher at Glasgow University in 1641, was called to the Bar in 1648, became Judge in the Scots Cromwellian Court 1657, Vice President of the Court of Session 1660, Lord President of the Court of Session (Scotland’s most senior judge) 1671, exiled to Holland 1682, and reappointed Lord President in 1689 subsequent to the ‘Glorious Revolution’.
Hale, Robert Lee (1884–1969)
Authors: Fried Barbara H.
Published: September 2018

Hale was an important figure in both the American legal realist movement and the looser association of Institutional and Progressive economists writing in the first part of the twentieth century. His writings on the nature of property rights, coercion, and the role of the state in structuring private economic relations grew out of the shared intellectual and political project of the Realists and Institutionalists: to expose the role of legal institutions in the production and distribution of wealth, in order to debunk the notion that the market was a natural (pre-political) or neutral (apolitical) entity. His work is one of the most careful and elaborated critiques of economic and constitutional laissez faire to come out of the period, and has influenced the treatment of a number of topics in modern American legal thought, including the nature of coercion, the viability of the ‘public–private’ distinction in law, and the role of property, contract and tort law in structuring the market economy.
Ambiguity
Authors: Bach Kent
Published: September 2018

A word, phrase or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The word ‘light’, for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark. Words like ‘light’, ‘note’, ‘bear’ and ‘over’ are lexically ambiguous. They induce ambiguity in phrases or sentences in which they occur, such as ‘light suit’ and ‘The duchess can’t bear children’. However, phrases and sentences can be ambiguous even if none of their constituents is. The phrase ‘porcelain egg container’ is structurally ambiguous, as is the sentence ‘The police shot the rioters with guns’. Ambiguity can have both a lexical and a structural basis, as with sentences like ‘I left her behind for you’ and ‘He saw her duck’.

The notion of ambiguity has philosophical applications. For example, identifying an ambiguity can aid in solving a philosophical problem. Suppose one wonders how two people can have the same idea, say of a unicorn. This can seem puzzling until one distinguishes ‘idea’ in the sense of a particular psychological occurrence, a mental representation, from ‘idea’ in the sense of an abstract, shareable concept. On the other hand, gratuitous claims of ambiguity can make for overly simple solutions. Accordingly, the question arises of how genuine ambiguities can be distinguished from spurious ones. Part of the answer consists in identifying phenomena with which ambiguity may be confused, such as vagueness, unclarity, inexplicitness and indexicality.
Animal language and thought
Authors: Jamieson Dale
Published: September 2018

The question of animal language and thought has been debated since ancient times. Some have held that humans are exceptional in these respects, others that humans and animals are continuous with respect to language and thought. The issue is important because our self-image as a species is at stake.

Arguments for human exceptionalism can be classified as Cartesian, Wittgensteinian and behaviourist. What these arguments have in common is the view that language and thought are closely associated, and animals do not have language. The ape language experiments of the 1960s and 1970s were especially important against this background: if apes could learn language then even the advocates of human exceptionalism would have to admit that they have thoughts. It is now generally believed that whatever linguistic abilities apes have shown have been quite rudimentary. Yet many sceptics are willing to grant that in some cases apes did develop linguistic skills to some extent, and clearly evidenced thought. Studies of other animals in captivity and various animals in the wild have provided evidence of highly sophisticated communicative behaviour. Cognitive ethology and comparative psychology have emerged as the fields that study animal thought. While there are conceptual difficulties in grounding these fields, it appears plausible that many animals have thoughts and these can be scientifically investigated.
Emotive meaning
Authors: Phillips David
Published: September 2018

Emotive meaning contrasts with descriptive meaning. Terms have descriptive meaning if they do the job of stating facts: they have emotive meaning if they do the job of expressing the speaker’s emotions or attitudes, or exciting emotions or attitudes in others. Emotivism, the theory that moral terms have only or primarily emotive meaning, is an important position in twentieth-century ethics. The most important problem for the idea of emotive meaning is that emotive meaning may not really be a kind of meaning: the jobs of moral terms supposed to constitute emotive meaning may really be performed by speakers using moral terms, on only some of the occasions on which they use them.
Language and gender
Authors: McConnell-Ginet Sally
Published: September 2018

How do language and gender interact? This can be interpreted as asking about sexual difference in relation to language-use. How do the sexes speak, how do we speak of the sexes? And could or should these patterns change?

