bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Language, conventionality of
Authors: Smith Barry C. 
Published: September 2018

When we say that smoke means fire or that those spots mean measles, we are noting how the presence of one thing indicates the presence of another. For these natural relationships to continue, it is enough that the laws of nature remain the same. The connection between the two states is strictly causal. By contrast when we say, ‘In English, "gold" means this stuff’, pointing at some metal, we are insisting on an arbitrary connection between a piece of language and part of the world. We might have used another word, as other languages do, or have used this word for something else. But, for a word to have the literal meaning it does in a language, this arbitrary connection must be sustained on subsequent occasions of use. What is needed to sustain the connection is an intention on our part, not just the continued operation of natural laws.
Of course, some connections between words and things are based on natural relations; there is, for example, onomatopoeia. However, few words have this feature. For the majority of words it is quite arbitrary that they have the meanings they do, and this has led many to suppose that the regularities needed to sustain the connections between words and what they stand for are conventional rather than causal. But there are also those who deny that convention is an essential feature of language.
Fiction, semantics of
Authors: Howell Robert 
Published: September 2018

Taken at face value, ‘Anna Karenina is a woman’ seems true. By using Tolstoi’s name ‘Anna Karenina’ and the predicate ‘is a woman’ we appear to refer to the character Anna and to attribute to her a property which she has. Yet how can this be? There is no actual woman to whom the name refers. Such problems of reference, predication and truth also arise in connection with representational art and with beliefs and other attitudes.
Meinong distinguishes the ‘being’ of objects (including fictional objects) from the ‘existence’ of actual objects such as Napoleon. ‘Anna Karenina’ refers to a concrete, particular, nonexistent object that has the property of womanhood. However, Meinong’s distinction seems to many ontologically suspect. Perhaps, then, being is existence and ‘Anna Karenina is a woman’ is actually false because ‘Anna Karenina’ has no referent. Russell in ‘On Denoting’ (1905) agrees. But how can we explain the apparent contrast in truth between this sentence and the unquestionably erroneous ‘Anna Karenina is from Moscow’? Or is it that being is existence but ‘Anna Karenina’ refers to an abstract, not a concrete, thing – an existent, abstract thing that does not have the property of being a woman but has merely the property of being said, by Tolstoi’s novel, to be a woman? Then, however, the meaning of our sentence about Anna no longer parallels that of ‘Emily Dickinson is a woman’. Perhaps, as many argue, we only pretend that ‘Anna Karenina’ refers and that the sentence is true. This position may not adequately explain the intuitions that support Anna Karenina as a genuine object of reference and predication, however.
Meaning and rule-following
Authors: Smith Barry C. 
Published: September 2018

Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule-following, and the recent responses to it, have been widely regarded as providing the deepest and most challenging issues surrounding the notions of meaning, understanding and intention – central notions in the philosophy of language and mind. The fundamental issue is what it is for words to have meaning, and for speakers to use words in accordance with their meanings. In Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein explores the idea that what could give a word its meaning is a rule for its use, and that to be a competent speaker is to use words in accordance with these rules. His discussion of the nature of rules and rule-following has been highly influential, although there is no general agreement about his conclusions and final position. The view that there is no objectivity to an individual’s attempt to follow a rule in isolation provides one strand of Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language.
To some commentators, Wittgenstein’s discussion only leads to the sceptical conclusion that there are no rules to be followed and so no facts about what words mean. Others have seen him as showing why certain models of what it takes for an individual to follow a rule are inadequate and must be replaced by an appeal to a communal linguistic practice.
Metaphor
Authors: Martinich A.P. 
Published: September 2018

A standard dictionary definition describes a metaphor as ‘a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object is used in place of another to suggest a likeness between them’. Although the theoretical adequacy of this definition may be questioned, it conveys the standard view that there is a difference between literal and nonliteral language; that figurative speech is nonliteral language and that a metaphor is an instance of figurative speech.
The three most influential treatments of metaphor are the comparison, interaction and speech act theories. According to the first, every metaphor involves a comparison; a specific version of this view is that every metaphor is an abbreviated simile. According to the second, every metaphor involves a semantic interaction between some object or concept that is literally denoted by some word, and some concept metaphorically predicated on that word. According to the third, it is not words or sentences that are metaphorical but their use in specific situations; thus, to understand how metaphors function, one must understand how people communicate with language.
Questions
Authors: Harrah David 
Published: September 2018

