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Added by: Jamie Collin
Summary: Argues against deflationary conceptions of truth. Deflationism provides a descriptive account of the term 'true', but these claims, argues Gupta, are both very strong and problematic.Ahmed, Arif. Saul Kripke (Contemporary American Thinkers)2007, Bloomsbury.-
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Added by: Jamie CollinPublisher’s Note:
Saul Kripke is one of the most important and original post-war analytic philosophers. His work has undeniably had a profound impact on the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Yet his ideas are amongst the most challenging frequently encountered by students of philosophy. In this informative and accessible book, Arif Ahmed provides a clear and thorough account of Kripke's philosophy, his major works and ideas, providing an ideal guide to the important and complex thought of this key philosopher. The book offers a detailed review of his two major works, Naming and Necessity and Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, and explores how Kripke's ideas often seem to overturn widely accepted views and even perceptions of common sense. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Kripke's thought, the book provides a cogent and reliable survey of the nature and significance of Kripke's contribution to philosophy. This is the ideal companion to the study of this most influential and challenging of philosophers.Comment: This book would be very useful in any course on Philosophy of Language, Philosophical Logic, and/or Metaphysics which incorporated the work of Saul Kripke. There are separate chapters on names, necessity, rule-following, and private languages; so a syllabus could make use of these individually depending on need, rather than the entire book. This is an excellent survey which covers Kripke's work in depth. As such, it is suitable for undergraduates and graduates.
1975, Philosophical Studies 27(1): 73-125.-
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Added by: Jamie Collin
Summary: Classic presentation of the prosentential theory of truth: an important, though minority, deflationist account of truth. Prosententialists take 'It is true that' to be a prosentence forming operator that anaphorically picks out content from claims made further back in the anaphoric chain (in the same way that pronouns such as 'he', 'she' and 'it' anaphorically pick out referents from nouns further back in the anaphoric chain).Comment: Good as a primary reading on a course on truth, philosophy of language, or on deflationism more generally. Any course that treats deflationary accounts of truth in any detail would deal with the prosentential theory of truth, and this is one of the most historically important presentations of that theory. Would be best used in advanced undergraduate or graduate courses.
Wilson, Deirdre, Dan Sperber. Meaning and Relevance2012, Cambridge University Press.-
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Added by: Jamie Collin
Abstract: When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.Comment: Many of the essays contained in this book would be useful in a course on philosophy of language. Each chapter is self-contained and could be used individually. Many topics are covered, but chapters on pragmatics, implicature, explicature etc., the nature of metaphor, and the evolution of language may be most relevant to philosophy of language courses. The book has the benefit of being both cutting-edge and quite accessible for students. Suitable for undergraduates and graduates.
Wetzel, Linda. Types and Tokens: On Abstract Objects2009, MIT Press.-
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Added by: Jamie Collin
Publisher's Note: There is a widely recognized but infrequently discussed distinction between the spatiotemporal furniture of the world (tokens) and the types of which they are instances. Words come in both types and tokens - for example, there is only one word type 'the' but there are numerous tokens of it on this page - as do symphonies, bears, chess games, and many other types of things. In this book, Linda Wetzel examines the distinction between types and tokens and argues that types exist (as abstract objects, since they lack a unique spatiotemporal location). Wetzel demonstrates the ubiquity of references to (and quantifications over) types in science and ordinary language; types have to be reckoned with, and cannot simply be swept under the rug. Wetzel argues that there are such things as types by undermining the epistemological arguments against abstract objects and offering extended original arguments demonstrating the failure of nominalistic attempts to paraphrase away such references to (and quantifications over) types. She then focuses on the relation between types and their tokens, especially for words, showing for the first time that there is nothing that all tokens of a type need have in common other than being tokens of that type. Finally, she considers an often-overlooked problem for realism having to do with types occurring in other types (such as words in a sentence) and proposes an important and original solution, extending her discussion from words and expressions to other types that structurally involve other types (flags and stars and stripes; molecules and atoms; sonatas and notes).Comment: The book, or extracts from the book, could be used in advanced undergraduate or postgraduate courses on metaphysics, nominalism or philosophy of language. Chapter 2 of the book provides a clear account of the ways Quine and Frege thought about ontological commitment and language. Chapters 3-5 are also useful for students who want to understand nominalism better, though more recent nominalist strategies, such as the kinds of fictionalism developed by Mark Balaguer and Mary Leng, are not addressed.