Not surprisingly, understanding language-gender interactions solely in terms of sexual difference yields a static and polarized picture. Men insult and swear, women flatter and wheedle, women draw others out while men monopolize conversations, men are direct and women beat around the bush, women gossip whereas men lecture. Linguistic conventions and familiar vocabulary equate humanity with males (note, for example, so-called generic uses of ‘he’) and sexuality with females (‘hussy’, for instance, once meant ‘housewife’). Men are linguistically represented as actors and women as acted upon, passive. Men control the institutions controlling language – such as schools, churches, publications, legislatures. Children of both sexes, however, learn a ‘mother tongue’ at a mother’s knee.

Such generalizations contain a few grains of truth, at least if restricted to so-called mainstream contemporary America or England. But they completely obscure the differences among women and among men and the varied forms of social relations so important to gender. One is never just a woman or a man: sexual classifications are inflected by age, class, race and much else. And gender involves not only women in relation to men as a group but also more specific cross-sex and same-sex relations ranging from egalitarian heterosexual marriages and same-sex partnerships through intense friendships and enmities among adolescent schoolgirls to camaraderie among boys on a football team. All such relations are partly constituted by people using language to and of one another; all are informed by and inform larger social arrangements. On the more linguistic side, these include dictionaries, the language arts curriculum and editorial guidelines; arrangements with a gender focus include marriage, high-school dances and gay rights legislation.

Emphasizing large-scale sex difference ignores cross-cultural and historical variation and makes change in language, in gender, or in their interaction appear mysterious. And such an emphasis erases the linguistic dynamics of a particular society’s construction of gender. Yet it is in such dynamics that, for example, language shapes and is shaped by sexual polarization and male dominance. This entry highlights approaches to language and gender that root each in historically situated social practice. Linguistic change and gender change then become inseparable.
Meaning and understanding
Authors: Rumfitt Ian
Published: September 2018

The existence of a close connection between the notions of meaning and understanding can hardly be denied. I may be said to understand you, on a given occasion of utterance, when I know what you then meant - or, at least, when I know the meaning of the words that you then uttered. An important and influential school of thought within the philosophy of language goes much further than these platitudes, however. Its members adhere to the view that questions about meaning are essentially questions about understanding: ‘a model of meaning is a model of understanding’. Their approach contrasts with that of those who expect an account of meaning to elucidate the nature of understanding only indirectly - perhaps by explaining meaning in terms of truth, inference, synonymy or self-expression, and only then explaining understanding as the correct recovery of meaning.
Private states and language
Authors: Craig Edward
Published: September 2018

Something is ’private’ if it can be known to one person only. Many have held that perceptions and bodily sensations are in this sense private, being knowable only by the person who experiences them. (You may know, it is often said, that we both call the same things ’green’; but whether they really look the same to me as they do to you, you have no means of telling.) Regarding the relation between private states and language two main questions have arisen:

- Could there be a ’private language’, that is, a language in which a person communicates to themselves, or records for their own use, information about their own private states – this language being in principle incomprehensible to others, who do not know the nature of the events it is used to record. This question is primarily associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein.