Some theorists hold that a question is an interrogative sentence; others that a question is what is meant or expressed by an interrogative sentence. Most theorists hold that each question has two or more answers, and that the point of asking a question is to have the respondent reply with one of the answers. Most hold that each question has an assertive core or presupposition that is implied by each of the answers; if it is false, then no answer is true, so we say that the question commits the fallacy of many questions and we regard the negation of the presupposition as a corrective reply to the question (it corrects the question).
For example, consider the question ‘Has Adam stopped sinning?’ Its answers are ‘Adam has stopped sinning’ and ‘Adam has not stopped sinning’. It presupposes ‘Adam has sinned’; thus ‘Adam has not sinned’ is a corrective reply. The ‘safe’ way to ask this question is via the conditional ‘If Adam has sinned, then has Adam stopped sinning?’
We can construct formal systems for asking whether and which questions in an effective way. Other types of question (for example, who and why) are still problematic. It can be proved that some questions are reducible to others, some questions raise others, and some systems for the logic of questions can never be complete in certain ways.
Language, early modern philosophy of
Authors: Szabo Zoltan Gendler 
Published: September 2018

Philosophical interest in language during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was strong but largely derivative. Most thinkers shared Leibniz’s view ‘that languages are the best mirror of the human mind, and that a precise analysis of the significations of words would tell us more than anything else about the operations of the understanding’.
The three most important areas of philosophical discussion about language in the modern period were the nature of signification, the origin of human language and the possibility of animal language. Signification was generally viewed as a relation between linguistic signs and ideas. There was no agreement whether signification is entirely conventional or contains a natural element, but the view is that it is entirely natural virtually disappeared. Even those who retained the belief in the possibility of a philosophically perfect language insisted that such a language should be constructed anew, rather than rediscovered as the lost language of Adam. The traditional biblical account of the origin of language was more and more contested but, as more naturalistic theories emerged, the problem of why other animals cannot talk became especially pressing.
Debates about language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were highly speculative; participants in these debates often relied on simplistic biological theories, inadequate grammars or anecdotal evidence from travellers. What makes these discussions important is less their scientific contribution than their engagement with the philosophical problems concerning the relationship between the human mind and the natural world.
Language, social nature of
Authors: Smith Barry C. 
Published: September 2018

Language is mostly used in a social setting. We use it to communicate with others. We depend on others when learning language, and we constantly borrow one another’s uses of expression. Language helps us perform various social functions, and many of its uses have become institutionalized. But none of these reflections settle the question of whether language is an essentially social phenomenon. To address this we must consider the nature of language itself, and then ask which social elements, if any, make an essential contribution to its nature.
While many would accept that language is an activity that must take place in a social setting, others have gone further by arguing that language is a social practice. This view commits one to the claim that the meanings of an individual’s words are the meanings they have in the common language. The former view need not accept so strong a claim: meaning depends on social interaction because it is a matter of what one can communicate to others but this does not require the existence of communal languages. A competing conception which rejects the social character of language in either of these versions is the thesis that language is mentally represented in the mind of an individual.
Language, ancient philosophy of
Authors: Shields Christopher 
Published: September 2018

The earliest interest in language during the ancient Greek period was largely instrumental: presumed facts about language and its features were pressed into service for the purpose of philosophical argumentation. Perhaps inevitably, this activity gave way to the analysis of language for its own sake. Claims, for example, about the relation between the semantic values of general terms and the existence of universals invited independent inquiry into the nature of the meanings of those general terms themselves. Language thus became an object of philosophical inquiry in its own right. Accordingly, philosophers at least from the time of Plato conducted inquiries proper to philosophy of language. They investigated:
- how words acquire their semantic values;
- how proper names and other singular terms refer;
- how words combine to form larger semantic units;
- the compositional principles necessary for language understanding;
- how sentences, statements, or propositions come to be truth-evaluable;
and, among later figures of the classical period,
- (6) how propositions, as abstract, mind- and language-independent entities, are to be (a) characterized in terms of their constituents, (b) related to minds and the natural languages used to express them, and (c) related to the language-independent world.
Focus
Authors: Glanzberg Michael 
Published: September 2018

