Philosophy of Language A-Z (Philosophy A-Z)

Philosophy of Language A–Z PHILOSOPHY A–Z SERIES GENERAL EDITOR: OLIVER LEAMAN These thorough, authoritative yet concis...

Author: Alessandra Tanesini

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Philosophy of Language A–Z PHILOSOPHY A–Z SERIES GENERAL EDITOR: OLIVER LEAMAN

These thorough, authoritative yet concise alphabetical guides introduce the central concepts of the various branches of philosophy. Written by established philosophers, they cover both traditional and contemporary terminology. Features • Dedicated coverage of particular topics within philosophy • Coverage of key terms and major figures • Cross-references to related terms.

Philosophy of Language A–Z offers clear and thorough guidance on how to negotiate the complexities of the philosophy of language. Alessandra Tanesini is Reader in Philosophy at Cardiff University. Her publications include Wittgenstein: A Feminist Introduction (Polity Press, 2004) and An Introduction to Feminist Epistemologies (Blackwell, 1999).

ISBN 978 0 7486 2229 0

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Edinburgh

Cover design: River Design, Edinburgh

Philosophy of Language A–Z

This essential reference tool, written in a language accessible to beginners and non-specialists alike, provides concise and precise entries on all the relevant key terms and issues. It includes extensive cross-references which indicate the contexts of each entry, and can be used to deepen understanding of any given topic.

www.eup.ed.ac.uk


Alessandra Tanesini

The first glossary to cover the theories, debates, concepts, problems and philosophers within the philosophy of language in one volume.

Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF

Alessandra Tanesini

Alessandra Tanesini

PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE A–Z

Volumes available in the Philosophy A–Z Series Christian Philosophy A–Z, Daniel J. Hill and Randal D. Rauser Epistemology A–Z, Martijn Blaauw and Duncan Pritchard Ethics A–Z, Jonathan A. Jacobs Indian Philosophy A–Z, Christopher Bartley Jewish Philosophy A–Z, Aaron W. Hughes Philosophy of Religion A–Z, Patrick Quinn Philosophy of Mind A–Z, Marina Rakova

Forthcoming volumes Aesthetics A–Z, Fran Guter Chinese Philosophy A–Z, Bo Mou Feminist Philosophy A–Z, Nancy McHugh Islamic Philosophy A–Z, Peter Groff Philosophy of Science A–Z, Stathis Psillos Political Philosophy A–Z, Jon Pike

Philosophy of Language A–Z Alessandra Tanesini

Edinburgh University Press

C

Alessandra Tanesini, 2007

Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by TechBooks, India, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 2228 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 2229 0 (paperback) The right of Alessandra Tanesini to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

Contents Series Editor’s Preface Introduction and Acknowledgements Philosophy of Language A–Z Bibliography

vii ix 1 184

Series Editor’s Preface Philosophy is not only expressed in language, but language is often its main object of interest and enquiry. Not of course language in the sense of grammar and style, which is more the realm of linguistics and literary investigation. Language as our medium for pursuing meaning, which in itself is the repository of meaning, has constantly fascinated philosophers with its ability both to enlighten and confuse. The issue of how words mean things, an issue that seems on the face of it so very simple, has in fact served to differentiate some of the major philosophical schools, and continues to appear on the battlefields of major theoretical controversies in philosophy. One of the intriguing features of debates about language is that they are generally conducted in terms of the very medium under discussion. In modern times the philosophy of language has become rather technical in nature, and it is very helpful to have a systematic list of explanations of many of the key concepts and figures in the discipline. Alessandra Tanesini has provided such a guide, and I am sure that readers of this volume will find her route through the thicket of different theories and arguments a useful one to follow. A solid grasp of some of the basic positions in the philosophy of language is indispensable for a grasp of philosophy as a whole, and this volume is designed to go someway to fulfilling that role. Oliver Leaman

Introduction and Acknowledgements This dictionary introduces readers to the main theories, problems, figures and arguments in the philosophy of language. It aims for breadth of coverage, including over 490 entries on every topic in the philosophy of language and on many notions in the cognate areas of logic, philosophical logic and the philosophy of mind. Entries are written in accessible, nontechnical vocabulary and made to be as concise as possible. Each entry is cross-referenced to others that are related to it, so that the reader can broaden his or her knowledge of the issues and debates connected to a given problem or figure. Further, entries are supplemented by brief further readings. I would like to thank Alex Miller and Michael Lynch for suggestions about which entries to include, and Michael Durrant, Richard Gray and Oliver Leaman for useful comments on earlier drafts. Staff at Edinburgh University Press were particularly helpful with all queries and have greatly facilitated the writing of this work. Cardiff, Wales May 2006


A A posteriori: The term applies primarily to knowledge that is ultimately dependent on experience or observation, and is thus dubbed ‘empirical’. The truths of natural science are knowable in this way. Some of these truths, such as those about subatomic particles, might be highly theoretical. Nevertheless, they are knowable a posteriori because they are based on evidence which is ultimately provided by the senses. A posteriori falsehoods are those claims whose falsity is ultimately known by means of experience or observation. A posteriori truths are opposed to a priori truths, which are not empirical. Until recently it was not uncommon for philosophers to assume that the notion of a posteriori or empirical truth was coextensive with those of synthetic truth and of contingent truth. In other words, they assumed that all and only the empirical truths were contingent and also that all and only these were synthetic. See Analytic; Kripke, Saul; Necessary A priori: The term applies to what can be known by reflection independently of experience. Arithmetical truths, such as two plus two is four, are typically thought to be knowable in this way. An a priori falsehood is a claim whose falsity can be established by reflection alone, for example, that

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two plus two is three. A priori truths are not empirical, which is to say that they are not a posteriori. Until recently it was not uncommon for philosophers to assume that the notion of a priori truth was coextensive with those of analytic truth, and of necessary truth. In other words, they assumed that all and only the a priori truths were necessary and also that all and only these were analytic. See Contingent; Kripke, Saul; Synthetic Further reading: BonJour (1998), ch. 1 Abstract entity: An entity that exists outside space or time and does not have any causal powers. If any such entities exist, and philosophers disagree on this matter, numbers could be a good example. An entity which is not abstract is concrete. It is called a particular. See Universal Abstraction: (1) Early modern philosophers used the term to refer to the process of neglecting or suppressing specific details. Thus, we obtain the idea of a dog, any dog, by abstraction from the idea of a spaniel by neglecting specific features pertaining to this breed but not shared by other dogs. Thus, an abstract idea is a general idea which is not fully detailed. This notion of abstraction has little in common with contemporary conceptions of an abstract entity. See Berkeley, George. (2) The term is also used to name a principle, attributed to Frege, for the formulations of definitions of a special sort. Consider, for example, all the lines in the world and group together all of those that are parallel to each other. By this process one obtains several classes of lines, with each class including all and only parallel lines. It is now possible to define the notion of the direction of a line as that which is the same for all the lines in each group. This is an abstractive definition of


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direction. Frege was dissatisfied with it because the definition does not by itself tell us what to say about things which intuitively we do not think as having a direction. Acquisition argument: This is a challenge, put forward by Dummett, to semantic realism. Semantic realism is the view that to understand a sentence is to know the conditions under which it is true (its truth conditions), and that these conditions might be such that it is potentially beyond us to detect whether or not they obtain (that is, the truth conditions are evidence-, verification- or recognition-transcendent). Dummett challenges the supporter of semantic realism to explain how knowledge of these evidence-transcendent conditions could possibly have been acquired. Dummett agrees with the realist that to understand a sentence is to know its truth conditions. However, he claims that states of affairs whose obtaining is by hypothesis undetectable could not have played a role in our acquisition of such knowledge. Thus, semantic realism must be false, and those sentences we understand must have truth conditions that are not evidence-transcendent. The argument is generally considered unsuccessful since the semantic realist can explain our understanding of sentences whose truth conditions are evidence-transcendent in terms of our understanding of their constituent words and of their modes of combination. See Communicability argument; Manifestation argument; Tacit knowledge; Verification transcendence Further reading: Hale (1999) Alethic: An adjective which means pertaining or concerning truth (from the Greek word for truth, aletheia). Ambiguity: A word or expression is ambiguous when it has more then one meaning.

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Analogy: An argument by analogy is one that relies on the similarities with a known case to draw inferences about an unknown one. Thus, it used to be claimed that we know of the existence of other minds by means of an analogy with our own. I know that in my case I behave in certain ways because of my beliefs, desires and sensations. I observe that others behave in similar ways, and I conclude, by analogy from my own case, that behind their behaviour are mental states similar to my own. This particular argument has severe shortcomings, including the fact that it generalises to all persons on the basis of one instance only. Analysis: It is a means of clarifying a concept by breaking it up into its conceptual components. Thus, for example, the concept of bachelor can be analysed as unmarried man of a marriageable age. See Analysis, paradox of Analysis, paradox of: The paradox has a long history having perhaps originated with Plato. Suppose that a statement of A is B offers an analysis, where A is the term to be explained or analysed (analysandum) and B is what gives the analysis (analysans). Either A and B are equivalent in meaning or they are not. If they are equivalent in meaning, then the analysis is trivial because it is not informative. If they are not equivalent in meaning, then the analysis is incorrect, because it does not tell us what the concept we analyse means. Either way, conceptual analyses are either trivial or wrong. A response to the paradox might be to say that an analysis that goes beyond merely restating the original meaning of the concept to be analysed need not be incorrect. Instead, it can refine, and sharpen up, that concept in ways that are informative.


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Analytic: A statement, claim or sentence which is true (false) in virtue only of the meanings of the expressions which make it up. For instance, ‘bachelors are unmarried males of a marriageable age’ is said to be an analytic truth. Synthetic truths, whose truth depends also on how things are, are opposed to analytic truths. Quine argued against the analytic–synthetic distinction, claiming that no noncircular definition of the notion of analyticity could be provided. Until recently, it was not uncommon for philosophers (including Quine himself) to assume that all and only analytic truths were necessary, and also that all and only analytic truths were knowable a priori. Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 4; Quine (1951) Anaphora: The cross-referencing relation which can hold, for example, between a noun and a pronoun. In the sentence ‘Mary arrived late at the party, and she left early’, the name ‘Mary’ is the anaphoric antecedent of the pronoun ‘she’ which cross-refers to it. Any expression that stands in anaphoric relation to an antecedent is called an ‘anaphor’. Confusingly, the antecedent might come after its anaphor in a sentence. An example is: ‘When she first crossed the line, Paula bowed to the audience’. Some philosophers have claimed that expressions other than pronouns can have anaphoric relations with antecedent locutions. See Pronoun; Prosentence Anscombe, G. E. M. (1919–2001): Professor Anscombe was a fellow of Somerville College, Oxford University and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University. Her influential work in philosophy includes her book Intention (1957) on action theory, and her papers on the intentionality of sensation and on the first person.

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Anscombe had been a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and was one of his literary executors. She was the translator of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and the author of the highly influential An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959). Anti-realism: The label for a family of views opposed to realism. Sometimes they are also referred to as non-realist. There are many kinds of anti-realism which are best understood in terms of the realist assumptions they reject. Anti-realists about an area of discourse, who deny the existence of the alleged entities in that area, divide into supporters of error-theory, who believe that all atomic claims in that area of discourse are simply false, and supporters of expressivism or non-cognitivism, who believe that sentences in that area of discourse are not used to make claims but simply to vent one’s attitudes or emotions. Other anti-realists accept the existence of the alleged entities, but deny that these objects exist independently of us. Dummett, for instance, opposes what he calls semantic realism. He argues that sentences in any given area of discourse should not be understood as being made true or false by conditions that might be even in principle undetectable by us, as the realist would have it. Instead, these sentences depend, in some way to be specified, on us for their truth. For instance, in arithmetic Dummett argues that truth cannot outstrip the possibility of finding a proof. Response-dependence about an area of discourse is another kind of anti-realism which takes the objects in question to depend on us for their existence. Recently, some philosophers have attempted to debunk the whole realism/anti-realism debate and support quietism instead. See Semantic anti-realism; Wright, Crispin Further reading: Miller (2005)


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Argument: (1) A piece of reasoning consisting of one or more conclusions and some premises, which are statements presented as reasons for, evidence in favour of, the conclusion or conclusions. Deductive arguments are those in which the premises are intended to provide conclusive reasons which guarantee the truth of the conclusion given the truth of the premises. Inductive arguments are those in which the premises provide evidence in favour of the conclusion. See Validity. (2) In mathematics and in logic the inputs of functions and operations are called their arguments, and the outputs are their values. For instance, in ‘2 + 3 = 5’, addition is the function, the arguments are 2 and 3, and the value is 5. Argument from above: One of two arguments offered by Quine in favour of the claim that translation is indeterminate. The other is known as the argument from below. Indeterminacy of translation is the thesis that in many instances there is no fact of the matter about which of two competing (and mutually incompatible) translations is correct. The argument from above relies on the idea that scientific theories are under-determined by all the possible empirical evidence. This is the idea that theories which are actually different might have exactly the same empirical consequences, so that no empirical evidence could be provided for favouring one over the other. Suppose we want to translate into our language the scientific theory of a scientist who belongs to a culture with whom we have never been in touch and who speaks a language that is totally new to us. In this instance we need to start the translation from scratch. In these cases, Quine claims that the translation of the theoretical claims in the foreigner’s theory is under-determined by our translations of those portions of its theory which are about observation. That

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is to say, there will be more than one way of translating these theoretical sentences, all of which are equally compatible with our translation of the foreigner’s observation sentences, despite being mutually incompatible. Quine’s claim here is not that translation is as under-determined as scientific theories are. Rather, his claim is that even when scientific under-determination is ignored, and one has chosen one scientific theory (as the foreign scientist has done), translation is still not determinate. Thus, the indeterminacy of translation is meant to be additional to the under-determination of scientific theories by all the possible empirical evidence. See Inscrutability of reference Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 4 Argument from below: One of two arguments offered by Quine in favour of the claim that translation is indeterminate. The other is known as the argument from above. Indeterminacy of translation is the thesis that in many cases there is no fact of the matter about which of two competing (and mutually incompatible) translations is correct. The argument relies on the idea of a radical translator who needs to translate a novel language from scratch. At the beginning the translator must rely exclusively on the behaviour of native speakers. For Quine, the translator can only avail herself of facts about the stimulus meaning of sentences of the native language. She can only take into account the circumstances under which natives would assent to sentences and the circumstances under which they would dissent from them. Quine claims that when all these facts are in, translation is still indeterminate, because mutually incompatible translations would be compatible with all the facts about stimulus meaning. This is the argument from below, and Quine substantiates it by example. Imagine that the natives


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assent to ‘gavagai’ when a rabbit is in sight and dissent from it when there is no rabbit. Both a translation of the native sentence as ‘there is a rabbit’ and as ‘there is an undetached rabbit part’ (i.e., a part of rabbit attached to the whole rabbit), despite being incompatible, are compatible with these facts about stimulus meaning. We cannot get evidence for preferring one of the translations over the other by asking, while pointing first to one part of a rabbit and then to another part of the same rabbit, whether this is ‘erat gavagai’ as that, because there is no unique way of determining whether the native word ‘erat’ is best translated as ‘same’ or as ‘undetached part of the same’. Translation is indeterminate because facts about stimulus meaning, which are the only acceptable facts, do not determine it. Evans has argued that indeterminacy is dissolved when the range of acceptable translations is restricted only to those which meet the further constraint of compositionality. Any translation of a complex expression must attribute to each of its semantic parts the same meaning it attributes to that part when used in combination with other semantic parts. Suppose natives sometime also say ‘ugul gavagai’ and also suppose that on the basis of previous natives’ utterances we take ‘ugul’ to mean ‘white’. But now the indeterminacy seems to disappear since ‘white rabbit’ and ‘white undetached rabbit part’ have different stimulus meanings. The presence of a black rabbit with a white foot would prompt dissent to the first but not necessarily to the second. Quine cannot reply by saying that ‘ugul’ could mean ‘part of a white animal’ because (by compositionality) ‘ugul’ must mean the same thing every time it is used. The problem is that ‘white’ and ‘part of a white animal’ have different stimulus meaning since the first, but not the second, applies to things that are not animals. Further, the problem is not addressed by taking ‘ugul’ to mean ‘part of a white

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thing’ because a white foot of a rabbit is also a thing. Thus, ‘white’ and ‘part of a white thing’ differ with regard to their stimulus-meanings since the first does not apply to a black rabbit with a white ear, but the second applies to one of its undetached parts. See Inscrutability of reference Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 4; Evans (1996), ch. 2; Quine (1960) Ascription: Attribution. When philosophers talk about ascriptions, they are often interested in the language used to make the ascription, rather than exclusively in what is ascribed. Assertibility condition: The condition which, if satisfied, warrants or justifies the assertion of the statement. Thus, the litmus paper’s turning red when immersed in a liquid is a condition that warrants the assertion that this liquid is acid. Supporters of semantic anti-realism have developed accounts of meaning in terms of assertibility conditions. Supporters of semantic realism, instead, have provided theories of meaning in terms of truth conditions. See Semantics, assertibility conditions; Superassertibility Assertion: A speech act that consists in putting forward a proposition as true. In order to be entitled to make the assertion a speaker does not need to have a guarantee that the assertion is true; some form of warrant or justification is sufficient. It is a matter of dispute among philosophers whether in order to provide an account of assertion we need to rely on a previously understood notion of truth. The debate between semantic realism and semantic anti-realism concerns whether the meaning of declarative sentences is to be understood in terms of their truth conditions or of their assertibility conditions.