- Can the nature of our private states affect the meaning of expressions in the public language, that is, the language we use for communicating with each other? Or must everything that affects the meaning of expressions in the public language be something which is itself public, and knowable in principle by anyone? Michael Dummett has argued that we must accept the second of these alternatives, and that this has far-reaching consequences in logic and metaphysics.
Meaning and communication
Authors: Blackburn Simon
Published: September 2018

The two fundamental facts about language are that we use it to mean things and we use it to communicate. So the philosophy of language tries to explain what it is for words and sentences to mean things and also what it is for us to communicate by using them. Although it cannot be accidental that meaning and communication go together, it is quite easy to see them as fundamentally distinct. Thus on some accounts the meaning of sentences is conceived in terms of a ‘representative’ power whereby they stand for either aspects of the world or ideas in the mind and their use in communication is derived from this property: language serves as a vehicle for meaning, itself thought of in independent terms. An alternative approach seeks to link the two more closely, seeing representation as itself only possible through the use of terms of a common language, used in communication.
Ordinary language philosophy
Authors: Martinich A.P.
Published: September 2018

Ordinary language philosophy is a method of doing philosophy, rather than a set of doctrines. It is diverse in its methods and attitudes. It belongs to the general category of analytic philosophy, which has as its principal goal the analysis of concepts rather than the construction of a metaphysical system or the articulation of insights about the human condition. The method is to use features of certain words in ordinary or non-philosophical contexts as an aid to doing philosophy. The uses in non-philosophical contexts are taken to be paradigmatic; it is in them that meaning lives and moves and has its being. All ordinary language philosophers agree that classical philosophy suffered from an inadequate methodology that accounts for the lack of progress. But proponents of the method do not agree about whether philosophical problems are solved or dissolved; that is, they do not agree about whether philosophical problems are genuine problems for which there are solutions or whether they are merely pseudo-problems, which can at best be diagnosed.
Performatives
Authors: Bach Kent
Published: September 2018

There are certain things one can do just by saying what one is doing. This is possible if one uses a verb that names the very sort of act one is performing. Thus one can thank someone by saying ‘Thank you’, fire someone by saying ‘You’re fired’ and apologize by saying ‘I apologize’. These are examples of ‘explicit performative utterances’, statements in form but not in fact. Or so thought their discoverer, J.L. Austin, who contrasted them with ‘constatives’. Their distinctive self-referential character might suggest that their force requires special explanation, but it is arguable that performativity can be explained by the general theory of speech acts.
Pragmatics
Authors: Recanati Francois
Published: September 2018

Analytic philosophers have made lasting contributions to the scientific study of language. Semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of language in use) are two important areas of linguistic research which owe their shape to the groundwork done by philosophers.

Although the two disciplines are now conceived of as complementary, the philosophical movements out of which they grew were very much in competition. In the middle of the twentieth century, there were two opposing ‘camps’ within the analytic philosophy of language. The first – ‘ideal language philosophy’, as it was then called – was that of the pioneers, Frege, Russell and the logical positivists. They were, first and foremost, logicians studying formal languages and, through these formal languages, ‘language’ in general. Work in this tradition (especially that of Frege, Russell, Carnap, Tarski and later Montague) gave rise to contemporary formal semantics, a very active discipline developed jointly by logicians, philosophers and grammarians. The other camp was that of so-called ‘ordinary language philosophers’, who thought important features of natural language were not revealed, but hidden, by the logical approach initiated by Frege and Russell. They advocated a more descriptive approach, and emphasized the ‘pragmatic’ nature of natural language as opposed to, for example, the ‘language’ of Principia Mathematica. Their own work (especially that of Austin, Strawson, Grice and the later Wittgenstein) gave rise to contemporary pragmatics, a discipline which (like formal semantics) has developed successfully within linguistics in the past thirty years.