Focus is the name of the phenomenon we typically see marked in English by putting stress on a word or phrase, as in:
- (1) John kissed JANE.
Focus triggers a number of effects. It indicates contrast. Sentence (1) indicates that John kissed Jane as opposed to Sally or Yolanda. This is typically described as a pragmatic effect, resulting from the way the content of the sentence is presented. But in some important cases, focus can affect the truth conditions of sentences, and so must be in part a semantic phenomenon. Focus also affects where and how ellipsis works, and so it relates to syntax as well. Finally, focus affects whether an answer to a question is felicitous. Answers to questions with the focus in the wrong place sound decidedly odd to speakers. Patterns of questions and answers often show how discourses are organized, and so focus plays an important role in discourse structure. Focus is thus a locus of interaction for major components of language, including pragmatics and discourse, semantics, syntax and phonology. As such it has been of interest to linguists, and to philosophers of language interested in how these components of language may be delineated and how they interact. Effects like contrast and felicity of question-answer pairs have also made focus of interest to philosophers interested in explanation and knowledge.
Type-logical semantics
Authors: Muskens Reinhard 
Published: September 2018

Type-logical semantics studies linguistic meaning with the help of the theory of types. The latter originated with Russell as an answer to the paradoxes, but has the additional virtue that it is very close to ordinary language. In fact, type theory is so much more similar to language than predicate logic is, that adopting it as a vehicle of representation can overcome the mismatches between grammatical form and predicate logical form that were observed by Frege and Russell. The grammatical forms of ordinary language sentences consequently may be taken to be much less misleading than logicians in the first half of the twentieth century often thought them to be. This was realized by Richard Montague, who used the theory of types to translate fragments of ordinary language into a logical language.
Semantics is commonly divided into lexical semantics, which studies the meaning of words, and compositional semantics, which studies the way in which complex phrases obtain a meaning from their constituents. The strength of type-logical semantics lies with the latter, but type-logical theories can be combined with many competing hypotheses about lexical meaning, provided these hypotheses are expressed using the language of type theory.
Action
Authors: Hornsby Jennifer 
Published: September 2018

Philosophical study of human action owes its importance to concerns of two sorts. There are concerns addressed in metaphysics and philosophy of mind about the status of reasoning beings who make their impact in the natural causal world, and concerns addressed in ethics and legal philosophy about human freedom and responsibility. ‘Action theory’ springs from concerns of both sorts; but in the first instance it attempts only to provide a detailed account that may help with answering the metaphysical questions.
Action theorists usually start by asking ‘How are actions distinguished from other events?’. For there to be an action, a person has to do something. But the ordinary ‘do something’ does not capture just the actions, since we can say (for instance) that breathing is something that everyone does, although we don’t think that breathing in the ordinary way is an action. It seems that purposiveness has to be introduced – that someone’s intentionally doing something is required.
People often do the things they intentionally do by moving bits of their bodies. This has led to the idea that ‘actions are bodily movements’. The force of the idea may be appreciated by thinking about what is involved in doing one thing by doing another. A man piloting a plane might have shut down the engines by depressing a lever, for example; and there is only one action here if the depressing of the lever was (identical with) the shutting down of the engines. It is when identities of this sort are accepted that an action may be seen as an event of a person’s moving their body: the pilot’s depressing of the lever was (also) his moving of his arm, because he depressed the lever by moving his arm.
But how do bodies’ movings – such events now as his arm’s moving – relate to actions? According to one traditional empiricist account, these are caused by volitions when there are actions, and a volition and a body’s moving are alike parts of the action. But there are many rival accounts of the causes and parts of actions and of movements. And volitional notions feature not only in a general account of the events surrounding actions, but also in accounts that aim to accommodate the experience that is characteristic of agency.
Mind, bundle theory of
Authors: Candlish Stewart 
Published: September 2018

This theory owes its name to Hume, who described the self or person (which he assumed to be the mind) as ’nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’ (A Treatise of Human Nature I, IV, §VI). The theory begins by denying Descartes’s Second Meditation view that experiences belong to an immaterial soul; its distinguishing feature is its attempt to account for the unity of a single mind by employing only relations among the experiences themselves rather than their attribution to an independently persisting subject. The usual objection to the bundle theory is that no relations adequate to the task can be found. But empirical work suggests that the task itself may be illusory.
Many bundle theorists follow Hume in taking their topic to be personal identity. But the theory can be disentangled from this additional burden.
Dualism
Authors: Rosenthal David M. 
Published: September 2018