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Assertoric content: The fact stating content of statements. Statements might also have additional meaning, but if it does not contribute to determining which facts are stated by the assertion, it is not part of its assertoric content. See Assertoric force Assertoric force: In order to make an assertion, a declarative sentence must be uttered with assertoric force. In general, force is that pragmatic component of meaning that makes the difference as to whether the utterance is a question, a command, an assertion, and so forth. See Assertoric content Asymmetric dependence: This is Fodor’s answer to the disjunction problem faced by indicator semantics. Imagine a person who cannot tell by sight a rabbit from a hare. This person learns about rabbits from books and by having a pet rabbit as a child. Whenever this person is in the presence of a rabbit, she forms a mental state of kind R. This same person, however, also forms a mental state of kind R when she sees a hare in the field. Indicator semantics appears to force us to say that the person has an eitherrabbit-or-hare representation. Intuitively, we want to say, instead, that this person at times mistakenly applies her representation of rabbits to hares. In other words, at times she mistakes a hare for a rabbit. Fodor suggests a way of patching indicator semantics so that it offers the right intuitive response. He claims that R-mental states represent rabbits rather than rabbits-or-hares because the causal relation between hares and R-mental states is asymmetrically dependent on the causal relation between rabbits and R-mental states. Intuitively, the point is that one applies R-mental states to hares because hares look like rabbits but not the other way round (hence, the asymmetry). If all hares were to be painted orange tomorrow,

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so that they looked very different from rabbit, the person would not form R-mental states in their presence. If, instead, rabbits were painted so as to differentiate them from hares, the person would continue to form R-mental states in their presence. Further reading: Crane (2003), ch. 5 Atomic sentence: A basic sentence which cannot be further decomposed into even more basic sentences. See Logical atomism Attributive position: An adjective occurs in an attributive position when it modifies a noun or a noun-phrase. Thus, ‘white’ in ‘she was wearing white shoes’ occurs in attributive position. This use of adjective is contrasted to their use in predicative positions when they are complements of a verb. Thus, ‘white’ in ‘those lilies are white’ occurs in a predicative position. Austin, J. L. (1911–60): Austin worked at Oxford University publishing only a small part of his work during his lifetime. Many of his books, including How to Do Things with Words (1975), were published posthumously and consist of his lecture notes as edited by his students. Austin was one of the main proponents of ordinary language philosophy; he focused his work on the many different uses to which words are ordinarily put. He is best known for his account of performatives and more specifically for his taxonomy of speech acts, which he classified as locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. See Illocutionary act; Locutionary act; Perlocutionary act Ayer, A. J. (1910–89): Famous for introducing logical positivism to Britain, Ayer spent his academic career at Oxford University and University College London. In his


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book Language, Truth, and Logic (2nd edn. 1946) Ayer argued that all meaningful propositions were either analytic or verifiable. Ayer’s definition of verifiability was subject to many refinements in order to combat the charge that any statement whatsoever would satisfy the definition. In the philosophy of perception Ayer developed a version of sense-data theory which was strongly criticised by Austin. See Verification principle Further reading: McDonald (2005)

B Bedeutung: Frege’s term for the feature of a linguistic expression which contributes to the determination of the truth or falsity of the sentences in which it occurs. For him, the Bedeutung of a proper name is the thing or person it names. The Bedeutungen of sentences are one of two truth-values: the true and the false. One-place functions (which Frege calls ‘concepts’) from objects to truth-values are the Bedeutungen of predicates with only one argument place (e.g. ‘. . . is red’); relations from more than one object to a truth-value are the Bedeutungen of predicates with more than one argument place (e.g., ‘. . . is west of . . . ’). Frege’s Bedeutung has been variously translated into English as reference, designation or meaning. It is closely related to the contemporary notion of the semantic value of an expression; that is, the contribution of that expression to what determines the truth or falsity of the sentences in which it occurs. Frege also distinguished the reference of an expression from its Sinn (sense), which is what determines the Bedeutung. Further reading: McCulloch (1989), chs 1 and 5; Frege (1892a)

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Begriffsschrift See Concept-script Behabitive: A term coined by Austin for a type of (illocutionary) speech act which consists in the adoption of an attitude towards the behaviour of others. Thanking somebody by saying ‘Thank you’ is an example; apologising by saying ‘Sorry’ is another. Austin acknowledges that this is a rather miscellaneous category whose boundaries are less than clear. Further reading: Austin (1975) Belief: Like desires, wants and hopes, beliefs are propositional attitudes. That is, they are attitudes towards propositions. Philosophers of language often think of beliefs as relations between individuals and propositions. Since Frege, they have also been aware of puzzles presented by sentences that report on individuals’ propositional attitudes. See De dicto attribution; De re attribution; Frege’s puzzles; Propositional attitude report Berkeley, George (1685–1753): Born in Kilkenny, Ireland and educated at Trinity College Dublin, Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, was one of the earliest and most interesting supporters of idealism. In his view, there exist only minds, including God, and ideas in these minds. Berkeley denies the existence of matter, but does not deny the existence of ordinary objects such as tables and rocks. Instead, in his view ordinary objects are collections of ideas. Some of his arguments against materialism are of interest in the philosophy of language. For instance, he argues that representation is always a matter of resemblance or likeness; he concludes that ideas can only represent other ideas since only ideas are like other ideas. This conception of representation is generally rejected by contemporary philosophers. Berkeley also argued against the existence of abstract ideas; that is to say, ideas lacking in some detail.


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Thus in his view, for example, we do not possess a general idea of a triangle. Since ideas are pictures in the mind, the idea of a triangle must be triangular and therefore it must be equilateral, or scalene, or isosceles. It must have at least one and at most one of these features. Berkeley was aware that this view generated complexities with regard to his theory of linguistic meaning. Since the meaning of the word ‘triangle’ is general, but the idea in the mind corresponding to it is specific, the meaning of the word cannot be equated with the idea associated with it. Instead, Berkeley argues that our dispositions and customs with regard to the use of the word contribute to its meaning. See Abstraction; Meaning, ideational theory of Biconditional: A sentence or proposition of the form ‘P if and only if Q’. The connective ‘if and only if’ is shortened as ‘iff’. In logical notation the connective is represented either as ‘≡’ or ‘↔’. Biconditionals are often used to state necessary and sufficient conditions. Bivalence: The law that states that every statement is either true or false. Thus, the law states that there are only two values and that each statement has at least and at most one of them. This is why this law is called bivalence. Bivalence should not be confused with excluded middle, according to which for every statement either it or its negation is true. Bivalence entails excluded middle, but the converse is not true. Dummett has argued that unqualified support for bivalence in a given area of discourse is a mark of adopting a realist position with regard to that area of discourse. See Realism Blackburn, Simon (1944–): A British, Cambridge-educated philosopher who has held academic positions at Oxford, Cambridge and the University of North Carolina. He is

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the main proponent of a version of non-cognitivism which he has dubbed quasi-realism. Bound variable See Variable Brain in a vat: A contemporary version of Descartes’ evil genius thought experiment due to Putnam. Putnam uses the thought experiment to argue against scepticism (and in favour of semantic externalism). Putman asks us to imagine a brain in a vat of nutrients which is fed by a computer nerve stimuli that are exactly like those human beings receive from the external world. In later reformulations of the thought experiment, the brain is said to have always been in the vat (ab initio brain in the vat). Putnam claims that, despite some intuitions to the contrary, such a brain could not have thoughts about trees and other ordinary objects because it does not have the right kinds of causal relations to them. Thus, Putnam’s conclusion is based on the causal theory of reference and of mental representation to which he subscribed when he developed this thought experiment. Supporters of internalism have different intuitions about the conceivability of this case. Further reading: Putnam (1981) Broad content: The content of psychological states which is determined by their truth conditions. Thus, when a person on Earth, Oscar, for example, has a belief which he would express by means of the utterance that there is water in the glass, he has a belief whose broad content is characterised by the fact that it is true if and only if there is water in the glass. However, when Twin Oscar on Twin Earth has a belief which he would express by means of an utterance of the words ‘there is water in the glass’, he has a belief with a different broad content, since his belief is true if and only if there is twater in the glass (because


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twater is the odourless, colourless liquid people drink on Twin Earth). See Burge, Tyler; Content; Externalism; Narrow content Burge, Tyler (1946–): At the time of writing a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Burge is one of the most prominent opponents of individualism in the philosophy of mind. Instead, he supports a version of externalism about mental content according to which facts about the physical and social environment external to a person contribute to the individuation of that person’s mental states, whose contents are consequently broad. Whilst Putnam argued by means of his Twin Earth example that the physical environment plays a role in the individuation of linguistic and mental content, Burge’s arthritis example makes a similar case for the importance of the social environment. Burge asks us to imagine a person Jane who utters the words, ‘I have arthritis in my thigh’. Jane, in Burge’s opinion, has a false belief since arthritis is a condition of the joints and not of the thigh. However, since linguistic meaning is conventional, Jane’s linguistic community could have developed a different linguistic practice. The word ‘arthritis’ could have been used to refer to a rheumatoid disease of the bones, and not just of joints. Let us call it ‘tharthritis’. Thus, had the community developed in that different manner, Jane’s utterance of the words ‘I have arthritis in my thigh’ might have been saying something true since her words would have meant that she has tharthritis in her thigh. In this instance, Jane’s words would have expressed the true belief that she has tharthritis in her thigh. The example illustrates that the meanings of Jane’s words and the contents of her beliefs can vary because of changes in the social environment, despite the

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absence of any change in the intrinsic facts about Jane herself. See broad content; internalism; narrow content

C Cambridge property: Those relational properties which things can acquire or lose without themselves undergoing any change. Thus, when Socrates died his wife acquired the property of being his widow. Since these properties are causally impotent, many philosophers do not take them to be genuine properties at all. Canonical notation: The translation of ordinary sentences into a formal or semi-formal language that is intended to make explicit the logical form of those sentences. Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970): A German philosopher of science who was a member of the Vienna Circle and prominent exponent of logical positivism. He moved to the United States in 1935 because of his opposition to the Nazi regime. In his early work The Logical Structure of the World (1928), Carnap attempted the reduction of all scientific terms to a purely phenomenalistic language. In the 1940s and 1950s Carnap wrote several books and articles which greatly contributed to the development of formal semantics and modal logic. Categorical predicate: A predicate that refers to a categorical property. Categorical properties are distinguished from the dispositional properties of things. For example, being soluble in water is a dispositional property of sugar, while being rectangular is a categorical property of most televisions. The notion of a categorical property is also


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used to characterise properties that are not a matter of degree. In this second meaning, being intelligent is not a categorical property since it is possible to be more or less intelligent, while having two eyes is a categorical property since one either has them, or does not. The two meanings of categorical are different and should not be conflated. Categorical property See Categorical predicate Category: There are many different notions of a category. First, grammatical categories are those described in books of grammar. They include: verbs, nouns, adverbs, and so forth. Second, logical categories are deployed when describing the logical form of sentences. They include: singular terms, quantifiers and predicates as well as modal operators. Third, some philosophers have developed the idea of a semantic category where two words are said to belong to the same category if and only if the substitution of one for the other in a meaningful sentence results in another sentence which is also meaningful. Category mistake: An expression coined by Gilbert Ryle. If after I were shown all the colleges’ buildings, I were to ask, ‘Yes, but where is the university?’ I would be making one such mistake. I would be treating the university as if it were an additional physical object with a location of its own. In general, to make a category mistake is to attribute properties or predicates appropriate for things of one kind to things of a different kind. Thus, asking of a stone whether it is blind is also a category mistake. Causal theory of reference: Introduced as an alternative to the description theory of reference, this is the name given to various views according to which an expression refers to whatever is causally linked to it in a certain way. For

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example, a proper name refers to the person it names. Kripke argues that, in these cases, the name is first introduced when the parents name the child, through the ceremony of naming the child (a sort of baptism); the name has its reference fixed by being causally linked to the child. In this way the name is causally grounded in its referent. Once the name is introduced, other people use the name to refer to the same person as the initial baptisers. This phenomenon is called reference borrowing. These other speakers acquire the ability to use the name so that it refers to the person it referred to at the baptising ceremony by becoming part of a causal chain of speakers which goes back to the initial baptisers. Besides proper names of people and other particulars, the causal theory of reference has also been adopted for natural kind terms such as ‘water’, ‘giraffe’, ‘gold’, ‘tiger’. In these instances, the reference of the term is first fixed when some speakers come in causal contact with a sample of the natural kind in question. Thus, the term ‘tiger’ is first introduced when some individuals were presented with tigers, and it is introduced to refer to all the objects that share the same nature of the sample objects; that is, to all tigers. Subsequent speakers borrow the reference from the initial dubbers of the term. Thus formulated, the theory allows for the possibility that names and natural kind terms might have a sense as well as a reference, and it is therefore not automatically committed to a theory of direct reference (the Millian view). The sense of a proper name, for example, could be a definite description used in the baptising ceremony to fix the reference of the name so as to establish the causal connection between the name and the person named. Alternatively, in purely causal theories, the sense could be the mode in which the causal link to the referent is secured. Evans has presented several objections to the causal theory of reference. He points out that names


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sometimes change their reference, whilst in this theory reference change is impossible. He also notes that the theory has difficulties in explaining the role of empty names like ‘Father Christmas’, which lack a referent. See Cluster theory of reference; Qua-problem; Reference; Rigid designator Further reading: McCulloch (1989), chs 4 and 8; Kripke (1980) Charity, principle of: A principle to which, according to Davidson, we appeal when interpreting the words of other people. We apply charity to their pronouncements by assuming that they hold beliefs that are mostly true. Thus, we interpret other people’s words in a way that maximises truth. Thus, if one says, ‘That saucepan has a teflon coating’, and I see that the person is gesturing towards a frying pan, I would normally take that person to mean frying pan by ‘saucepan’. That is to say, I would normally apply the principle of charity and take that person to be saying something which is true. See Humanity, principle of; Radical interpretation Chomsky, Noam (1928–): Born in the USA, Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at MIT. He is the most influential American linguist in the twentieth century as well as being a prominent left-wing political activist. Chomsky has revolutionised the science of linguistics by focusing his attention on the study of the language faculty in human beings. Chomsky’s starting point is the observation that linguistic competence is remarkably uniform among human beings. He thinks that an excessive focus on linguistic performance has obscured this important observation. Chomsky explains this uniformity by postulating the existence of a language faculty in human beings which is largely innate. Chomsky provides a variety of reasons in

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favour of innatism. First, he deploys the so-called poverty of stimulus argument. He claims that children could not have acquired competence with regard to certain features of languages simply on the basis of their experiences of other speakers. Chomsky also notes that innatism provides the best explanation for the speed at which children acquire linguistic competence, and the absence of certain kinds of errors in young learners which one would expect if their learning operated on a trial-and-error basis supplemented by feedback provided by competent speakers. In the 1970s Chomsky postulated the development of the language faculty from an initial innate state (universal grammar) to a more evolved state which is not subject to further changes. Chomsky also made a distinction between two levels of representation. The first level is a deep structure, known as generative grammar, common to all speakers independently of what language they might speak. This grammar consists of explicitly statable recursive rules for the generation of all the possible phrase structures in a language. The surface structure, or transformative grammar, is derived from the deep structure by means of rules of transformation. In the 1980s Chomsky abandoned parts of this framework and began to think of universal grammar as a system of innate principles common to all speakers, combined with a certain numbers of parameters. The learning of a specific natural language would thus be understood largely as a matter of setting the right parameters for that language. Crucially, Chomsky does not believe that language–world relations play an important role in the characterisation of the structure of language. Further reading: Chomsky (1995) Cluster theory of reference: A more recent version, developed by John Searle and Strawson, of the description theory