From the general conception put forward by ordinary language philosophers, four areas or topics of research emerged, which jointly constitute the core of pragmatics: speech acts; indexicality and context-sensitivity; non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning; and contextual implications. In the first half of this entry, we look at these topics from the point of view of ordinary language philosophy; the second half presents the contemporary picture. From the first point of view, pragmatics is seen as an alternative to the truth-conditional approach to meaning associated with ideal language philosophy (and successfully pursued within formal semantics). From the second point of view, pragmatics merely supplements that approach.
Propositional attitude statements
Authors: Taylor Kenneth A.
Published: September 2018

Propositional attitude statements – statements about our beliefs, desires, hopes and fears – exhibit certain logical peculiarities. For example, in apparent violation of Leibniz’s law of the indiscernibility of identicals, we cannot freely substitute expressions which designate the same object within such statements. According to Leibniz’s law, every instance of the following scheme is valid:

- a = b

- F(a)

- Therefore, F(b)

The validity of Leibniz’s law seems beyond question. It says, in effect, that if an object has a certain property, then anything identical to that object also has that property. Valid instances abound. But consider the following apparently invalid instance:

- Hesperus is Phosphorus

- Hammurabi believed that Hesperus often rose in the evening

- Therefore, Hammurabi believed that ‘Phosphorus’ often rose in the evening.

If we take ‘Hammurabi believed that…often rose in the evening’ to serve as the predicate F and ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ to be a and b respectively, this argument appears to be an instance of Leibniz’s law. Yet (3) apparently fails to follow from (1) and (2). Hammurabi believed that Hesperus and Phosphorus were two heavenly bodies not one. And he believed that Hesperus did, but that Phosphorus did not rise in the evening.

We have derived a false conclusion from true premises and an apparently valid law. If that law is really valid, then our argument had better not be a genuine instance of the law. The tempting conclusion, widely accepted, is that we were wrong to construe propositional attitude statements as simple predications. We should not, that is, construe ‘Hammurabi believed that…often rose in the evening’ to be just a long predicate with the semantic function of attributing some property to the object commonly denoted by ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’. But then the question arises: if attitude reports are not simple predications, what are they? Philosophers have disagreed sharply in their answers. Moreover, their disagreements are intimately connected to a wide range of deep issues about the nature of meaning and reference.
Conceptual analysis
Authors: Hanna Robert
Published: September 2018

A distinction must be made between the philosophical theory of conceptual analysis and the historical philosophical movement of Conceptual Analysis.

The theory of conceptual analysis holds that concepts – general meanings of linguistic predicates – are the fundamental objects of philosophical inquiry, and that insights into conceptual contents are expressed in necessary ’conceptual truths’ (analytic propositions). There are two methods for obtaining these truths:

- direct a priori definition of concepts;

- indirect ’transcendental’ argumentation.

The movement of Conceptual Analysis arose at Cambridge during the first half of the twentieth century, and flourished at Oxford and many American departments of philosophy in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the USA its doctrines came under heavy criticism, and its proponents were not able to respond effectively; by the end of the 1970s the movement was widely regarded as defunct. This reversal of fortunes can be traced primarily to the conjunction of several powerful objections: the attack on intensions and on the analytic/synthetic distinction; the paradox of analysis; the ‘scientific essentialist’ theory of propositions; and the critique of transcendental arguments. Nevertheless a closer examination indicates that each of these objections presupposes a covert appeal to concepts and conceptual truths. In the light of this dissonance between the conventional wisdom of the critics on the one hand, and the implicit commitments of their arguments on the other, there is a manifest need for a careful re-examination of conceptual analysis.
Semantics
Authors: Crimmins Mark
Published: September 2018

Semantics is the systematic study of meaning. Current work in this field builds on the work of logicians and linguists as well as of philosophers. Philosophers are interested in foundational issues in semantics because these speak to the nature of meaning, as it embeds in our thinking and in our relations to each other and to the world. Of special interest are questions about how a semantic theory should respect the connections of meaning to truth and to understanding. In addition, numerous semantic problems concerning particular linguistic constructions bear philosophical interest, sometimes because the problems are important to resolving foundational semantical issues, sometimes because philosophical problems of independent interest are expressed using the constructions, and sometimes because clarity about the semantic function of the constructions enables clarity in the development of philosophical theories and analyses.
Semantics, situation
Authors: Perry John R.
Published: September 2018

Situation semantics attempts to provide systematic and philosophically coherent accounts of the meanings of various constructions that philosophers and linguists find important. It is based on the old idea that sentences stand for facts or something like them. As such, it provides an alternative to extensional semantics, which takes sentences to stand for truth-values, and to possible worlds semantics, which takes them to stand for sets of possible worlds.