Fara, Delia Graff. Desires, Scope, and Tense2003, Philosophical Perspectives 17(1): 141-163.-
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Added by: Nick Novelli
Summary: According to James McCawley (1981) and Richard Larson and Gabriel Segal (1995), the following sentence is three-ways ambiguous: -/- Harry wants to be the mayor of Kenai. -/- According to them also, the three-way ambiguity cannot be accommodated on the Russellian view that definite descriptions are quantified noun phrases. In order to capture the three-way ambiguity of the sentence, these authors propose that definite descriptions must be ambiguous: sometimes they are predicate expressions; sometimes they are Russellian quantified noun phrases. After explaining why the McCawley-Larson-Segal solution contains an obvious flaw, I discuss how an effort to correct the flaw brings to light certain puzzles about the individuation of desires, about quantifying in, and about the disambiguation of desire ascriptions.Comment: An interesting paper about the semantics of desire. Would be suitable in a philosophy of language course.
Fara, Delia Graff. Specifying Desires2013, Noûs 47(2): 250-272.-
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Added by: Nick Novelli, Emily Paul
Abstract: A report of a person's desire can be true even if its embedded clause underspecifies the content of the desire that makes the report true. It is true that Fiona wants to catch a fish even if she has no desire that is satisfied if she catches a poisoned minnow. Her desire is satisfied only if she catches an edible, meal-sized fish. The content of her desire is more specific than the propositional content of the embedded clause in our true report of her desires. Standard semantic accounts of belief reports require, however, that the embedded clause of a true belief report specify precisely the content of the belief that makes it true. Such accounts of belief reports therefore face what I call "the problem of underspecification" if they are extended to desire reports. Such standard accounts are sometimes refined by requiring that a belief report can be true not only if its subject has a belief with precisely the propositional content specified by its embedded clause, but also only if its subject grasps that content in a particular way. Such refinements do not, however, help to address the problem of underspecification for desire reports.Comment: Perfect for a beliefs and desires element of a philosophy of language course. Very clear and contains many discussion points - e.g. could ask students to give their own examples of cases where the content of one's desire is underspecified - and test whether they agree with Graff Fara that the desire can still be true.
Fara, Delia Graff. Phenomenal Continua and the Sorites2001, Mind 110(440): 905-935.-
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Added by: Nick Novelli
Abstract: I argue that, contrary to widespread philosophical opinion, phenomenal indiscriminability is transitive. For if it were not transitive, we would be precluded from accepting the truisms that if two things look the same then the way they look is the same and that if two things look the same then if one looks red, so does the other. Nevertheless, it has seemed obvious to many philosophers (e.g. Goodman, Armstrong and Dummett) that phenomenal indiscriminability is not transitive; and, moreover, that this non-transitivity is straightforwardly revealed to us in experience. I show this thought to be wrong. All inferences from the character of our experience to the non-transitivity of indiscriminability involve either a misunderstanding of continuity, a mistaken interpretation of the idea that we have limited powers of discrimination, or tendentious claims about what our experience is really like; or such inferences are based on inadequately supported premisses, which though individually plausible are jointly implausible.Comment: A very good paper for an interesting and controversial claim. Very logically rigorous, well-presented and easy to follow, even if not necessarily convincing. Interesting in philosophy of mind in its own right, and is also a good illustration of use of logic in constructing an argument. It does require skill in quantificational logic to understand.
Taylor, Kenneth A.. Truth and Meaning: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language1998, Oxford: Blackwell.-
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Added by: Nick Novelli
Summary: This lucid and wide-ranging volume constitutes a self-contained introduction to the elements and key issues of the philosophy of language. In particular, it focuses on the philosophical foundations of semantics, including the main challenges to and prospects for a truth conditional semantics. Since the book is neither single-mindedly philosophical, nor single-mindedly technical, it is an accessible introduction to the philosophical foundations of semantics, and will provide the ideal basis for a first course in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic.Comment: This book offers a good introduction to theories of meaning, and includes some good, clear presentations of specialised systems of logic used in philosophy of language, giving students a good example of the existence and practical usefulness of logic beyond first-order. Chapter 3, on Tarski's formal theory of truth, is one of the better treatments of that subject available. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate teaching.
Taylor, Kenneth A.. Narrow content functionalism and the mind-body problem1989, Noûs 23(3): 355-72.-
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Added by: Nick Novelli
Summary: Narrow content functionalism claims that the contents of beliefs are determined by their causal profile. If two belief tokens are of the same causal type, they are of the same semantic type. However, Taylor argues that de dicto semantic types do not supervene on causal types, due to multiple realizability. He establishes this with the thought experiment of "fraternal twin earth", where things are functionally identical but molecularily different.Comment: This paper shows how Putnam's "twin earth" thought experiment needs to be modified to address narrow content functionalism. Suited to higher-level mind and language courses. Best taught after some more introductory readings on the topic, as those not already familiar with some of the elements may become lost.
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Gupta, Anil. A Critique of Deflationism
1993, Philosophical Topics 21: 57-81.
Comment: This would be very useful in a course on the nature of truth, or any course in which deflationary conceptions of truth are relevant. The paper is not technical and provides a good account of deflationism about truth. This would be suitable for undergraduates or graduates.