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of reference. Instead of taking each name to abbreviate one definite description, the cluster theory takes names to abbreviate clusters of definite descriptions most of which, but not necessarily all, are satisfied by the referent of the name. The cluster theory can cope with some of the arguments raised by Kripke against the description theory of reference. More specifically, it can answer most of Kripke’s non-modal arguments. Thus, the cluster theory can acknowledge the fact that different people associate different descriptions, provided they are part of the cluster, with the same name. Similarly, it can explain why people often associate more than one description with a name. Further, since the referent of the name might not satisfy all the descriptions that the name abbreviates, there is no single description in the cluster which the referent of the name must satisfy. Further, by invoking reference borrowing and a social division of linguistic labour, the theory can explain how speakers can refer to something even though the cluster of descriptions they associate with the name either fails to identify the referent uniquely or is not even true of it. Supporters of the theory can explain the phenomena appealed to by Kripke in his modal argument by relying on the idea of the scope of quantifiers. Further reading: Devitt and Sterelny (1999), ch. 3.2; McCulloch (1989) Cognitive command: A notion introduced by Wright. Wright is concerned with individuating among the areas of discourse which are minimally truth-apt, those that can be realistically construed. One of the marks of discourse about which realism can be maintained is that it exhibits cognitive command. Roughly speaking a discourse exhibits this feature if it is a priori true that any difference of opinion in this area can only be satisfactorily explained

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in terms of the cognitive shortcomings (including lack of information or faulty reasoning) of at least one of the two disagreeing parties. See Cosmological role Further reading: Wright (1992) Cognitivism: To be a cognitivist about a given area of discourse is to hold that judgements made in that area purport to express beliefs and describe facts, and as such can be assessed as true or false. Cognitivism can take many forms including error-theory, response-dependence and realism. Cognitivism is opposed to non-cognitivism, according to which judgements in a given area of discourse do not express beliefs and do not describe facts. Further reading: Miller (2003) Commissive: A term introduced by Austin to name a type of (illocutionary) speech act by means of which the speaker purports to place himself or herself under an obligation. Promising is the paradigmatic example. Utterances of ‘I promise’, ‘I will do it’, ‘I give you my word’, when used to make a promise, are instances of commissive speech acts. Further reading: Austin (1975) Common knowledge: A piece of knowledge such that each agent in a group has that knowledge, and further each agent in the group knows that each agent in the group has that knowledge, and further each agent in the group knows that each agent in the group knows that each agent in that group has that knowledge, and so on ad infinitum. The existence of common knowledge is often necessary for co-ordinated activity in social interaction. We owe the first explicit analysis of this notion to David Lewis in his book Convention. Further reading: Lewis (1986a)


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Communicability argument: An argument deployed by Dummett against views that identify linguistic meanings with private mental states. Dummett argues that if linguistic meanings were private, linguistic communication would be impossible. However, since we do communicate by means of language, linguistic meanings are not private mental states. See Acquisition argument; Manifestation argument Competence, linguistic See Linguistic competence Completeness: A formal system is said to be complete if every valid argument can be proved within the system. A complete system could be unsound if arguments that are not valid are also provable in the system. See Soundness Compositionality: The principle of compositionality states that the meaning of a sentence is dependent upon the meanings of its semantic (or meaningful) parts and the way in which these meanings are brought together. Thus, the meaning of ‘Mary loves her sister’ depends on the meanings of ‘Mary’, ‘loves’ and ‘her sister’ and on their order in the sentence. Supporters of compositionality invoke it to explain the productivity and systematicity of linguistic understanding. They claim that compositionality explains our ability to understand novel sentences and that when we understand a complex expression we tend also to understand others that are constituted by the same parts in different orders. A theory of meaning for a language is said to respect compositionality if it includes only a finite number of axioms, and generates theorems which specify the meanings of each sentence in that language in a way that displays how these meanings depend on the meanings of its parts. See Language of thought; Semantics, truth-conditional

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Concept: For Frege a concept is a one-place function from an object to a truth-value (true or false), it is the reference (Bedeutung) of a one-place predicate such as ‘. . . is red’ or ‘. . . is British’. In contemporary philosophy of mind and language the notion has acquired a new meaning. On this view to ascribe possession of a concept to an individual is to ascribe a set of abilities to that individual. Thus to have the concept of a horse one must be able to recognise horses, know that they are animals, and so forth. Concept-script (Begriffsschrift): The title of Frege’s first book and the name of the formal logical language he developed to express all conceptual contents. Frege offered an analysis of sentences in terms of functions (designated by predicates) and arguments (designated by names and other singular terms). Frege also developed the notion of a truth function, which is a function that takes truth-values (the true and the false) as arguments and yields truth-values as values. Conjunction, disjunction and negation are examples of such functions. Probably most importantly of all, Frege developed the notion of a quantifier. Thus, he made it possible to express multiple generalities in logic for the first time. Frege’s own notation for quantifiers and truth function is not used by contemporary logicians. These typographical differences should not obscure the fact that Frege’s logic is what we use now. Further reading: Beaney (1996), ch. 2; McCulloch (1989), ch. 1 Conditional: In ordinary language there are at least two kinds of conditionals: indicative conditionals as exemplified by the conditional ‘if Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy, someone else did’, and subjunctive conditionals, such as ‘if Oswald had not killed Kennedy, someone else would have’. Subjunctive conditionals with an antecedent which is either


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known to be false or assumed to be false are called ‘counterfactuals’. There is some disagreement about how to classify some conditionals. Thus, some philosophers take future conditionals such as ‘if Barcelona does not win the championship in 2007, Chelsea will’ to be indicative; others classify them with subjunctive conditionals. There is also disagreement about how best to understand indicative conditionals. Some philosophers think that indicative conditionals are statements which have truth conditions. Among these, some take the indicative conditional to be the truth-functional material conditional familiar in logic. Others argue that it is not a truth-functional sentential connective. A different approach takes indicative conditionals not to be the sort of thing that has truth conditions at all, but to be an expression of conditional probabilities. In other words, according to this approach when I say ‘if I study, I will pass the exam’, I am not stating a conditional fact, instead I am saying that the probability that I will pass the exam is high on the supposition that I study. See Conventional implicature Further reading: Bennett (2003); Edgington (2001) Connective, truth-functional See Truth-functional sentential connective Connotation: The connotation, or linguistic intension, of a term is contrasted with its denotation. The denotation of a term is its extension, namely, the collection of things it stands for. The term ‘intension’ is used in more than one way: either as what determines what falls in the extension or as the function which assigns for each possible world an extension to a term in that world. Constative: Austin coined the expression to refer to descriptive utterances or statements. An example would be an

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utterance of the sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’. Constative utterances are contrasted by Austin with performative utterances, such as ‘I promise to give you a ticket’. Content: The meaning of an utterance or of a mental state such as a belief or a desire is its content. Some philosophers distinguish between two kinds of content of mental states: broad contents which are determined by the truth conditions of the state, and narrow contents which supervene on the internal states of the agent. Thus, for ¨ instance, I and my doppelganger on Twin Earth might be in states with the same narrow contents. I believe that I see a glass of the odourless clear liquid that fills the lakes, etc., and so does she. But our states have different broad contents since my belief is true if what I see is a glass of water, while her belief is true if what she sees is a glass of what she calls ‘water’, but has chemical composition XYZ. See Externalism; Internalism Further reading: Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (1996) Context: The situation in which an utterance occurs. It often determines the identity of the words involved; it also disambiguates the utterance. Thus, for example, the context serves to determine whether by ‘bank’ a speaker means money or river bank. In the case of indexical expressions such as ‘I’, the context is necessary to determine the meaning and reference of expressions even when there are no ambiguities. Context principle: A principle, first elaborated by Frege in The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), where he states that ‘it is only in the context of a sentence that a word has a meaning’. Frege never restates the principle in any of his later works, but it was adopted by Ludwig Wittgenstein


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in both the Tractatus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953). The basic idea behind the principle is that the sense of a word is given by its role in the sentence in which it occurs. See Compositionality Contingency: A proposition is contingent if and only if it is true but could have been false. Thus, contingent truths are contrasted with necessary truths. See Modality; Necessity; Possibility Convention: Language, it is generally agreed, is conventional at least in the sense that the relation between language and the reality it is about is arbitrary. Thus, the word ‘apple’ could have referred to pears; its reference to apples is a matter of convention. More recently, some philosophers also claim that language is conventional in the sense that the meanings of words are under the speakers’ rational control. See Common knowledge; Language Convention T: First devised by Alfred Tarski as a minimal constraint (which he dubbed ‘criterion of material adequacy’) on any theory of truth. He claimed that any materially adequate account of the truth predicate in a language must identify as the truth predicate in that language a predicate which satisfies all instances of a schema, which he called the T-schema. The schema is: S is True if and only if p, where what replaces S is the name of a sentence and what replaces p is a translation of that sentence in the language in which the schema is formulated. For example, the following are all instances of the T-schema: ‘La neve e` bianca’ is true if and only if snow is white; ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white. Thus, in order for a theory of truth that takes the truth predicate

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in English to be ‘is true’ to be materially adequate, it must have as theorems all the instances of the T-schema such as ‘grass is green’ is true if and only if grass is green; ‘snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white; ‘London is the capital of the UK’ is true if and only if London is the capital of the UK; and so forth. Tarski postulated that the expressions used to fill the places indicated by S and p in the schema had already been assigned determinate meanings. He, therefore, presupposed knowledge of meaning in order to define truth. See Semantics, truth-conditional; Truth, semantic theory of Further reading: Tarski (1944) and (1969) Conventional implicature: A notion developed by Frank Jackson in the context of his account of indicative conditionals. In Jackson’s view indicative conditionals are truth-functional material conditionals. Thus, he claims that somebody who asserts an indicative conditional makes the same assertion with the same truth conditions as somebody who asserts the equivalent material conditional. There are notorious problems with this view. For instance, all material conditionals with false antecedents are true. Thus, since I ate no waffles today, the following absurd conditional ‘if I ate waffles today, you ate one thousand eggs’ should be true if it were a material conditional. Jackson solves the problem by saying that although the conditional assertion is an assertion of a material conditional, the assertion also has a conventional implication. Besides asserting what it does, it also implies, suggests or conveys something else. What it implies is a matter of the conventions governing the meaning of the word ‘if’, rather than, as with the case of conversational implicature, a matter of the conversational maxims governing communication. For Jackson asserting


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a conditional of the form ‘if A then B’ implies that one accords to B a high probability of being true, under the supposition that A is true. Jackson coins a technical term for this relationship. He writes that, in this instance, B is robust with respect to A. Thus, the conventional implicature of the word ‘if’ in every conditional is that the consequent has a high probability of being true, given the supposition that the antecedent is true. This implicature is violated in conditionals such as ‘if I ate waffles today, you ate one thousand eggs’ where the antecedent and the consequent are unrelated. That is why these conditionals seems absurd. See conditional Conversational implicature: Conversation is governed by conversational maxims which require us, for example, to be relevant and sincere. Often, we can communicate something without explicitly saying it, by relying on the other person’s knowledge of these maxims. What is thus communicated is a conversational implicature. Thus, if you are at my place, and I have stopped offering you any drink sometime previously and I now say that I am tired, you might conclude that I want you to leave. You draw this conclusion by reasoning that if I say that I am tired, then my tiredness must be relevant to the current situation, and it would be relevant if I wanted you to leave. Conversational implicatures are not created only by following conversational maxims, but also by violating them, as is often done when one is being sarcastic. Thus, I might say ‘that’s great’ in a context in which it is clear that I intend you to see that I am implicating that it is not great at all. The maxim requiring speakers not to say what they believe to be false is, in this instance, flouted on purpose. See Grice, H. P.

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Conversational maxim: Maxims or social norms that govern cooperative conversation. They include the following: 1. be relevant; 2. do not say what you believe to be false; 3. make your contribution as informative as required for the purposes of the current exchange; 4. be brief; 5. do not say things for which you do not have adequate evidence; 6. avoid ambiguity. These maxims are all derived from the principal normative principle of cooperative conversation, the Cooperative Principle, which enjoins us to make our conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk-exchange in which we are engaged. The theory of conversational maxims and implicature was first developed by H. P. Grice. See Conversational implicature Copula: One of the roles played by the verb ‘to be’. Thus, ‘is’ is the copula in the sentence ‘Edinburgh is beautiful’. Some philosophers like Frege take the copula to be part of the predicate which is thus conceived as an incomplete expression with a gap that can be filled by a subject. Other philosophers take a proposition to be composed by two names (one of a thing and the other of a property) conjoined by the copula. See Predication Corner quotation: First devised by Quine and symbolised as . . ., corner quotations express generalisations over quotations. If p is a variable that ranges over sentences, p is a variable that ranges over the results of applying quotations marks to the sentences p ranges over. Thus, whilst p is a place-holder for sentences (i.e., the cat is on the mat), p is a place-holder for their quote names (i.e., ‘the cat is on the mat’).


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Cosmological role: A notion introduced by Wright. He is concerned with individuating among the areas of discourse which are minimally truth-apt those that can be realistically construed. One of the marks of discourse about which realism can be maintained is that it exhibits wide cosmological role. A discourse, such as that of physics, exhibits wide cosmological role because the putative facts reported by its characteristic claims are invoked in explanations of further facts of other kinds, besides facts about our beliefs or other propositional attitudes. See Cognitive command Further reading: Wright (1992) Count term: For example, ‘dog’ or ‘tree’. These are known as count or countable terms because it makes sense to ask how many of these are present. We can count dogs or trees and state how many of these we wish to talk about. Count terms are contrasted with mass terms such as ‘gold’ or ‘water’. See Criterion of identity or identification; Individuation; Natural kind term; Sortal Counterfactual: A counter to fact conditional such as ‘if the moon were made of cheese, radiation from the sun would melt it’. Counterfactuals always have false antecedents; this is what it means to say that they are counter to fact. Intuitively, some counterfactuals are false, for example, ‘If Napoleon had been Italian, he would have spoken Polish’. Hence, counterfactuals cannot be material conditionals which are true, whenever their antecedents are false. The best-known semantics for counterfactuals has been developed in terms of possible worlds by Lewis. He claims that a counterfactual such as ‘if the moon were made of cheese, radiation from the sun would melt it’ is true if and only if in any possible world in which the antecedent is

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true (that is, the moon is made of cheese) and such that it resembles the actual world as much as possible given the truth of the antecedent (that is, it is a world in which the moon is made of cheese but it is otherwise as close as possible to how things actually are), the consequent is also true (that is, radiation from the sun melts the moon). This interpretation treats any counterfactuals with impossible antecedents as vacuously true. See Semantics, possible worlds; Subjunctive conditional Further reading: Lewis (1973) Counterpart: A notion introduced by Lewis in his modal realist theory of possible worlds. For Lewis, each possible world is a concrete universe, completely physically isolated from any other possible world. For Lewis, entities are world-bound; they each exist in only one world. However, entities have counterparts in other worlds. These counterparts are entities existing in other worlds, but which are similar to the entities of which they are counterparts. The notion of being a counterpart is vague, since it has borderline cases. In some worlds two separate entities could both be the most similar to an entity in another world. In some worlds, it might be vague whether or not a given entity has a counterpart at all. In Lewis’s view what makes it true that Gordon Brown could have been the prime minister of the UK in 2005 is the fact that there is a possible world in which Gordon Brown’s counterpart is the prime minister of the counterpart of the UK in 2005. This view has often been met with what Lewis describes as ‘the incredulous stare’. See Modality; Semantics, possible world Further reading: Divers (2002); Lewis (1986b) Criterion of identity or identification: It provides the identity conditions of some object or other. In other words, the


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criterion of identity is what allows us to tell for any a or b whether they are the same or different. It has been pointed out that we cannot identify things in the absence of a specification of the kind of thing to which they belong. Such specifications are offered by sortal concepts; these concepts supply the criteria of identity for the individuals falling under them. Thus, the concept apple is a sortal concept and it provides criteria for identifying whether a and b are the same apple or different apples. Mass concepts such as gold also provide identity criteria since they permit the identification of the gold of which a ring is made as the same (or different) gold as that of which the bracelet was made. Thus, there exist identity criteria for gold, although there are no criteria of individuation for gold, since ‘gold’ is not a count term. There are two forms identity criteria might take: one-level and two-level. For example, the criterion for the identity of sets in mathematics is a one-level criterion. It reads: for any two sets X and Y, X is identical with Y if and only if X and Y have the same members. What we have here is a criterion of identity which permits us to tell in all instances whether two sets are the same. It is one-level because the criterion quantifies over the same things for which it supplies a criterion of identity. The criterion of identity supplied by Frege for the identity of directions of lines is, instead, a two-level criterion. It reads: for any two lines a and b, the direction of line a is identical to the direction of line b if and only if lines a and b are parallel. The criterion provides identity conditions for directions by quantifying over lines (rather than their directions), and is therefore a two-level criterion. See Definition; Mass term; Relative identity Further reading: Lowe (1999) Criterion of material adequacy See Convention T