Situations are limited parts or aspects of reality, while states of affairs (or infons) are complexes of properties and objects of the sort suitable to constitute a fact. Consider the issue of whether Jackie, a dog, broke her leg at a certain time T. There are two states of affairs or possibilities, that she did or she did not. The situation at T, in the place where Jackie was then, determines which of these states of affairs (infons) is factual (or is the case or is supported). Situation theory, the formal theory that underlies situation semantics, focuses on the nature of the supports relation.

Situation semantics sees meaning as a relation among types of situations. The meaning of ’I am sitting next to David’, for example, is a relation between types of situations in which someone A utters this sentence referring with the name ’David’ to a certain person B, and those in which A is sitting next to B. This relational theory of meaning makes situation semantics well-suited to treat indexicality, tense and other similar phenomena. It has also inspired relational accounts of information and action.
Speech acts
Authors: Bach Kent
Published: September 2018

Making a statement may be the paradigmatic use of language, but there are all sorts of other things we can do with words. We can make requests, ask questions, give orders, make promises, give thanks, offer apologies and so on. Moreover, almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker’s intention; there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one’s audience.

The theory of speech acts is partly taxonomic and partly explanatory. It must systematically classify types of speech acts and the ways in which they can succeed or fail. It must reckon with the fact that the relationship between the words being used and the force of their utterance is often oblique. For example, the sentence ‘This is a pig sty’ might be used nonliterally to state that a certain room is messy, and further to demand indirectly that it be tidied up. Even when this sentence is used literally and directly, say to describe a certain area of a farmyard, the content of its utterance is not fully determined by its linguistic meaning – in particular, the meaning of the word ‘this’ does not determine which area is being referred to. A major task for the theory of speech acts is to account for how speakers can succeed in what they do despite the various ways in which linguistic meaning underdetermines use.

In general, speech acts are acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed. For example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses a regret. As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the audience identifies, in accordance with the speaker’s intention, the attitude being expressed.

Some speech acts, however, are not primarily acts of communication and have the function not of communicating but of affecting institutional states of affairs. They can do so in either of two ways. Some officially judge something to be the case, and others actually make something the case. Those of the first kind include judges’ rulings, referees’ decisions and assessors’ appraisals, and the latter include sentencing, bequeathing and appointing. Acts of both kinds can be performed only in certain ways under certain circumstances by those in certain institutional or social positions.
Montague, Richard Merett (1930–71)
Authors: Parsons Terence
Published: September 2018

Richard Montague was a logician, philosopher and mathematician. His mathematical contributions include work in Boolean algebra, model theory, proof theory, recursion theory, axiomatic set theory and higher-order logic. He developed a modal logic in which necessity appears as a predicate of sentences, showing how analogues of the semantic paradoxes relate to this notion. Analogously, he (with David Kaplan) argued that a special case of the surprise examination paradox can also be seen as an epistemic version of semantic paradox. He made important contributions to the problem of formulating the notion of a ‘deterministic’ theory in science.
Chomsky, Noam (1928–)
Authors: Hornstein Norbert
Published: September 2018

Fish swim, birds fly, people talk. The talents displayed by fish and birds rest on specific biological structures whose intricate detail is attributable to genetic endowment. Human linguistic capacity similarly rests on dedicated mental structures many of whose specific details are an innate biological endowment of the species. One of Chomsky’s central concerns has been to press this analogy and uncover its implications for theories of mind, meaning and knowledge.

This work has proceeded along two broad fronts.