Dualism is the view that mental phenomena are, in some respect, nonphysical. The best-known version is due to Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a nonphysical substance. Descartes argued that, because minds have no spatial properties and physical reality is essentially extended in space, minds are wholly nonphysical. Every human being is accordingly a composite of two objects: a physical body, and a nonphysical object that is that human being’s mind. On a weaker version of dualism, which contemporary thinkers find more acceptable, human beings are physical substances but have mental properties, and those properties are not physical. This view is known as property dualism, or the dual-aspect theory.
Several considerations appear to support dualism. Mental phenomena are strikingly different from all others, and the idea that they are nonphysical may explain just how they are distinctive. Moreover, physical reality conforms to laws formulated in strictly mathematical terms. But, because mental phenomena such as thinking, desiring and sensing seem intractable to being described in mathematical terms, it is tempting to conclude that these phenomena are not physical. In addition, many mental states are conscious states – states that we are aware of in a way that seems to be wholly unmediated. And many would argue that, whatever the nature of mental phenomena that are not conscious, consciousness cannot be physical.
There are also, however, reasons to resist dualism. People, and other creatures with mental endowments, presumably exist wholly within the natural order, and it is generally held that all natural phenomena are built up from basic physical constituents. Dualism, however, represents the mind as uniquely standing outside this unified physical picture. There is also a difficulty about causal relations between mind and body. Mental events often cause bodily events, as when a desire causes an action, and bodily events often cause mental events, for example in perceiving. But the causal interactions into which physical events enter are governed by laws that connect physical events. So if the mental is not physical, it would be hard to understand how mental events can interact causally with bodily events. For these reasons and others, dualism is, despite various reasons advanced in its support, a theoretically uncomfortable position.
Emotions, nature of
Authors: Solomon Robert C. 
Published: September 2018

What is an emotion? This basic question was posed by William James in 1884, and it is still the focus for a number of important arguments in the philosophy of mind and ethics. It is, on the face of it, a quest for a definition, but it is also a larger quest for a way of thinking about ourselves: how should we think about emotions – as intrusive or as essential to our rationality, as dangerous or as indispensable to our humanity, as excuses for irresponsibility or, perhaps, as themselves our responsibilities? Where do emotions fit into the various categories and ‘faculties’ of the mind, and which of the evident aspects of emotion – the various sensory, physiological, behavioural, cognitive and social phenomena that typically correspond with an emotion – should we take to be essential? Which are mere accompaniments or consequences?
Many philosophers hold onto the traditional view that an emotion, as a distinctively mental phenomenon, has an essential ’subjective’ or ’introspective’ aspect, although what this means (and how accessible or articulate an emotion must be) is itself a subject of considerable dispute. Many philosophers have become sceptical about such subjectivism, however, and like their associates in the social sciences have turned the analysis of emotions to more public, observable criteria – to the behaviour that ’expresses’ emotion, the physiological disturbances that ‘cause’ emotion, the social circumstances and use of emotion language in the ascription of emotions. Nevertheless, the seemingly self-evident truth is that, whatever else it may be, an emotion is first of all a feeling. But what, then, is a ’feeling’? What differentiates emotions from other feelings, such as pains and headaches? And how does one differentiate, identify and distinguish the enormous number of different emotions?
Mind, identity theory of
Authors: Jackson Frank 
Published: September 2018

We know that the brain is intimately connected with mental activity. Indeed, doctors now define death in terms of the cessation of the relevant brain activity. The identity theory of mind holds that the intimate connection is identity: the mind is the brain, or, more precisely, mental states are states of the brain. The theory goes directly against a long tradition according to which mental and material belong to quite distinct ontological categories – the mental being essentially conscious, the material essentially unconscious. This tradition has been bedevilled by the problem of how essentially immaterial states could be caused by the material world, as would happen when we see a tree, and how they could cause material states, as would happen when we decide to make an omelette.
A great merit of the identity theory is that it avoids this problem: interaction between mental and material becomes simply interaction between one subset of material states, namely certain states of a sophisticated central nervous system, and other material states. The theory also brings the mind within the scope of modern science. More and more phenomena are turning out to be explicable in the physical terms of modern science: phenomena once explained in terms of spells, possession by devils, Thor’s thunderbolts, and so on, are now explained in more mundane, physical terms. If the identity theory is right, the same goes for the mind. Neuroscience will in time reveal the secrets of the mind in the same general way that the theory of electricity reveals the secrets of lightning. This possibility has received enormous support from advances in computing. We now have at least the glimmerings of an idea of how a purely material or physical system could do some of the things minds can do.
Nevertheless, there are many questions to be asked of the identity theory. How could states that seem so different turn out to be one and the same? Would neurophysiologists actually see my thoughts and feelings if they looked at my brain? When we report on our mental states what are we reporting on – our brains?