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D Davidson, Donald (1917–2003): Davidson was an American philosopher, and student of Quine, whose views in the philosophy of mind and language, and of action have been profoundly influential. Davidson’s best-known contributions to the philosophy of language are his theory of meaning as a theory of truth, his notion of radical interpretation, and his rejection of conceptual relativism based on arguments against the existence of conceptual schemes. See Language; Malapropism; Metaphor; Parataxis; Semantics, truth-conditional Further reading: Malpas (2005) De dicto attitude: The kind of attitude ascribed to an individual by means of a de dicto attribution. De dicto attribution: When talking about people’s beliefs, desires and other so-called propositional attitudes we can adopt different ways of ascribing or attributing these attitudes to them. Thus, for instance, we can ascribe to a person, John, the belief that George Orwell is the author of 1984. This is an example of a de dicto ascription because it relates the believer (in this case, John) to a dictum or proposition (in this instance, the proposition that George Orwell is the author of 1984). It must be observed that the occurrence of singular terms in de dicto attributions is opaque. If we substitute ‘Eric Blair’ (George Orwell’s real name) for ‘George Orwell’ in the attribution above we might obtain a false sentence. Since John might not know Orwell’s real name, he might not believe that Eric Blair is the author of 1984. De dicto attributions of this sort are contrasted with de re attributions. Everybody agrees that there are at least two different ways of attributing


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attitudes, like belief and desire, to people. However, there is disagreement as to whether these are two ways of talking about the same propositional attitudes, or whether de dicto attributions are ascriptions of attitudes of a special kind, and de re attributions are ascriptions of attitudes of another kind. See Opacity; Propositional attitude reports Further reading: McKay and Nelson (2005) De dicto belief: A belief attributed to an individual by means of a de dicto attribution. De dicto modality: Modality is about necessity and possibility. It is said to be de dicto when it concerns the modal statuses of propositions. The propositions expressed by the sentences ‘Necessarily a white wall is white’, ‘Possibly, London is the capital of the UK’, are all examples of de dicto modalities. The proposition expressed by ‘Necessarily a white wall is white’ is true, because in every possible world the proposition expressed by ‘a white wall is white’ is true. Ordinary modal sentences in English are often ambiguous, and can be interpreted as expressing more than one proposition. Thus, for example, the sentence ‘The teacher of Alexander the Great might not have been the teacher of Alexander the Great’ can be read in two ways. Read as expressing a de dicto modal proposition, the sentence is false, since it would mean that it is possible that the proposition expressed by ‘The teacher of Alexander the Great is not the teacher of Alexander the Great’ is true. Read as expressing a de re modal proposition, the sentence is true because it would mean that it is possible that the teacher of Alexander the Great (namely, Aristotle) might not have been the teacher of Alexander the Great. See de re modality Further reading: Plantinga (1974)

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De re attitude: Their existence as a special kind of attitude is matter of dispute. If they exist, they are ascribed to an individual by means of de re attributions. De re attribution: Some ascriptions of beliefs and desires appear to relate the person who has the attitude to a nonpropositional object. An example is the ascription expressed by saying ‘John believes of George Orwell that he is the author of 1984’. Here, we do not seem to ascribe to John an attitude towards a proposition. Instead, John’s belief appears to consist in his attribution of the property of being the author of 1984 to an entity (a res in Latin), namely George Orwell. Because they are, or appear to be, about things rather than propositions, these attitudes are called de re (Latin for about a thing). The occurrence of singular terms in de re attributions is transparent, because if we substitute ‘Eric Blair’ (George Orwell’s real name) for ‘George Orwell’ in the attribution above, the truth-value of the sentence expressing the attribution is not changed. There is an ongoing debate as to whether de re and de dicto attributions are merely two ways of talking about the same propositional attitudes which, despite appearances to the contrary, always take propositional objects or whether they refer to different kinds of attitudes. If the latter, there would exist de dicto attitudes that have propositional objects, and are attributed to individuals by means of de dicto attributions, and de re attitudes, that have non-propositional objects, and are ascribed to individuals by means of de re attributions. See Extensionality; Propositional attitude reports Further reading: McKay and Nelson (2005) De re belief: Their existence as a distinct kind of belief is a matter of dispute. Supporters of their existence argue that


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de re attributions are ascriptions of a special kind of attitude, namely a de re attitude. De re modality: Modality is about necessity and possibility. It is said to be de re when it concerns the modal statuses of the properties of things. For example, ‘the number 2 is necessarily (or essentially) a prime number’; ‘Tony Blair is contingently (or possibly) the Prime Minister of the UK in 2006’ all express de re modalities. De re modality is different from de dicto modality. The sentence expressing a de re necessity ‘a white wall is necessarily white’ is false, because the wall, which is white, might be of a different colour. Ordinary modal sentences in English are often ambiguous and amenable to both de re and de dicto readings. Quine argued that the notion of de re modality is incoherent. His argument was driven by strong opposition to essentialism (a commitment to essences), which he thought was a consequence of taking de re modality seriously. Further reading: Plantinga (1974) De re sense: A sense (Sinn) or mode of presentation of an object which cannot be entertained if the object does not exist. Demonstratives have been thought to have such a sense. See Singular thought De se attribution: These are ascriptions of beliefs and desires, or other similar attitudes, which are about oneself. It is has been argued by John Perry and others that at least some of these attributions involve attitudes that do not have propositional objects, but are to be distinguished also from ordinary de re attitudes. Suppose I believe that the person with the torn sack of sugar is making a mess on the floor. I might subsequently discover that I am that

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person. I now have a new belief that I am making a mess. This is a de se attribution of what seems to be a de se attitude because it is irreducibly about oneself, since it seems impossible to capture the content of the belief without using the indexical ‘I’. In order to begin to see why this might be the case, one needs to compare my belief that Alessandra Tanesini is making a mess, and my belief that I am making a mess. These two might seem to have the same content, and thus it would seem possible to explain the object of the second belief as a proposition. However, if we think of the content of the attitude as that to which we refer in explaining actions, these two beliefs differ in content. If I believe that I am making a mess, I will search for my pack of sugar. If, instead, I believe that Alessandra Tanesini is making a mess, I will do no such thing unless I also believe that I am Alessandra Tanesini. But then, the indexical has reappeared. Further reading: Perry (1979) Deconstruction See Derrida, Jacques Definite description: An expression such as ‘the Queen of England’, or ‘the capital of Wales’. Frege takes definite descriptions to be names, and acknowledges that some of them might fail to refer either because there is nothing they stand for or because there is more than one such thing. ‘The King of France’ is an example of the first kind of failure, ‘the Chelsea player’ could be an example of the second if the context fails to clarify who is the player in question. Sentences including definite descriptions with no reference are, for Frege, neither true nor false. In order to avoid taking sentences containing definite descriptions that fail to refer as lacking in truth-value, Russell treats definite descriptions as quantified expressions. He suggests that a sentence like ‘The King of France is bald’ is


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to be read as ‘There is at least one thing and there is at most one thing such that, that thing is the King of France and that thing is bald’. That is, ‘(∃x)(∀y){[x is the King of France & (if y is the King of France, then x = y)] & x is bald}’. Russell also suggests that names such as ‘London’ are in fact definite descriptions in disguise and should be treated in the same manner. Kripke has offered arguments against these Russellian views. Kripke claims that names are rigid designators and that definite descriptions are not rigid. It must also be noted that, as Donnellan points out, there are two uses of definite descriptions: attributive and referential. In its attributive use the description refers to the one thing that satisfies the description or otherwise fails to refer. In their referential use definite descriptions can succeed in referring even though nothing literally satisfies the description. Thus, I can use the expression ‘the man drinking champagne over there is the new president’ and succeed in referring to the given person even though, unknown to me, what he is drinking is actually lemonade. See Quantifier Further reading McCulloch (1989) Definition: In dictionaries words are defined by means of locutions that explicate the meaning of the definiendum (the term to be defined). Philosophers have provided different kinds of definitions for words and concepts. Explicit definitions provide a meaning for a word or an expression in isolation. Thus, for example, unmarried man of a marriageable age is an explicit definition of the concept of bachelor. Contextual definitions account for the meaning of a term by offering an expression which is necessarily equivalent to it but does not belong to the same category as the term to be defined. Thus, Frege relies on the necessary equivalence between sentences about parallel lines

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and about sameness of direction to offer a contextual definition of the concept of the direction of line a. Frege notes that ‘line a is parallel to line b’ is necessarily equivalent to ‘the direction of line a is identical to the direction of line b’, and he uses this fact to define ‘the direction of line a’ as identical to ‘the direction of line b if and only if a is parallel to b’. Early analytic philosophers such as Russell and Moore take a philosophical definition to provide an analysis of the term to be defined. Deflationism: To take a deflationist approach to a certain kind of talk is to deny that it refers to entities or properties with a substantive metaphysical nature. Thus, for instance, deflationists about truth-talk deny that the word ‘true’ refers to a property with a substantive nature. Deflationists about fact-talk deny that the notion of a fact has any metaphysical weight. Deflationists do not jettison the vocabulary they deflate; instead, they often acknowledge that it is very useful. Deflationists are, however, committed to denying that the talk they deflate can play any genuine explanatory role of the kind which would require the existence of the metaphysics they reject. The most popular form of deflationism is that which takes truth-talk as its target. See Truth, deflationary theories of Deictic term See Indexical Demonstrative: A linguistic category that includes the pronouns ‘this’ and ‘that’. It also includes demonstrative phrases such as ‘that woman’. Sentences containing demonstratives and demonstrative phrases are used in different contexts to refer to different things. For this reason, most philosophers take demonstratives to be of


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a kind with indexical terms such as ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’, and offer very similar accounts for both. The main difference between demonstratives and other indexicals lies in the manner in which their reference in a given context is determined. Demonstratives, such as ‘this’ and ‘that’, require something from the speaker, such as a gesture or at least an intention, to have their reference fixed. If a person says ‘that is big’ without pointing to anything or thinking of anything, he or she is not referring to anything by their use of ‘that’. The reference of pure indexicals such as ‘I’ or ‘today’ is, instead, fixed automatically without any need for the speaker to point to or have an intention directed toward anything. See Dthat; Kaplan, David Further reading: Braun (2001) Demonstrative identification: There are, broadly speaking, two ways of identifying objects so that they become available for thought. First, we can track and recognise objects by being perceptually acquainted with them. That is, we can identify (and re-identify) an object by seeing, touching or listening to it. These are all examples of demonstrative identification of an object. Once the object has been identified in any of these ways, it becomes possible to have thoughts about it. Second, we can identify an object by means of a description that applies to that object. This second way of making an object available for thought is called ‘descriptive identification’. This terminology was developed by Strawson, who modelled it on Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. The same terminology was employed by Evans in a very influential discussion of these topics. See Demonstrative thought; Russell’s principle Further reading: Evans (1982)

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Demonstrative thought: A thought that has as a constituent a demonstrative (typically perceptual) mode of presentation of the object which the thought is about. Thus, one utterance of the sentence ‘that [while pointing to Red Rum] is a horse’ expresses a demonstrative thought which involves a visual presentation of Red Rum. An utterance of ‘that [while listening to Red Rum’s bray] is a horse’ expresses a different thought about Red Rum because it has as a constituent an aural presentation of Red Rum. Occasionally, the expression ‘demonstrative thought’ is used simply to refer to thoughts expressed by sentences containing a demonstrative, independently of any account one might wish to give of the nature of such thoughts. See Demonstrative identification; Descriptive thought; Russell’s principle; Singular thought Further reading: McCulloch (1989) Denotation: Russell’s name for the mode of reference of definite descriptions. Thus, for example, the definite description, ‘the President of the US in 2005’ is said to denote George W. Bush. See Extension Derrida, Jean-Jacques (1930–2004): Derrida was a controversial French philosopher, father of deconstruction, whose work has been mostly negatively received by AngloAmerican philosophers. Derrida’s early work was primarily concerned with the structuralist tradition in linguistics initiated by Saussure, and the phenomenological tradition initiated by Edmund Husserl. He then expanded his critical work to include a variety of essays on many philosophical and literary figures. In the course of this work, Derrida developed a kind of methodology that has been labelled ‘deconstruction’. Derrida tried to resist any


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proceduralist reading of his methodology, but such readings are hard to avoid. Deconstruction so understood consists in searching for a binary opposition in a text, where a binary opposition is treated in the text as exhaustive and mutually exclusive. The deconstructive approach proceeds by showing that the privileged term in these oppositions actually presupposes the rejected or despised term, so that the two opposing terms are shown to be interdependent rather than mutually exclusive, and the underprivileged term is shown to play a pivotal role in a text that explicitly excludes or devalues it. A famous example of deconstruction is Derrida’s treatment of the opposition of writing and speech. Although any attempt to extract ordinary philosophical theories from Derrida’s books is probably bound to be out of step with the purposes served by those works, Derrida does appear to have some views about linguistic meaning. He appears to hold with Davidson that all interpretation is radically indeterminate. Derrida’s starting point is the denial of intrinsic or original intentionality. Instead, he takes meaningfulness to be always a matter of extrinsic properties or relations. Central to this thought is the notion of iterability. To say that a sign is iterable is to say that it can be repeated, and that its repetition consists in the production of another tokening of the same type. New tokenings can differ in some of their semantic properties from previous tokenings, and still count as tokenings of the same type. The meaning of the sign would be determined by the whole chain of its tokens. However, since these chains of tokenings are never ending, meanings are never fully determinate. This is an idea that Derrida expresses by saying that meanings are never fully present, but are always deferred. See Différance Further reading: Wheeler III (2000)

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Description theory of reference: The view according to which names are abbreviations of definite descriptions. These descriptions provide the sense of the name and determine what the name refers to. The classical formulation of the position was developed by Russell who takes names such as ‘Aristotle’ to be abbreviations of a definite description such as ‘the teacher of Alexander’. Kripke raised some serious objections against this view, and also against a more sophisticated version of it known as the cluster theory of reference. His modal argument states that names cannot be abbreviations for (clusters of) definite descriptions because names behave differently from descriptions in modal contexts. ‘Necessarily, Elizabeth II is the Queen of England’ is false. However, ‘Necessarily, the Queen of England is the Queen of England’ is true. Kripke explains this modal phenomenon by arguing that names are rigid designators, whilst descriptions are not. Kripke also provides several non-modal considerations which militate against the description theory. First, since different people associate different descriptions with the same name, the theory has the odd consequence that the name has different meanings for different persons. Second, the theory cannot cope with the fact that people often associate more than one description with the same name. Third, many people cannot provide a description which would uniquely identify the bearer of the name, but if the description is meant to identify the bearer, it must single the bearer out. Fourth, some people might provide a description which is not even true of the bearer of the name. In other words, people might still succeed in referring to something or somebody even though they are confused about what or who it is. Fifth, names cannot be completely eliminated in favour of descriptions. Many descriptions contain names which can only be substituted


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with descriptions which contain further names. Some of these difficulties are not a problem for supporters of the cluster theory. See Causal theory of reference; Frege, Gottlob Further reading: McCulloch (1989) Descriptive identification: One of two ways of identifying objects so that they become available for thought. The other is demonstrative identification. In descriptive identification we identify an object or person (say, Tiger Woods) in terms of a description; normally, the sort of thing which is expressible by a definite description that uniquely applies to that object or person (say, the winner of the 2005 Open at St. Andrews). Once the object is thus identified we can have descriptive thoughts about it; such as the thought that the winner of the 2005 Open at St. Andrews is American. See Evans, Gareth Further reading: McCulloch (1989); Evans (1982) Descriptive meaning: The factual meaning of an expression or a sentence. It is often cashed out in terms of truth conditions by saying that the descriptive meaning of a sentence is given by the conditions that must obtain if the sentence is to be true. Non-cognitivism about an area of discourse (such as ethics) denies that indicative sentences that belong to that area have descriptive or factual meanings. Instead, their role would be to express some form of non-cognitive attitude. Descriptive thought: A thought that has as a constituent a descriptive (typically expressible by means of a definite description) mode of presentation of the object or objects which the thought is about. Thus, the sentence ‘The Prime Minister of the UK in 2004 was a man’ expresses a descriptive thought about, as it happens, Tony Blair. This