First, Chomsky has fundamentally restructured grammatical research. Due to his work, the central object of study in linguistics is ‘the language faculty’, a postulated mental organ which is dedicated to acquiring linguistic knowledge and is involved in various aspects of language-use, including the production and understanding of utterances. The aim of linguistic theory is to describe the initial state of this faculty and how it changes with exposure to linguistic data. Chomsky (1981) characterizes the initial state of the language faculty as a set of principles and parameters. Language acquisition consists in setting these open parameter values on the basis of linguistic data available to a child. The initial state of the system is a Universal Grammar (UG): a super-recipe for concocting language-specific grammars. Grammars constitute the knowledge of particular languages that result when parametric values are fixed.

Linguistic theory, given these views, has a double mission. First, it aims to ‘adequately’ characterize the grammars (and hence the mental states) attained by native speakers. Theories are ‘descriptively adequate’ if they attain this goal. In addition, linguistic theory aims to explain how grammatical competence is attained. Theories are ‘explanatorily adequate’ if they show how descriptively adequate grammars can arise on the basis of exposure to ‘primary linguistic data’ (PLD): the data children are exposed to and use in attaining their native grammars. Explanatory adequacy rests on an articulated theory of UG, and in particular a detailed theory of the general principles and open parameters that characterize the initial state of the language faculty (that is, the biologically endowed mental structures).

Chomsky has also pursued a second set of concerns. He has vigorously criticized many philosophical nostrums from the perspective of this revitalized approach to linguistics. Three topics he has consistently returned to are:

- Knowledge of language and its general epistemological implications

- Indeterminacy and underdetermination in linguistic theory

- Person-specific ‘I-languages’ versus socially constituted ‘E-languages’ as the proper objects of scientific study.
Generics
Authors: Leslie Sarah-Jane
Published: September 2018

Generics are statements such as ‘dogs are mammals’, ‘a tiger is striped’, ‘the dodo is extinct’, ‘ducks lay eggs’ and ‘mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus’. Generic statements express general claims about kinds, rather than claims about particular individuals. Unlike other general statements such as ‘all dogs are mammals’ or ‘most tigers are striped’, generics do not involve the use of explicit quantifiers (such as ‘all’ or ‘most’ in these examples). In English, generics can be expressed using a variety of syntactic forms: bare plurals (e.g. ‘ducks lay eggs’), indefinite singulars (e.g. ‘a tiger is striped’) and definite singulars (‘the dog is a mammal’). (Sometimes, habitual statements such as ‘Mary smokes’ or ‘John runs in the park’ are classified as generics, but we will not follow this practice here.)

The truth conditions of generics have proved quite puzzling for theorists. For example, ‘dogs are mammals’ seems to require for its truth that all (possible) dogs be mammals. ‘A tiger is striped’ or ‘ravens are black’, however, are somewhat more forgiving, since they are compatible with the existence of a few stripeless albino tigers, and white albino ravens. ‘Ducks lay eggs’ and ‘a lion has a mane’ are more forgiving still; these generics are true even though it is only the mature members of one gender which possess the relevant properties. This truth-conditional laxity is limited in scope, however: we do not accept ‘ducks are female’ or ‘lions are male’, even though every egg-laying duck is a female duck, and similarly mutatis mutandis for maned lions. Finally, we accept ‘mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus’, even though fewer than 1 per cent of mosquitoes carry the virus, while also rejecting ‘books are paperbacks’, when over 80 per cent of books are paperbacks. The correct analysis of the truth conditions for generics is a matter of great controversy among theorists working on the problem.
Anomalous monism
Authors: McLaughlin Brian P.
Published: September 2018

