JJ at Feminist Philosophers posted a recent case of a child who appears to have had little social contact for the first five or six years of her life. As JJ notes, feral children, while thankfully rare, are interesting to theorists for a variety of reasons. Questions about the nature of language, human capacity for [...]
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And you thought translating German was hard!
According to this article, the title of this post is a single Oneida word that means, “the two of them went around to the other side of the altar again.”
The word is formed, according to linguist Cliff Abbot, by “add[ing] nine prefixes to the simple root verb “-tase-“, which [...]
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Looks like you can watch the whole film, “Wittgenstein,” here.
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Predication is one of the most basic features of our language. To use a predicate in discussion of the actual world is to make a claim about the way the world (or whatever specific part of it we happen to be speaking about) is. It’s obvious that word-world connections such as those we see in [...]
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Given the discussion of parts I, II and III, I want to propose a way to understand intensions which may end up speaking to certain questions about modal semantics. As an introduction, let’s recall that Carnap engaged in a similar project in Meaning and Necessity. In that work, state-descriptions were to play the functional role [...]
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The difficulty for using a “conceptually prior” class of possible worlds — more about what is meant by the phrase in scare quotes in a moment — to the purpose of giving an account of the intension of predicate terms (at least one which is epistemically responsible) is more apparent. Say we assume, as Lewis [...]
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In part I of this series, I promised to outline what I felt were shortcomings of the view according to which we could provide a genuine modal semantics (semantics for a language with modal operators) under the presupposition that this language was “antecedently meaningful” — which I take to mean at a minimum that at [...]
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One thread of philosophy of language intersects, in at least a few places, with a thread of philosophical considerations about modality. Once we begin considering how to provide an account of understanding the meaning or intension of a predicate such as ‘is ψ’, we realize that we must consider possible circumstances or imaginary scenarios in [...]
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Posted in Action Theory, Continental Philosophy, Early Modern Philosophy, Epistemology, Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, General Interest, Late Modern Philosophy, Latin American Philosophy, Metaphysics, Moral Psychology, News & Notes, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mathematics, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Psychology, Philosophy of Religion, Race and Gender on September 17, 2007 | 6 Comments »
Class is officially in session for the 53rd Philosophers‘ Carnival!
Since we at the Florida Student Philosophy Blog have recently returned to class, we thought you should too. We would like to thank all those who submitted, and we hope that you find the current selection as engaging as we did. Courses (or posts if you [...]
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Whatever other implications there are from a theory according to which at least some singular referring terms are directly referring and proper names are rigid designators, one take-home lesson is properly semantic: if there’s anything to the notion of rigid designation, and if proper names are in fact rigid designators, then the semantics of proper [...]
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I’ve been reading Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, which has been in the news quite a bit recently. Early in the book, Harris puts forward an argument to the effect that Christians are inconsistent in claiming, on the one hand, that they have good reasons for holding Christianity while believing, on the other, that Muslims [...]
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… a colloquium featuring Mark Colyvan (University of Sydney) at the University of Miami, Friday, May 11th.
- Rico Vitz
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… a colloquium featuring Bernhard Nickel (Harvard) at the University of Miami, Thursday, April 26th.
- Rico Vitz
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… a colloquium featuring Michael Jubien at the University of Florida, Monday, April 16th.
- Rico Vitz
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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on concepts explains three commonly held views of concepts. On the first, concepts are taken to be psychological entities that serve as constituents of the mental representations that feature in the representational theory of mind. On the second, concepts are understood in terms of concept possession which is explained [...]
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The notion of possible worlds has proved incredibly frutiful in providing formal semantics for various systems of quantified modal logic. Perhaps so fruitful that philosophers interested in related issues such as semantics for the terms ‘necessarily’ and ‘possibly’ of natural language or in the metaphysical nature of necessity and possibility often make use of the [...]
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