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thought has as a constituent a descriptive presentation which uniquely identifies Tony Blair as the sole individual that fits the description of being in 2004 the Prime Minister of the UK. Occasionally, the expression ‘descriptive thought’ is used simply to refer to the thoughts expressed by sentences containing a definite descriptions, independently of any account one might wish to give of the nature of such thoughts. See Demonstrative thought; Descriptive identification Further reading: McCulloch (1989) Designated truth-value: An expression used in logic to indicate the truth-value or values which are preserved in valid inferences. Thus, in classical logic the only designated truth-value is the true. However, in logics that admit of more than two truth-values, for example, a logic that admits the values true, false and indeterminate, there might be more than one designated truth-value. Différance: A notion coined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The odd typography purports to point to a difference with a difference in spelling which is inaudible in the French pronunciation. Différance is a necessary condition for the possibility of ordinary difference. Derrida’s notion is greatly indebted to Plato’s discussion of difference in the context of the problem of universals. Derrida’s notion is intended to address the same problem in the context of the relation between one universal type and the many tokens which instantiate it. See Predication Direct reference: Usually understood as the view, allegedly first formulated by John Stuart Mill, that the meaning of a name is the object it refers to. That is, according to this position, there is no meaning or sense that mediates between the name and its bearer. Instead, the name


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directly refers to the object, and its doing so constitutes the whole contribution of the name to the meanings of the sentences in which it occurs. This view, which has recently been revived due to the problems faced by the description theory of reference, has some highly implausible consequences. For instance, its supporters must deny that the sentence ‘Mark Twain is an author’ differs in meaning from the sentence ‘Samuel Clemens is an author’. In their view since ‘Mark Twain’ and ‘Samuel Clemens’ are two names for the same person, these two sentences have the same meaning. The theory of direct reference must be distinguished from the causal theory of reference. Even supporters of a purely causal version of the latter could admit that names have senses or modes of presentation as well as referents, although these modes of presentation would have to be causal and not descriptive. Recently, Kaplan has suggested that, besides names, demonstratives (such as ‘this’ and ‘that’) and indexicals (such as ‘here’, ‘now’) also might have direct reference. Kaplan’s definition of direct reference, however, is slightly different from the one provided in this entry. See Frege’s puzzle; Reference; Sense; Structured proposition Further reading: Salmon (2005) Disjunction problem: A difficulty for various forms of indicator semantics. According to this view, a kind of mental state represents a certain kind of thing if and only if that kind of mental state is reliably causally connected to things of that kind. But suppose that whenever one person is in the presence of rabbits she forms a mental state of a given kind. This same kind of state, call it R-state, is also had by that person when she reads about rabbits in books. However, this person is not very good at telling hares from rabbits just by looking at them. As a result,

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her R-mental states are also reliably causally correlated with hares. Intuitively, we want to say that this person sometimes mistakes a hare for a rabbit. She forms a mental representation of a rabbit when she is in the presence of a hare. But indicator semantics would commit one to saying that this person has mental states that represent the disjunction: either rabbit or hare. This problem is related to general difficulties for indicator semantics raised by the idea of misrepresentation. Jerry Fodor’s theory of asymmetric dependence was developed as an answer to this problem. Other supporters of indicator semantics attempt to address this issue by relying on the idea of teleological function. This approach is known as teleosemantics. Further reading: Crane (2003), ch. 5 Disposition: Examples of dispositions are solubility, magnetism, fragility. For example, glass is fragile; it has a disposition to break. This is to say that if glass were to be struck, it would break. Thus, minimally to attribute a dispositional property to a thing is to say that some conditionals hold true of that thing. More generally, something has a disposition to do something G if and only if were it to be put in some specific conditions, it would do G. Those who think that there is not much more than this to dispositions subscribe to a conditional analysis of dispositions. Others provide more metaphysically weighty accounts of dispositions as causal powers. These powers would explain why the entities that have them behave as they do. Everybody agrees that entities have dispositional properties even when these are not manifested. Thus, glass is fragile even when it is not broken, and sugar would be soluble in water even if there were no water on earth to dissolve it. See Categorical predicate


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Dispositionalism: Supporters of this view argue, contra Kripke’s meaning scepticism, that facts about semantic meanings can be explained in terms of dispositional facts about language use. A crude dispositional account of meaning that equates meaning with actual dispositions to use the relevant expressions is clearly doomed to failure. The idea that somebody might be systematically disposed to make mistakes when they use a given expression makes sense; so the meaning of an expression is not determined by the speakers’ actual dispositions to use that expression. If it were so determined, the idea that speakers can make systematic mistakes would have to be unintelligible, while in fact it is perfectly intelligible. A more sophisticated version of dispositionalism sees meaning as determined by facts about how speakers in ideal conditions would be disposed to use the expression. According to this account we should ignore facts about how speakers are disposed to use the expression in less than ideal conditions. This kind of sophisticated dispositionalist can make sense of systematic error, but faces the difficult problem of specifying in a non-question-begging way what conditions count as ideal or optimal. It has been suggested that one way of meeting this objection is by the adoption of the Ramsey– Lewis style of reductive explanation. Fodor’s account of meaning in terms of asymmetric dependence has also being taken by some as a dispositionalist reply to Kripke’s sceptic. See Ramsey sentence; Rule-following Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 6 Disquotation: A device that cancels out the effect of the quotation marks. See Truth, disquotational theory of

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Domain: In logic and semantics this is the collection of things or abstract entities over which the operators and quantifiers range and which constitute the input of functions. For instance, the quantifiers of ordinary logic are unrestricted, which means that they range over everything whatsoever. This is to say that anything at all is included in the domain. Similarly, the domain of possible world semantics is the collection or set of all possible worlds. Modal operators range over that domain. See Interpretation Donnellan, Keith (1931–): He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Donnellan is credited with making the distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions. Dthat: A new word, coined by Kaplan, which is stipulated to function as a true demonstrative. A demonstrative is a word whose reference varies according to the context of utterance. The reference of the demonstrative in context is partly determined by a demonstration, which could be a gesture of pointing to one thing, or a sort of inner pointing (an intention directed towards one thing). See Indexical Dummett, Michael (1925–): A British philosopher who spent his teaching career at Oxford University. He is best known for his work on the philosophy of Frege. Dummett reads Frege as, among other things, a philosopher of language who developed a semantics based on the two notions of sense and reference (Bedeutung). Famously, Dummett also argued that the whole debate between realism and anti-realism is best understood in semantic rather than metaphysical terms. For Dummett, a realist


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about a certain area of discourse – e.g., the past – claims that sentences in that area are true only when conditions, whose obtaining might not be even in principle verifiable, hold. Thus, a realist about the past will say that the sentence ‘Caesar sneezed 10 minutes before crossing the Rubicon’ is true if and only if he did sneeze at that point, even though there is now no available evidence, and there will never be any evidence, as to whether or not this situation obtained. The anti-realist about a given area of discourse claims, instead, that sentences in that area are true when some conditions, whose obtaining does not outstrip or transcend verification, hold. Dummett developed two arguments, known as the acquisition argument and the manifestation argument, against realism. In recent years, Wright has refined some of Dummett’s insights about the nature of the debate between realism and anti-realism. Dummett has also written extensively on causality and on the philosophy of mathematics. See Communicability argument; Verification transcendence Further reading: Weiss (2002)

E E-type pronoun: One kind of anaphoric use of pronouns. An example is ‘it’ in ‘John picked something up. It was rotten and yellow’. E-type pronouns can be substituted by a noun-phrase constructed from the context, in this instance ‘The thing picked up by John’. See Anaphora Ellipsis: An expression is said to be elliptical when some parts of it have been intentionally omitted.

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¨ Elucidation (Erlauterung): Some recent interpreters of Frege and Wittgenstein, such as James Conant, have taken this notion to have a quasi-technical meaning. They claim that elucidation is akin to a clarification of logically primitive notions that cannot be defined. The process of elucidation is meant to involve the employment of nonsense sentences such as ‘Concepts are predicative expression’, which despite appearances to the contrary for Frege fails to say anything about concepts. Emotive utterances: Utterances whose purpose is to express emotions and solicit the same emotions in others. Supporters of emotivism in ethics take talk about morality to be of this nature. Emotivism: The view, held by Ayer among others, that moral judgements serve only to express emotions or sentiments of approval or disapproval. They do not express beliefs and are not capable of being either true or false. According to this view, for example, to say that murder is wrong is tantamount to expressing one’s disapproval of murder which could be equally expressed by saying, ‘Boo! Murder’. See Expressivism; Frege–Geach problem; Noncognitivism Further reading: Ayer (1946) Empiricism: Early modern empiricists, like Locke, claimed all knowledge is ultimately derived from experience. They also denied the existence of any innate ideas or principles. More recently supporters of logical positivism claim that, with the exception of a priori truths and falsehoods, the only sentences that are meaningful are those capable of being empirically verified or falsified. The term is sometimes used also to refer to the weaker thesis that experience is an indispensable source of knowledge.


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Entailment: Arguably the central notion in logic. A proposition or propositions is said to entail some other or others when the latter proposition or propositions follow necessarily from the former proposition or group thereof. Thus, for example, the propositions all mammals have lungs and whales are mammals entail the proposition whales have lungs. There is no agreement about which among different formal relations provides the correct understanding of the ordinary notion of entailment. Using the language of possible worlds, A entails B is interpreted as saying that B is true in all possible worlds in which A is true. Enthymeme: An argument in which one or more premises are left implicit. Equivalence class: A class of individuals related by an equivalence relation. Thus, for example, all the human beings in the world can be partitioned into equivalence classes based on their individual income, so that all the individuals in each class have the same income as that of all other individuals in that same class. In this case, the individual members of each class are equivalent to each other with respect to income level. Equivalence relation: A relation such as having the same mass as, the same income as, or the same number of members as, which is reflexive (it holds between an object and itself), symmetrical (if it holds between an object a and another object b, it also holds between b and a) and transitive (if it holds between a and b, and between b and c, it also holds between a and c). Thus, having the same income as is an equivalence relation because any person has the same income as himself or herself. Further, if a person – let us call him ‘Bob’ – has the same income as another – say, Jane – then the second person, i.e., Jane,

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has the same income as the first, namely Bob. Finally, if Bob has the same income as Jane, and Jane has the same income as Jake, then Bob has the same income as Jake. By contrast, being taller than is not an equivalence relation because it is not symmetrical since if Bob is taller than Jane, it does not follow that Jane is taller than Bob (quite the contrary). Identity is an equivalence relation. See Equivalence class; Relative identity Equivocation: A fallacy of reasoning that arises when a term or a phrase is used with two or more different meanings. Error-theory: A position about the status of a whole area of discourse. It is the view that the atomic statements in that area aim to describe facts, but, since these facts do not obtain, all these statements are false. The first theory of this kind was developed by Mackie, who held that all the atomic ethical statements are false because there are no ethical facts. More recently, Field has argued that all atomic statements of arithmetic are false because they aim to describe facts about numbers, and numbers do not exist. See Cognitivism Further reading: Miller (2005); Field (1980); Mackie (1977) Eternal sentence: A sentence whose truth-value remains fixed at all times and for every speaker, such as ‘copper oxide is green’. Eternal sentences are contrasted with occasion sentences such as ‘that is copper oxide’ whose truth-value can change depending on the occasion of utterance. Evans, Gareth (1946–80): Despite his early death, Evans, first a student and subsequently a lecturer at Oxford University, made several important contributions to the


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philosophy of language. In his posthumously published book Varieties of Reference (1982) Evans made several important contributions to the theory of reference. He exposed some problems for a crude causal theory and put forward a defence for mixed theories that recognised the importance of both descriptive and demonstrative modes of identification. In the same book Evans developed analyses of the notions of singular thought and of non-conceptual content. See Argument from below; Russell’s principle Evidence transcendence See Verification transcendence Excluded middle, law of: The law that states that for each proposition either that proposition or its negation is true. It is symbolised by the schema: A ∨ ¬ A. This law should not be confused with bivalence, which states that every proposition is either true or false. There are logical systems in which excluded middle holds because any sentence of the form A ∨ ¬ A is a theorem and yet bivalence fails because the system admits of sentences which are neither true nor false. Excluded middle holds because the negations of these sentences are true. See Bivalence Exercitive: A term coined by Austin for a type of (illocutionary) speech act which consists in the exercise of power or assertion of influence. The sacking of an employee by uttering the words ‘You are fired’, the adjournment of the meeting by uttering ‘the meeting is adjourned’ are all exercitives. Austin includes orders and commands in this broader category. Expositive: A term coined by Austin for a type of (illocutionary) speech act which consists in the clarifying of reasons

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and the conducting of arguments. Thus, the concession of a point by saying ‘I see’ or ‘Oh, yes’, and the introduction of a quotation by saying ‘Quote’, are expositives. Expressivism: A family of views according to which judgements about a given area of discourse do not purport to describe facts, but aim instead to express something, typically an emotion or a feeling of approval and disapproval. Expressivist accounts have been developed especially for discourse about morals and aesthetics. See Emotivism; Frege–Geach problem; Non-cognitivism Further reading: Miller (2003), chs 3–5 Extension: What a word stands for. Thus, the extension of a singular term is its referent; the extension of a predicate is the collection of things to which it applies; and the extension of a sentence is its truth-value. The extension of a word is contrasted with its intension. Extensional context: A linguistic context within which expressions with the same extension can be substituted for each other without a change to the truth-value of the whole sentence (salva veritate). For example, ‘London is a busy city’ is an extensional context since the substitution of ‘the capital of the UK’ for ‘London’ does not alter the truth-value of the whole. Notoriously, some parts of natural languages do not seem extensional. The evening star is the planet Venus, and yet it might be true that John believes that Venus is a planet, and false that John believes that the evening star is a planet. See Frege’s puzzles; Propositional attitude reports Externalism: A view primarily about the individuation of properties, according to which whether an individual has


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a property of a given kind depends at least in part on facts which are external to the individual in question. In the philosophy of mind and language externalism is a view about what individuates mental and linguistic contents. Externalists argue that facts about the environment external to the subject contribute to the determination of the contents of that subject’s mental states and to the meanings of the subject’s utterances. The classical arguments in favour of externalism are Putnam’s Twin Earth example and Burge’s arthritis example. Critics of these arguments have either denied the intuitions Putnam and Burge rely on, or alternatively have argued that each mental state has two kinds of content. Externalism would be true of one kind of content, broad content, and false of the other, narrow content. Thus, when the earthling and his twin have thoughts which they would express by uttering the words ‘there is water in the glass’, their thoughts have a common narrow content which can be characterised by saying that they think that the glass contains some of the odourless, colourless stuff that fills the lakes. But they also have different broad contents since the earthling has a thought which is true if and only if there is water in the glass and the twin has a thought which is true if and only if there is twater in the glass. Some externalists think of psychological states as internal states of the subject whose individuation conditions lay partly outside the subject. They would thus be analogous to states such as being sunburnt which is a state of the skin that is partly individuated in terms of what lies outside the skin, since being caused by the sun is what makes a sunburn what it is. Others, strong externalists, claim that the psychological states themselves partly lie outside the subject whose states they are. See Internalism Further reading: Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (1996)

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F Fact: Some philosophers deflate this notion. In their view a fact is just a shadow of a true claim. Thus, they might say that to call something a fact is nothing more than saying that we claim something to be true when we state it. Other philosophers give ontological weight to the notion of a fact. These philosophers insist that only some true assertions are genuinely factual, while others, despite being truth-apt, fall short of stating an objective fact. Some philosophers go even further and invoke a metaphysically heavy-duty notion of fact to explain the idea of a truthmaker. See Deflationism; Truth aptness Fallacy: A fallacious argument is one that is not valid. If the argument is deductive, then it might lead from true premises to a false conclusion. If it is inductive, the premises do not offer sufficient evidence in favour of the truth of the conclusion. See Validity Falsity: The opposite of truth. In classical logic it is expressed by the non-designated truth-value: false. See Designated truth-value Family-resemblance: A notion introduced by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations (1953) to explain concepts such as that of (game). Wittgenstein points out that there are no features that all and only games have in common. What makes all games instances of the concept is a looser set of relations which holds between various examples of games. Thus, basketball and soccer are related by being ball games involving more than one team, the use of a ball connects these games with