Anomalous monism, proposed by Donald Davidson in 1970, implies that all events are of one fundamental kind, namely physical. But it does not deny that there are mental events; rather, it implies that every mental event is some physical event or other. The idea is that someone’s thinking at a certain time that the earth is round, for example, might be a certain pattern of neural firing in their brain at that time, an event which is both a thinking that the earth is round (a type of mental event) and a pattern of neural firing (a type of physical event). There is just one event, that can be characterized both in mental terms and in physical terms. If mental events are physical events, they can, like all physical events, be explained and predicted (at least in principle) on the basis of laws of nature cited in physical science. However, according to anomalous monism, events cannot be so explained or predicted as described in mental terms (such as ‘thinking’, ‘desiring’, ‘itching’ and so on), but only as described in physical terms. The distinctive feature of anomalous monism as a brand of physical monism is that it implies that mental events as such (that is, as described in mental terms) are anomalous – they cannot be explained or predicted on the basis of strict scientific laws.
Belief
Authors: Jackson Frank
Published: September 2018

We believe that there is coffee over there; we believe the special theory of relativity; we believe the Vice-Chancellor; and some of us believe in God. But plausibly what is fundamental is believing that something is the case – believing a proposition, as it is usually put. To believe a theory is to believe the propositions that make up the theory, to believe a person is to believe some proposition advanced by them; and to believe in God is to believe the proposition that God exists. Thus belief is said to be a propositional attitude or intentional state: to believe is to take the attitude of belief to some proposition. It is about what its propositional object is about (God, coffee, or whatever). We can think of the propositional object of a belief as the way the belief represents things as being – its content, as it is often called.

We state what we believe with indicative sentences in ‘that’-clauses, as in ‘Mary believes that the Democrats will win the next election’. But belief in the absence of language is possible. A dog may believe that there is food in the bowl in front of it. Accordingly philosophers have sought accounts of belief that allow a central role to sentences – it cannot be an accident that finding the right sentence is the way to capture what someone believes – while allowing that creatures without a language can have beliefs. One way of doing this is to construe beliefs as relations to inner sentences somehow inscribed in the brain. On this view although dogs do not have a public language, to the extent that they have beliefs they have something sentence-like in their heads.

An alternative tradition focuses on the way belief when combined with desire leads to behaviour, and analyses belief in terms of behavioural dispositions or more recently as the internal state that is, in combination with other mental states, responsible for the appropriate behavioural dispositions.

An earlier tradition associated with the British Empiricists views belief as a kind of pale imitation of perceptual experience. But recent work on belief largely takes for granted a sharp distinction between belief and the various mental images that may or may not accompany it.
Bodily sensations
Authors: Martin M.G.F.
Published: September 2018

Bodily sensations are those feelings, or sensory experiences, most intimately associated with one’s body: aches, tickles; feelings of pain and pleasure, of warmth, of fatigue. Many philosophers contrast bodily sensations with perceptions of the external world, claiming that sensations provide one with awareness of nothing independent of them. An alternative approach is to take sensations to be a form of awareness of one’s body – on one view sensations are simply the perception of the state and properties of one’s body. Bodily sensations have been seen as a major problem for any attempt to give an account of the mind that takes it to be part of the material world as investigated by the physical sciences.
Desire
Authors: Pettit Philip
Published: September 2018

If an agent is to be moved to action, then two requirements have to be fulfilled: first, the agent must possess beliefs about the way things actually are, about the actions possible given the way things are, and about the likely effects of those actions on how things are; and, second, the agent must have or form desires to change the way things are by resorting to this or that course of action. The beliefs tell the agent about how things are and about how they can be altered; the desires attract the agent to how things are not but can be made to be.

This rough sketch of beliefs and desires is widely endorsed in contemporary philosophy; it derives in many ways from the seminal work of the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume. The striking thing about it, from the point of view of desire, is that it characterizes desire by the job desire does in collaborating with belief and thereby generating action: it characterizes desire by function, not by the presence of any particular feeling. The account raises a host of questions. Is desire an entirely different sort of state from belief, for example, and from belief-related states like habits of inference? Does desire have to answer to the considerations of evidence and truth that are relevant to belief and inference? How does desire relate to preference and choice? And how does desire relate to the values that we ascribe to different courses of action and that influence us in what we do?