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tennis but also with children’s games involving bouncing a ball against a wall. Score-keeping links soccer to bridge, and the use of cards connects bridge to patience games with cards. Thus, in the same way in which members of a family do not necessarily share the same features, there will be features shared among some of them and other features some of those might share with yet other members. Fictionalism: A view that can be held about different areas of discourse, such as morality or folk psychology. The central tenet of the view is that its supporters take atomic sentences belonging to an area of discourse to be literally and systematically false. Thus, fictionalism is a kind of error-theory. However, supporters of fictionalism also hold that these false claims play a useful role, and that therefore this kind of discourse should be preserved despite its falsity. ‘Fido’-Fido principle: The principle followed by theories of meaning that treat all linguistic expressions as if they were names. A name like ‘Fido’ gets its meaning by referring to an individual, namely Fido. A supporter of the principle would treat general words like ‘dog’ or ‘triangle’ as names for the universals dog-eity or triangularity, thought as abstract individuals. The expression ‘“Fido”-Fido Principle’ was coined by Gilbert Ryle. Force: This notion was first introduced by Frege as one of three ingredients of meaning as ordinarily understood. The other two are sense and tone. Force is the pragmatic component that makes an utterance of a sentence an instance of an assertion or a question or a command, and so forth. Further reading: Dummett (1981)

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Free variable See Variable Frege, Gottlob (1848–1925): Frege was a mathematician who spent his whole academic career at the University of Jena. Relatively unknown in his lifetime, his work has had an enormous influence on contemporary analytic philosophy of language and of mathematics. He is also widely held as the founder of contemporary formal logic, arguably, his most important contribution not just to philosophy but to all areas of knowledge. Frege employs the mathematical notions of function and argument to develop a language of logic which he called ‘concept-script’ (Begriffsschrift). Predicates stand for functions which take objects as arguments and yield truth-values (truth or falsity) as their values. Proper names stand for objects. Frege also develops the notion of a truth function such as ‘and’ or ‘not’ which takes truth-values as arguments and yields truth-values as values. For instance, ‘and’ generates a truth when it conjoins two truths, and generates a falsehood in all other cases. Before Frege, logicians had no means to deal with sentences, including multiple generalities such as ‘everybody loves somebody’. Using the language of functions and objects, Frege developed the notion of a universal quantifier which allowed him to express such generalities. In mathematics Frege offered a definition of number and developed a logicist programme aimed at reducing all arithmetical truths to logical truths. The programme has faced enormous difficulties because of the discovery of paradoxes, known as set-theoretical paradoxes, affecting the commonsensical notion of a class or collection of items. Frege’s most important contributions to contemporary philosophy of language are his distinctions between concept and object, and between sense and reference. Concepts are a kind of function, those with only one argument, and objects are their arguments. Concepts


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are the referents of predicates, and objects are the referents of proper names. Both proper names and predicates also have, besides their referents, senses. These senses are the constituents of the thoughts which are expressed by the sentences of which names and predicates are parts. See Frege’s puzzles Further reading: Dummett (1981); Frege (1892a and 1892b) Frege–Geach problem: A problem for all forms of noncognitivism. The problem as it affects emotivism was first discussed by Geach, who attributed its development to Frege. Supporters of emotivism hold that to state that murder is wrong is equivalent to evincing one’s feeling of disapproval of murder by uttering ‘Boo! murder’. Geach points out that in moral discourse not all uses of sentences, such as ‘murder is wrong’, are free-standing; some uses are embedded in more complex constructions. An example is: ‘If murder is wrong, then genocide is also wrong’. The emotivist owes an account of these uses. He cannot claim that in this example one is also merely evincing one’s disapproval of murder because we use conditional sentences such as these without committing ourselves to endorsing their antecedents. Thus, if I say, ‘If John comes home today, I will bake a cake’, I am not claiming that John is coming home today. Similarly, the emotivist cannot plausibly say that by saying ‘If murder is wrong, then genocide is also wrong’ I am expressing my disapproval of murder. The emotivist does not merely face the problem of providing some account of these embedded uses of moral discourse, the account also needs to be such that the apparent validity of inferences involving moral discourse is respected. For instance, the inference from (1) murder is wrong and (2) if murder is wrong, then genocide is also wrong, to (C) genocide is wrong

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seems perfectly valid. However, it can be valid only if it involves no equivocation. Hence, the meaning of ‘murder is wrong’ in (1) and (2) must be the same. But now the problem for the emotivist appears insurmountable, since he cannot give for the expression ‘murder is wrong’ as it appears in (2) the kind of emotivist account he wanted to give for its free-standing use in (1), and yet he also needs to attribute to the expression the same meaning in both cases. All other forms of non-cognitivism face what is structurally the same problem. See Quasi-realism Further reading: Miller (2003), chs 3–5; Blackburn (1984) ch. 6.2 Frege’s puzzles: First formulated in Gottlob Frege’s seminal article ‘On Sense and Meaning’ (1892a), the first puzzle concerns identity statements and constitutes the primary focus of the article. The second puzzle concerns propositional attitude reports and is only briefly addressed in Frege’s article. Frege notes that identity statements such as ‘the evening star is the evening star’ and ‘the morning star is the evening star’ have different cognitive significance. In order to ascertain the truth of the first we do not need to look at the sky, but the second expresses a substantial astronomical discovery. Frege’s early account of language could not explain the difference between these identity statements because it focused exclusively on the truth-value of sentences and the contributions that the names and predicates in those sentences made to the determination of those truth-values. In other words, Frege’s exclusive concern was with what in contemporary parlance is called the ‘semantic value’ of an expression. If we focus only on semantic values there is no difference between the two identity statements. The statements themselves have the same semantic value, namely, truth.


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The first is true, because Venus (which is the semantic value of ‘the evening star’) is identical with Venus (i.e., is the semantic value of ‘the evening star’). The second is true, because Venus (which is the semantic value of ‘the morning star’) is identical with Venus (i.e., is the semantic value of ‘the evening star’). Thus, there is no difference between the two statements with regard to their semantic values or those of their parts. In order to explain the difference between the two statements Frege introduces the notion of the sense or mode of presentation associated with an expression. The names ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ refer to the same object, but have different senses. They present the object differently, because they present it respectively as the last star to disappear in the morning and as the first to appear in the evening. Hence, for Frege the two identity statements have different senses because they include names with different senses. Frege calls the sense of a sentence, the thought expressed by the sentence. Thus, the two sentences used in the statements above are said by Frege to differ in cognitive significance because they express different thoughts. Frege used the same distinction between sense and reference to solve a puzzle concerning propositional attitude reports. He noted that a sentence like ‘John believes that the evening star is the evening star’ could be true and yet the sentence ‘John believes that the morning star is the evening star’ be false. Frege took examples like this one to show that the that-clauses in sentences such as these two contribute something other than their truth-value to the truth-value of the whole sentence in which they figure. They cannot contribute their truth-values because those are the same, and yet the truth-values of the sentences which differ only with respect to these clauses are different. Frege proposed as a solution to the puzzle that in these contexts the thatclauses have indirect reference, and this reference is their

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ordinary sense. Thus, the contributions made by these clauses to the overall truth or falsity of the sentences in which they appear are the different thoughts expressed by the clauses. Consequently, since these thoughts differ, it is no surprise that the truth-values of the complex sentences are also different. Both puzzles are still widely discussed, and many different solutions are being proposed. See Direct reference; Intensional context; Propositional attitude reports; Thought Further reading: Frege (1892a). Function: There are at least two distinct notions of function currently in use among philosophers: (1) a mathematical or logical function is an operation that takes arguments as its inputs and produces values as outputs. For instance, in ‘2 + 3 = 5’, addition is the function, the arguments are 2 and 3, and the value is 5; (2) a biological function is the purpose of a biological entity. For instance, pumping blood is the function of the heart, because this is what the heart is designed to do. This use of the teleological notion of design should be ultimately understood in evolutionary non-teleological terms. See teleosemantics

G Game See Language-game Gavagai: This expression figures in Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of translation. ‘Gavagai’ is an expression used by some imaginary natives whose language Quine imagines we need to translate from scratch. The natives use the expression when a rabbit is present. Quine points out that the expression can equally be translated as ‘there


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is a rabbit’ or ‘there is an undetached rabbit part’ among other things. See Stimulus meaning Geach, Peter T. (1916–): A British philosopher who was for many years professor of philosophy at the University of Leeds. He has made numerous contributions to philosophical logic, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of religion. He is famous for his work on medieval and Aristotelian logic, for his theory of relative identity and for his work on the theory of reference. See Frege–Geach problem; Predicable Gedanke See Thought Generality: ‘Woman’, ‘apple’, ‘water’ are all general terms. What is characteristic of them is their role in predication. Unlike singular terms, general terms can appear in the predicative position prefixed by the copula. See Mass term; Natural kind term; Sortal Further reading: Quine (1960), ch. 3. Generative grammar: A notion developed by Chomsky to indicate the recursive, context-free rules that govern the deep structure of the language faculty and generate all phrase structures. Grammar: A notion more commonly used by linguists rather than philosophers. Chomsky in particular has argued for the existence of a universal grammar, a generative grammar and a transformational grammar. Grasping a thought: For Frege, thoughts are abstract entities; they are what contemporary philosophers mean by ‘propositions’. Hence, thoughts are not psychological

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entities. Frege never explained satisfactorily how we are capable of having knowledge of thoughts, but he used the expression ‘grasping a thought’ to convey the idea that thoughts as propositions exist even when they have never been thought or grasped by any human being. See Platonism Grice, H. P. (1913–88): Grice began his career at Oxford University but moved to Berkeley, California in the late 1960s. He is the founder of psychological approaches to the theory of linguistic meaning. His work has been extremely influential in bringing about a shift of focus away from language towards thought as the primary bearer of meaning. Grice himself attempts to reduce linguistic meaning (which he identifies as a kind of non-natural meaning) to speaker meaning. He also analyses what a speaker means by his or her words on one occasion of utterance in terms of the speaker’s communicative intention. Since Grice sees language primarily as a means to communicate one’s thoughts to others, he also develops an account of what is conveyed in conversation by implication without being explicitly stated. He calls this phenomenon ‘conversational implicature’ and provides a theory of it in terms of conversational maxims governing all conversations. See Meaning, communicative intention theory of; Natural meaning; Perlocutionary intention

H Hermeneutics: The term is now used to refer to a specific approach to the study of the interpretation of texts, although the etymology of the term refers to interpretation in general. Among the founders of the hermeneutical


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approach to reading and interpretation are Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. One of the tenets of the approach is the idea that the parts and the whole of a text stand in a special relation of co-dependence. The meaning of each part of the text depends on the meaning of the whole and the meaning of the whole depends on each part. As a result interpretation involves hermeneutic circles requiring the reader to go back and forth between the whole and its parts. Further reading: Ramberg and Gjesdal (2005) Holism: A family of views according to which whether something has a given property is a matter of its relations to other items. Thus, if meanings are holistically individuated, the meaning of an expression depends on the meanings of other expressions. The opposite of holism is sometimes called atomism. Further reading: Peacocke (1999) Homonymy: The relation that holds between two different words that just happen to be written in the same way. Thus, for instance ‘bank’ as in river bank and ‘bank’ as in money bank are homonyms in English. The fact that they have distinct etymologies shows that what we have here are two distinct words rather than an ambiguous word with more than one meaning. Homophonic translation: The preferred approach to a translation or interpretation of the utterances of other speakers of our language. Their words are taken at face value, and interpreted to mean what the same words mean for the interpreter. See Indeterminacy of translation; Radical interpretation

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Humanity, principle of: It is preferred by some philosophers to the principle of charity. It states that when interpreting others we should attribute to them the thoughts we would have if we were in their circumstances, which is to say if we had had their upbringing, possessed their sensory apparatus and lived through their life. Hyperintensionality: (1) Linguists use the term to indicate contexts in which expressions with the same intensions are not intersubstitutable salva veritate. An example is provided by belief and other propositional attitude contexts, where, for instance, ‘John believes all triangles have three angles’ might be true but, due to John’s ignorance, ‘John believes all triangles have three sides’ is false. (2) The term is also used to refer to theories that take propositions to be basic entities, which are not reducible to constructions out of possible worlds. See structured proposition Hypostatisation: Also known as reification, hypostatisation is the fallacy of treating something which is not a thing or an object as if it were one. For example, a person that thinks of justice as an abstract entity which is named by the word ‘justice’ would be guilty of this fallacy.

I Icon: In semiotics, an icon is a sign that represents by resembling what it is a sign for. A picture is an example of an icon. The terminology was introduced by Peirce. Idealisation: The process of abstraction from actual limitations in order to consider ideal conditions. Thus, for example, supporters of sophisticated dispositionalism


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abstract from actual dispositions to use a word in order to focus on dispositions in ideal or optimal conditions. Identity: The equivalence relation that each thing has with itself and nothing else. It is the smallest equivalence relation, since if a is identical with b, then a and b also stand in all other equivalence relations. Thus, identity secures indiscernibility because if a is identical to b, then a has a property if and only if b also has it. Identity so understood is an absolute equivalence relation, because whenever it holds between a and b there cannot be another equivalence relation which does not hold between that a and b. Not all philosophers believe that ordinary languages have the resources to express absolute identity. In particular, Geach has argued in favour of relative identity. In his view, every claim that x is identical with y is an incomplete expression which functions as a shorthand for the claim that x is the same A as y, where A is a sortal term. See Leibniz’s law Identity conditions: The conditions that constitute a criterion of identity or identification for a given thing. Idiolect: A language spoken by a single person or a single group. Iff: Shorthand for the biconditional sentential connective if and only if. Illocutionary act: is defined by Austin as an act of saying something (locutionary act) with a certain force, such as the force of a question or a command. Warning is an example of an illocutionary speech act. Under appropriate circumstances one can perform such an act, for instance, by uttering the sentence ‘There is a dog in the house’.

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Apologising, promising, questioning, replying, disagreeing, announcing a verdict, declaring a meeting open are all examples of illocutionary speech acts. Austin believed that we get an illocutionary act when force is added to a locutionary act. What this adding might amount to is not clear. If I say, ‘I warn you that things are going to change’, I perform a warning. But, in this instance, the content of the words I utter determines their force as well, so nothing is added to the mere saying to get something with the force of a warning. Critics of Austin, however, might be wrong to say that there is no difference between the performance of a locutionary (rhetic) act, which is merely the saying of something taking it to have a meaning, and the performance of an illocutionary act. Arguably, one could utter words with meaning, as when we find ourselves for no particular reason voicing a sentence that comes to mind, without thereby performing an illocutionary act of any sort. Austin divided illocutionary acts into five categories: behabitives (like apologising), commissives (like promising), exercitives (like ordering), expositives (like making a point or explaining a reason) and verdictives (like issuing a judgement). See Perlocutionary act Imperatives: An imperative sentence is a command. Implication: The expression is sometimes used to refer to the logical relation that holds between P and Q when it is not possible for P to be true and Q false. It is often represented thus: P → Q. Outside logic, the term is sometimes used to indicate contents that are suggested by an expression without being part of its meaning. Implicature See Conversational implicature; Conventional implicature


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Impredicativity: A definition or characterisation of a set or collection is said to be impredicative if it makes a reference to a totality to which that set belongs. The admission of impredicative definitions has been taken by some as the main cause of paradoxes in set theory. Indeterminacy of translation: A thesis proposed by Quine according to which in many instances there is no fact of the matter about which among competing translations of foreign sentences is correct. Thus, the thesis is tantamount to meaning irrealism or scepticism, the view that there are no meaning facts. Quine provides two arguments for the thesis. The first, known as the argument from below, relies on the idea that incompatible translations would equally account for all the evidence based on natives’ behaviour which would be available to a person engaged in radical translation, which is to say a translation from scratch. In his argument Quine uses the example of natives’ utterances of ‘gavagai’, which he claims could equally be translated as ‘there is a rabbit’, ‘there is an undetached rabbit part’, ‘there is an instance of rabbithood’. The reason why these incompatible translations are all compatible with the natives’ behaviour is that they appear to have the same stimulus meaning since whenever a rabbit is present, so is an undetached rabbit part, and so is an instance of rabbithood, and vice versa. The second argument, known as the argument from above, relies on the idea that once all the facts about physics have been fixed, the facts about translation are still underdetermined. However, since, for Quine, physical facts are all the facts there are, if physics does not determine the facts about translation, then there are no further facts that need to be determined. Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 4; Hookway (1987); Quine (1960)

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Index: In semiotics, an index is a sign that represents what it stands for by being connected to it by means of a nonsemantic relation. A photograph is an example of an index since it is causally connected to what it stands for. The terminology was introduced by Peirce, but it is not very well defined. Indexical: A linguistic category, including so-called pure indexicals such as ‘I’, ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’, true demonstratives such as ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘he’ and ‘she’, and other indexicals such as ‘here’ and ‘now’. It also includes complex demonstratives such as ‘that flower’ or ‘this dog’. Sometimes all expressions whose reference shifts from utterance to utterance are labelled ‘indexicals’. Hence, some philosophers have also argued that the category extends further to include all words that indicate tense, modal words such as ‘possibly’, some adjectives such as ‘big’ which are context-sensitive (what counts as big when talking of a mouse is different from what counts as big when talking of an elephant), and even, for a few philosophers, all vague expressions, like the predicate ‘bald’. True demonstratives such as ‘he’ have their reference in a context determined in part by extra-linguistic factors. Thus, if ‘he’ is used demonstratively in an utterance of ‘he is a spy’, the speaker must point to somebody or at least intend a particular person, when uttering the sentence, if the pronoun is to have a reference. The pronoun ‘I’, on the other hand, is a pure indexical. It always refers to the speaker himself or herself; no gestures or intention need to be supplied in order to secure a reference. It should be noted that words like ‘she’ have both demonstrative and non-demonstrative uses. For example, in the sentence ‘Mary bought a new house; she was very happy’, the pronoun is not used demonstratively, but anaphorically. Philosophers have so far not being very successful in


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explaining how the same word can have these different functions. Most philosophical accounts of indexicals attempt to respect the intuition that, for instance, when Bob says ‘I am British’ and Mary says ‘I am British’, there is a sense in which they both say the same thing, and another sense in which what they say is different. They say the same thing in the sense that they utter the same words with the same unambiguous linguistic meaning. But, what Bob says is true if and only if Bob is British, and what Mary says is true if and only if Mary is British. Kaplan has developed the most influential view of indexicals which respects this intuition. He argues that the content of a sentence like ‘I am British’ changes relative to a context, so the content of ‘I am British’ when Bob says it is different from its content in the context of Mary uttering it. What remains unaltered in the two contexts is the linguistic meaning of the sentence which Kaplan calls its ‘character’. See Anaphora; Dthat Indicator semantics: This view proposes that we understand the notion of representation as a refinement or development of the notion of indication. Something indicates something else if and only if there is a constant connection, typically causal, between the two. Thus, lightning indicates thunder because whenever there is lightning there is thunder. This notion of indication cannot be equivalent to representation since errors in representation, but not in indication, are possible. Fred Dretske, a supporter of this approach, proposes that representation is understood in terms of having the function of indication. A mental state might have the function of indicating ice-cream, but, since misfunction is possible, it might sometimes be mistakenly formed in the presence of sorbet. Dretske explains the notion of having the function of indicating something

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in etiological terms. A mental state R has the function of indicating something S if, when the organism first formed R-mental states, they were recruited as part of the organism’s system for indicating S. See Teleosemantics Further reading: Neander (2004); Crane (2003), ch. 5 Indirect speech: A report of an utterance without using a direct quotation, for example, ‘Galileo said in Italian that the earth moves’. See Parataxis Indiscernibility of identicals See Leibniz’s law Individual: The referent of a singular term, typically either a particular (i.e., a specific concrete thing or person) or an abstract entity, such as, perhaps, an individual number, 2, for instance. Individualism See Internalism Individuation: A principle or criterion of individuation combines a criterion of identity or identification, which states the conditions under which a is the same or different from b, together with a principle of unity that permits to single out a and b as countable items. Thus, ‘apple’ (which is a count term and a sortal) supplies a criterion of individuation for apples because it provides what we need in order to be able to count apples, and thus to answer questions such as ‘How many apples are in the bag?’ Mass terms provide criteria of identity but not of individuation, since we can identify that this gold is the same as the gold that, say, made up a ring, but gold is not the sort of thing that can be counted. Further reading: Lowe (1999)


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Infelicity: Some speech acts such as orders, promises, and so forth, are not capable of being either true or false. They can, however, suffer from infelicity when the necessary conditions for the successful performance of an act are not met. Thus, for instance, an utterance of ‘I hereby pronounce you husband and wife’ performed by a person lacking in the necessary authority do not constitute a valid declaration of marriage; such an utterance therefore suffers from an infelicity. Inference: A move from some premises to a conclusion. The inference is deductive if the truth of the premises establishes the truth of the conclusion. It is inductive if the premises offer reasons in support of the conclusion. In an inference to the best explanation, the conclusion is offered as the best explanation for the truth of the premises. Inferentialism See Semantics, inferentialist Infinite regress arguments: Infinite regresses are typically considered vicious in philosophy, so any argument which shows that a view leads to an infinite regress is a powerful objection to that theory. For an example, see Wittgenstein’s argument against thinking that rulefollowing is a matter of providing an interpretation. Information: There are both formal and informal senses of this notion. Informally, information covers both natural and non-natural meaning. In this sense, both the rings on a tree trunk and words convey information. There are many formal notions of information which do not have much in common. Fred Dretske has provided an account of information in terms of the notion of indication used in indicator semantics.

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Inscrutability of reference: A thesis developed by Quine which is closely related to his views about indeterminacy of translation. Quine argues that in many cases there is no fact of the matter about which of several, mutually incompatible, translations of a foreign sentence is correct. Thus, for example, it would be equally correct to translate ‘gavagai’ as either ‘there is a rabbit’ or ‘there is an undetached rabbit part’. Hence, the reference of ‘gavagai’ is indeterminate, since there is no fact of the matter whether this expression refers to rabbits, to undetached rabbit parts or to instances of rabbithood. Further, Quine claims that radical translation begins at home. Thus, if there is no fact of the matter about which, between mutually incompatible interpretations, assigns the correct reference to foreign expressions, there is also no fact of the matter about the reference of expressions in our native language since it is just a language like any other. Further reading: Quine (1969), ch. 2 Intension: The term ‘intension’ is used in more than one way. It is sometimes thought as determining the extension of the term. In this sense, intension is similar to Frege’s notion of sense. Technically, it is defined as a function that assigns for each possible world an extension to a term in that world. See Connotation Intensional context: A context is intensional if co-extensional terms are not inter-substitutable salva veritate. Examples of such contexts are modal contexts, contexts of direct quotation and intentional contexts involving propositional attitude reports. Thus, even though ‘Mark Twain’ and ‘Samuel Clemens’ refer to the same person, ‘John believes that Mark Twain was a great writer’ might be true,


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while ‘John believes that Samuel Clemens was a great writer’ is false. See De dicto attributions Intention: There is a variety of philosophical accounts of the notion of intention. Most philosophers take intention to be a state of mind which is often involved in futuredirected practical reasoning and which, when properly related to an action, makes it appropriate to call that action intentional. Intentionality: The feature of mental states in virtue of which they are about something. What they are about is called ‘the intentional object’ of the state. Such objects may not exist. Thus, Pegasus can be the intentional object of a thought which is about it, despite the fact that Pegasus itself does not exist. For this reason, many philosophers do not think of mental states as involving genuine relations to their intentional objects. Internal realism: A position which was adopted by Putnam in the 1980s. The position is not entirely clear but it is opposed to metaphysical realism. It is the view that there is no fixed totality of mind-independent objects, but that questions about the number and kind of objects that exist can only be answered relative to a theory. Putnam also links it to the view that there is more than one true description of the world, and that truth is some sort idealised epistemic warrant. See Permutation argument; Truth, epistemic theories of Further reading: Putnam (1981) Internalism: A view primarily about the individuation of properties, according to which whether an individual has a property of a given kind depends exclusively on facts

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which are internal to the individual in question. In the philosophy of mind and language internalism is a view about what individuates linguistic and mental contents. Internalists argue that only facts which are internal to the subject can contribute to the determination of the contents of that subject’s mental states and to the meanings of the subject’s utterances. Supporters of the view offer various considerations in its support. They suggest that the contents of our own thoughts must be determined solely by what goes on inside our head because if they were not, it would be impossible for each one of us to know by means of introspection alone, as we surely do, what it is that one is thinking. They also point out that we can conceive of a brain in a vat, fed neural stimuli by a computer, having many thoughts and beliefs about all sorts of things, even though they have never really encountered any of them. Hence, if such cases are genuinely conceivable, externalism must be wrong. Externalists in reply simply deny the conceivability of the brain in a vat example. Their response to the first objection is more complex. They acknowledge that there is a sense in which we do not have privileged access to the contents of our thoughts. But they point out that in another sense we have such access as is demonstrated by our ability to express our thoughts by means of words without need for empirical evidence or further observations. In the Twin Earth thought experiment both Oscar and Twin Oscar know by means of introspection alone that they have thoughts which they would express by means of the words ‘that’s water’, what Oscar does not know, and could not know by introspection, is that his thought is about H2 O. The same considerations apply to his twin, and his thought about XYZ. See Broad content; Content; Narrow content Further reading: Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (1996)


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Interpretant: A term coined by Peirce to refer to any item that mediates the relation between a representation and the object it stands for. In the case of signs, the interpretant is a mental state. See Semiotics Interpretation: (1) Informally, an interpretation is an assignment of meanings to expressions of a language. (2) In formal semantics the notion of interpretation has a technical sense first developed by Tarski. In this sense, an interpretation for a language consists in specifying a non-empty set as the domain of discourse or interpretation, and assigning a reference to all primitive, non-logical vocabulary. Thus, each constant will have one object assigned to it as its reference, each monadic (one-place) predicate will have a class of things assigned to it as its extension, each dyadic (two-place) relation will have a class of ordered pairs, and so forth. In this manner, it becomes possible to determine relative to the interpretation whether any given sentence of the language is true or false. Logical truths are sentences which turn out to be true in all interpretations. Interrogative: An interrogative sentence is a question. Irrealism See Meaning irrealism Is: There are three distinct uses to which the verb ‘to be’ is put in English and some other languages. Each has a different logical function and is translated differently in logic. To confuse them is to risk equivocation. These uses are: (1) Existence, as in ‘God is’. In these cases ‘is’ means exists and it is translated into logic using the existential quantifier. Thus, (∃x) (Gx). (2) Identity, as in ‘Eric Blair is George Orwell’. In these cases ‘is’ means is identical; it is translated into logic using the identity symbol. Thus, a = b.

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(3) Predication, as in ‘London is pretty’. In these cases, ‘is’ functions as the copula which in logic is absorbed into the symbol for the predicate. Thus, Pa. Isomorphism: Two models or theories are said to be isomorphic, to have the same structure, if and only if the elements of one can be put into a one-to-one correlation with the elements of the other. This is to say, that for each element of the one theory there is exactly one element of the other that corresponds to it, and vice versa.

J Judgement: Judgement is the mental equivalent of assertion. To judge that P (say, that the Moon is the Earth’s only satellite) is to assent to P, or to take P to be true. The notion plays a crucial role in Immanuel Kant, who was one the first philosophers to stress the primacy of the propositional over the subsentential. Judgement-dependence See Response-dependence

K Kaplan, David (1933–): An American philosopher, at the time of writing teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has developed the most influential theory of meaning for indexicals. Kaplan takes the reference of demonstratives to be fixed partly by means of a demonstration which is a gesture or an intention directed towards an object or a person accompanying an utterance which includes a demonstrative. Kaplan makes a


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distinction between the content and the character of sentences which include indexicals. These sentences have contents with respect to contexts. Thus, the same sentence has different contents in different contexts, and two different sentences might have the same content in different contexts. For instance, if Bob says ‘I am British’ and Mary says ‘I am British’, the contents of their utterances are different, even though they use the same sentence. What Bob says is true if and only if Bob is British and what Mary says is true if and only if Mary is British. Further if, while pointing to Mary, Bob says ‘she is British’ the content of this utterance is the same as what Mary has said, even though Bob has used a different sentence to express that content. Kaplan takes the contents of sentences relative to contexts to be propositions which can have individuals as constituents. Propositions like these are called ‘singular propositions’. The character of a sentence, on the other hand, can be identified with its linguistic meaning. The character of a sentence does not vary with the context. Instead, it is a function which yields the content of the sentence, given the context as argument. For Kaplan, indexicals are rigid designators; once their reference has been fixed, they refer to the same one thing in all possible worlds in which that one thing exists. If I say ‘today is sunny’, what I say would have been false if today were not sunny. In other words, whether my claim is true or false in a hypothetical situation is determined by whether in that situation this very same day is a sunny one. What the weather might be like on any other day is irrelevant, even though, of course, during one of these other days I might also say ‘today is sunny’. Kaplan further claims that indexicals have direct reference. In other words, he holds that their contribution to the content of the sentence is their referent, the actual thing that they refer to. This is why Kaplan holds that the contents of sentences

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including indexicals are singular propositions. Kaplan’s theory of direct reference is not quite Millian because he accepts that indexicals have characters which contribute to the character of the sentences in which they appear. Thus, the character of ‘I’ is a function which for each context yields as value the speaker in that context. The character is similar to what could be called the sense of the indexical. See Dthat; Sense Knowing-how: Practical knowledge such as knowing how to ride a bicycle or how to build a nuclear reactor. Some philosophers argue that practical knowledge can be explained in terms of propositional knowledge (knowingthat). Knowing-that: Propositional knowledge which is expressed using a that-clause. For example, knowing that 2 + 2 = 4, that water is H2 O, that London is a city are all examples of propositional knowledge. It is still a matter of dispute whether practical knowledge or knowing-how can be explained in terms of propositional knowledge. Kripke, Saul (1940–): A contemporary American philosopher who has made ground-breaking contributions to the philosophy of language, to metaphysics and to logic. In the philosophy of language, Kripke introduced the notion of a rigid designator. He developed some powerful arguments against the description theory of reference, and formulated one of the first versions of the causal theory of reference. In metaphysics he revived the fortunes of essentialism. Kripke argued that both individuals and natural kinds have some of their properties necessarily. These arguments lead Kripke to conclude that there are many a posteriori truths which are necessarily


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true. One such truth is, for example, ‘water is H2 O’. The view that there is a form of necessity which is not logical or conceptual was quite revolutionary at the time. Kripke’s contribution to logic is also quite momentous since he was the first to develop a possible world semantics for modal logic. Further, in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), Kripke provided a powerful sceptical argument in favour of meaning irrealism based on Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. See A posteriori; A priori; Meaning scepticism; Modality; Reference borrowing; Semantics, possible world

L Language: Philosophers have provided many different accounts of what languages might be. Some think of languages as structured by formal logical relations; others prefer accounts based on the idea of speech acts. Few would deny their existence. Davidson, however, has denied the existence of languages if these are understood as governed by conventions that determine the connections between words and what they might mean. Language acquisition: Several philosophers have made claims about what kind of features language must have for it to be learnable by creatures, like us, with finite abilities. Fodor has used these considerations to argue for a language of thought, Dummett to argue against semantic realism, and Davidson to argue for a recursive theory of meaning. See Acquisition argument; Semantics, truth-conditional

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Language game: A term coined by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations (1953). It is intended to convey an analogy between language use and games. It is used to designate either fragments of actual linguistic practice or imaginary primitive ways of using words. In either case, lessons are learnt about our actual language use by the study of these language games. Language of thought: A view in the philosophy of mind developed by Jerry Fodor. In his view, human cognition involves mental representations which are structured like sentences in a language. In favour of this claim Fodor argues that thought, like language, is productive because we are able to think novel thoughts we had never entertained before, and systematic because the meaning of a whole thought depends in a systematic manner on the meanings of its parts. For Fodor, the mental processing of representations, like the computations of symbols performed by a computer, is only sensitive to the syntactical structure, and not the meanings, of the representations processed. Further reading: Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (1996), ch. 10 Langue See Saussure, Ferdinand de Leibniz’s law: The principle that states that if a and b are identical, then they have the same properties (i.e., are indiscernible). It is also known as the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals. It is not to be confused with its converse which would state that if two things have the same properties, they are identical. Lewis, David (1941–2001): One of the most influential North American philosophers of the twentieth century, Lewis


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held positions at the University of California, Los Angeles and at Princeton University. He visited Australia often, and has left an important mark on the philosophical scene in that country. Lewis’s most important contributions to the philosophy of language are his semantics for counterfactuals, his modal realist account of possible worlds, as well as his innovative account of the notion of convention. He also produced ground-breaking work in metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mind. See common knowledge Liar paradox: The standard formulation of the paradox involves the self-referential sentence ‘This sentence is false’. Suppose this sentence is true, then what it says is true. Thus, since it says that it is false, it is false. Suppose, then, that the sentence is false. Thus, what it says is false. It says that it is false. Thus, it is false that it is false. Therefore, it must be true. In conclusion, if we suppose that the sentence is true, it follows that it must be false. But if we suppose that it is false, it has to be true. A way out of the paradox might be sought by arguing that the sentence is neither true nor false. This approach does not solve all the paradoxes in the liar family. In particular, it offers no way out of the strengthened liar paradox concerning the sentence ‘this sentence is not true’. If the sentence is supposed to be true, it is not true. If the sentence is supposed to be not true (either false or neither true nor false), then, since it is not true that it is not true, it turns out to be true. Linguistic competence: The body of tacit or implicit knowledge in virtue of having which speakers are capable of speaking the language. It should be distinguished from linguistic performance. See Chomsky, Noam

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Linguistic meaning: The meaning of an expression such as a sentence. Linguistic meaning is often distinguished from speaker meaning, which is roughly what a speaker intends to convey by means of an utterance on a specific occasion. The two easily come apart, for instance, when the sentence meaning alone does not determine what the sentence is about, when the speaker uses sarcasm or when she uses the wrong word. Thus, I might say the words ‘this is nice derangement of flowers’ meaning that it is a nice arrangement of flowers. My words mean that this is nice derangement of flowers; this is their linguistic meaning. On that occasion, however, what I mean by them, the speaker meaning, is that this is a nice arrangement of flowers. See Non-natural meaning Linguistic performance: Facts about speakers’ actual linguistic behaviour. Linguistic performance is to be distinguished from linguistic competence. See Chomsky, Noam Linguistic turn: This is said to be a feature of twentiethcentury philosophy, characterised by the fact that philosophers instead of using language to talk about other things, such as ethics or ontology, have turned their focus on language itself. Thus, for example, disputes between realists and anti-realists about any given topic are often framed not directly in terms of the existence of facts of a given kind, but in terms of various features of the language used to talk about the topic at issue. See Anti-realism; Cognitivism; Meaning-scepticism; Non-cognitivism; Semantic realism Literal meaning: Philosophical theories of meaning tend to be concerned with this kind of meaning. It is contrasted with


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metaphorical meanings or the kinds of meaning conveyed by means of a variety of attitudes such as irony or sarcasm. See Metaphor Locke, John (1632–1704): A prominent early modern British empiricist, Locke made extensive contributions to the philosophy of mind and to political philosophy; he was a political activist and one of the founding fathers of liberalism. He proposed a view of language in which the meaning of a linguistic expression is the mental idea that the speaker intends to express when uttering the words. This suggestion has many problems; for example, it presupposes the notion of intention. It also must be supplemented with an explanation of how ideas have their meanings. If the suggestion is that ideas are images of what they are ideas of, it is hard to picture what the idea of ‘and’, the idea of ‘splendidly’, would be like. In any case the suggestion cannot work. Suppose that the idea of red is a red idea in the mind. Unless one already knows what red is like so that one knows that the mental picture is red, the mere presence of the red item in the mind could not count as thinking about red. It should be noted that word meaning rather than sentence meaning is the focus of Locke’s theory. He did not seem to think about sentences as something other than a mere list of words. See Meaning, ideational theory of Locutionary act: A kind of speech act defined by J. L. Austin as the act of saying something. Austin further classifies locutionary acts into three nested categories. At the lowest level are phonetic acts, which consist in the utterance of noises. The noises uttered by very small children are examples of such acts. At the next level are phatic acts, which are utterances of words. For example, to practise

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the pronunciation of foreign words is to perform acts of this second kind. The highest level is occupied by rhethic acts, which consist in the utterances of words and sentences as meaning something. Thus, my utterance of the sentence ‘the cat is on the mat’ could be an example of a rhetic act. Every performance of a rhetic act, the uttering of words with meaning, is also a performance of a phatic act, the uttering of words, and of a phonetic act, the uttering of noises. It is clearly not possible to utter words with meaning without uttering words, and if ‘noises’ is understood broadly to include both scribbles and bodily gestures, it is also not possible to utter words without making noises. The converses, instead, do not hold. So rhetic acts presuppose phatic acts which in turn presuppose phonetic acts, but not vice versa. These three categories can be thought of as strata which build on one another to produce a complete locutionary act. See Illocutionary act; Perlocutionary act Logic: Frege once defined logic as the study of the laws of thought. It is not the study of how people think, but the study of how they ought to think. In contemporary parlance logic so understood is the study of valid inference. Frege has also proposed a different account of logic as the study of the most general truths, namely logical truths. Besides these two different conceptions, a third conception of logic as the study of the properties of a variety of formal languages is also currently a common currency. Logical atomism: A view endorsed by both Russell in ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’ (1918) and Wittgenstein in the Tractatus (1922), it states that all complex propositional sentences can be analysed in terms of atomic sentences which are made true by atomic facts. More specifically, according to this view every complex sentence


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can be uniquely analysed as a logical (in Wittgenstein’s case, truth-functional) construction of atomic sentences. Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s versions of the position differed with regard to their understanding of atomic sentences and facts. For Russell atomic sentences predicate a simple property or relation of one or more simple particulars, and atomic facts consist of simple particulars having simple properties or relations. For Wittgenstein, atomic sentences are concatenations of names of simple objects, and atomic facts are combinations of these same objects. The view has now been largely abandoned. See Analysis Further reading: Anscombe (1959) Logical category See Category Logical empiricism See Logical positivism Logical form: The logical form of a sentence is its logical structure. It is that in virtue of which the sentence can play the role it does in valid patterns of inference. Thus, because ‘John is tall and blond’ follows from ‘John is tall’ and ‘John is blond’, but ‘Somebody is tall and blond’ does not follow from ‘Somebody is tall’ and ‘Somebody is blond’, it follows that ‘John is tall’ and ‘Somebody is tall’ have different logical forms. See Predicate; Quantifier; Singular term Logical positivism: A position first developed by the members of the Vienna Circle, such as Carnap, at the beginning of the twentieth century. They adopted a kind of empiricism, and argued that a posteriori sentences were meaningful only if verifiable. Thus, they rejected the whole of ethics and metaphysics as meaningless. Logical positivists developed a verificationist theory of meaning according to

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which the meaning of a sentence is given by its method of verification. However, all the attempts to spell out a satisfactory version of this verification principle ended up in failure. Logical positivists also subscribed to a conventionalist account of necessity and the a priori. In their view all necessary truths were tautologies. They were true simply in virtue of the conventional meanings of their constituent words, and said nothing substantive about reality. See Ayer, A. J.; Meaning, verification theory of Logically proper name: A singular term whose significance depends on the existence of its reference. Logically proper names are thus said to be object-invoking or objectinvolving since unless the object they purport to refer to exists, the sentences in which the name occurs fail to be either true or false. Logically proper names are sometimes called ‘Russellian singular terms’.

M Malapropism: A misuse of words, such as ‘a nice derangement of epitaphs’, which involves a mistake concerning words that resemble one another. Davidson takes our ability to understand what the utterer of a malapropism meant as evidence that linguistic understanding does not rely on a previous tacit knowledge of rules governing the use of linguistic expressions. Manifestation argument: This is a challenge, put forward by Dummett, to semantic realism. Semantic realism is the view that to understand a sentence is to know the conditions under which it is true (its truth conditions), and that these conditions might be such that it is


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potentially beyond us to detect whether or not they obtain (that is, the truth conditions are evidence- or verificationtranscendent). Dummett argues that what we know when we understand a sentence must manifest itself in our use of language. That is to say, to understand a sentence is to have certain practical abilities that we exercise in speaking and listening. But, Dummett continues, if to understand a sentence consisted in knowing some verification-transcendent truth conditions, as the semantic realist claims, there would be no actual practical abilities that could count as manifesting that knowledge. This is because we are not able to detect or recognise evidencetranscendent truth conditions. Hence, our knowledge of them could not be manifested in our ability to recognise them when they obtain. Critics have argued that Dummett’s conception of what counts as a manifestation of a piece of knowledge is too narrow. See Acquisition argument; Communicability argument; Verification transcendence Further reading: Hale (1999) Mass term: A term which, like ‘water’, ‘platinum’ or ‘furniture’, refers to a non-countable kind. It is because it makes no sense to ask how many of them there are that furniture, water and gold are mass terms. Typically, mass terms have the semantic property of referring cumulatively: the sum of any two parts of it is also a part of it. Thus, the sum of any two parts of water that are water is also water. It does not follow, however, that any part of the mass kind is referred to. Thus, oxygen molecules are parts of water which are not water, and there are parts of furniture which are not in themselves furniture. See Count term; Matter term; Natural kind term; Sortal Material adequacy, criterion of See Convention T

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Material conditional: The truth functional sentential connective represented in formal logic by the horseshoe (‘⊃’). Its meaning is given by a truth-table which shows that ‘P ⊃ Q’ is false only when P is true and Q is false, and is true in all other cases. The material conditional is often translated into English as ‘if . . . then . . . ’. However, it is a matter of philosophical controversy whether ordinary indicative conditionals in English are best understood as material conditionals. McDowell, John (1942–): A British, Oxford-educated philosopher, at the time of writing holding a position at Pittsburgh University. His contributions to the philosophy of language include his work on singular thoughts and on the identity theory of truth, as well as his work on themes in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, especially the so-called rulefollowing considerations. See Truth, identity theory Meaning, theories of: A theory of meaning for a language is a theory that attributes to each expression in the language its literal meaning. Such a theory would spell out what is known by speakers who understand the expressions (i.e., their linguistic competence). Philosophers have adopted numerous approaches. It should be noted that many current philosophical theories of meaning do not presuppose a commitment to the existence of things called ‘meanings’. As a matter of fact most contemporary theorists of meaning deny that there are such entities. In their opinion, knowing the meaning of a sentence is not the same as knowing an object. Rather, it consists in having a complex set of abilities which are manifested in the appropriate use of the sentence in question. Philosophical theories of meaning can be grouped under the following headings: the ideational theory (Locke’s view


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that meanings are ideas in the head); the picture theory (the early Wittgenstein’s view that sentences are pictures of facts with which they share a form); the use theory (the later Wittgenstein’s view that to ask after the meaning of an expression often is to ask about its use); psychological or communicative-intention theories (Grice’s programme to reduce the meanings of sentences to the intentions of speakers uttering them via a notion of speaker meaning); truth-conditional semantics (including Frege’s account of how the truth-values of sentences depend on the reference or denotation of their meaningful parts, Davidson’s theory of meaning as a theory of truth, and more recent versions of possible world semantics); inferentialist semantics which identifies meaning with inferential role; verification and assertibility theories (including the logical positivists’ view that the meaning of a sentence is given by its method of verification, and Dummett’s account in terms of the conditions in which one is warranted in asserting the sentence in question). See Logical positivism; Meaning, communicativeintention theory of; Meaning, ideational theory of; Meaning, picture theory of; Meaning, use theory of; Meaning, verification theory of; Molecularity; Semantics, assertibility condition; Semantics, inferentialist; Semantics, truthconditional Meaning, communicative-intention theory of: In these theories linguistic meaning is ultimately reduced to the communicative intentions of speakers; that is, to psychology. The founder of this approach in the 1950s was Grice, who attempted to reduce linguistic meaning to speaker meaning, and who offered an analysis of speaker meaning in terms of communicative intention. The speaker’s communicative intention which determines what the speaker means is (a) the intention to induce an effect, typically a

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belief, in the audience, (b) the intention that the first intention is recognised by the audience, and (c) the intention that the audience’s recognition plays a role in the explanation of why the effect was produced. Grice also argued that the linguistic meaning of a sentence is explained in terms of what speakers regularly or conventionally use utterances of that sentence to mean (their speaker meaning). There are several problems for this account. First, it cannot easily attribute a meaning to sentences that have never been uttered. Second, it cannot easily explain the compositionality of meaning; i.e., the fact that the meaning of the constituent parts determines the meaning of the sentential whole. See Non-natural meaning Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 7 Meaning, ideational theory of: The view held by some early modern philosophers, like Locke, that the meanings of words are ideas in the mind. The view in itself would only postpone the problem of explaining meaning. Some of the same philosophers held that ideas have meanings by being pictures that resemble what they are about. There are many problems with this view. First, some ideas concern abstract notions for which no picture is forthcoming. Second, ideas cannot resemble in all respects what they are about. For instance, objects have weight and mass but ideas do not. The view requires that ideas resemble in all respects what they represent. Finally, and more seriously, as Wittgenstein has argued, merely having ideas in the mind cannot be what understanding the meaning of language is about. If I do not know what ‘red’ means or red is, it will not help to have colour samples, one of which is red, since I would not know which one is red. Similarly, just having coloured ideas in the mind does not


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furnish the word ‘red’ with a meaning unless I already know which is red, and therefore what ‘red’ means. See Berkeley, George Meaning, picture theory of: The theory of meaning which is generally attributed to Wittgenstein in the Tractatus (1922). According to the theory, sentences represent facts in virtue of sharing the same pictorial form with them. Thus, sentences are not really different from diagrams or other pictorial representations of facts. Wittgenstein also argues that any attempt to state his theory was bound to end up in nonsense. See Saying/showing Further reading: Anscombe (1959) Meaning, use theory of: The view, wrongly attributed to Wittgenstein, that the meaning of an expression is determined by its use. The view has contemporary supporters who subscribe to various sophisticated versions of dispositionalism. Arguably Grice’s theory of linguistic meaning is also a kind of use theory. See Meaning, communicative-intention theory of Meaning, verification theory of: The view endorsed by the supporters of logical positivism, and also by Quine, that the meaning of an a posteriori sentence is given by its method of verification. For example, the sentence ‘Feux is a black cat’ has a meaning which is given by the kind of observation which would be required to verify it conclusively. Logical Positivists relied on this theory to rule out sentences of metaphysics, theology or ethics as lacking any factual meaning. See Verification principle Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 3

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Meaning fact: A fact which constitutes a sentence meaning what it does. Meaning facts are also called semantic facts. Supporters of meaning irrealism do not believe in the existence of any such facts. Meaning irrealism: The view that there are no distinctive facts about meaning. Thus, supporters of the view would say that there is no fact of the matter about what any sentence means. A semantic irrealist does not hold that all sentences are meaningless, since if that were true, it would be a fact about them. Instead, a supporter of the view holds that there is no special realm of meanings and other semantic properties which is described by those sentences which are about other sentences and appear to attribute meanings to them. Thus, the sentence ‘ “la neve e` bianca” means that snow is white’ does not state a semantic fact (that is, its meaning that snow is white) about the Italian sentence ‘la neve e` bianca’. Instead, it might be used to convey how the Italian sentence is usually translated into English, although a different translation could be equally compatible with the facts. This view has been adopted, for different reasons and using different arguments, by Kripke and Quine. See Indeterminacy of translation; Meaning scepticism Meaning scepticism: There are two versions of scepticism about meaning. The first was developed by Quine as part of his argument for the indeterminacy of translation. The second was developed by Kripke in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982). In this book Kripke provides a sceptical argument for the claim that there is no fact of the matter about what any sentence means. Kripke claims to find the root of this paradoxical conclusion in Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. Kripke’s argument proceeds by considering all


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the candidate facts which might determine the meaning of various expressions, and showing that they fail to do the job. Having considered all plausible candidates and shown that they fail in the task, Kripke concludes that there are no facts that constitute the meaning of any expression. Kripke uses an example concerning the sign +. Imagine that a person has never previously performed additions with numbers larger than 56, he is then presented with ‘68 + 57 = ?’ and answers ‘125’. It would seem that two kinds of facts make his answer correct: the arithmetical fact that 125 is the sum of 57 plus 68, and the semantic fact that he means addition by +. Kripke raises sceptical questions about the existence of this second kind of fact; he does not take issue with mathematical facts. He challenges us to provide a fact that determines that in the past that person meant addition by + rather than quaddition, where quaddition is like addition for numbers smaller than or equal to 56 but gives ‘5’ as a result of being applied to numbers larger than 56. He shows that we cannot answer by citing facts about the person’s past behaviour, about general rules, about the images or occurrent thoughts in that person’s head, or even facts about the person’s dispositions to use that sign. Kripke has two objections against the proposal that equates facts about meaning with dispositions to use the sign. First, he claims that dispositions are finite. Second, he claims that meaning is normative. Facts about the meaning of an expression are facts about how the expression ought to be used, but facts about dispositions only tell us how it would be used. Kripke’s sceptical paradox concludes that there are no facts about meanings, and consequently all sentences about what other expressions mean are neither true nor false. His sceptical solution rescues talk of meaning. Although when we talk about meanings we do not describe any facts, this kind of talk is not pointless since it can

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help when teaching the language to newcomers. Further although such sentences do not have truth conditions because they do not state any facts, they have assertibility conditions, that is to say conditions under which their assertion is warranted. Critics have objected that Kripke appears to suggest that there are facts about such assertibility conditions, but such facts would seem to be the kind of facts about meanings that are said not to exist. See Dispositionalism; Meaning irrealism Further reading: Miller (1998), chs 5 and 6 Meinong, Alexius (1853–1920): An Austrian philosopher, and a student of Brentano, who taught at the University of Graz. He is famous for believing that there are objects like Pegasus that, although they fail to instantiate the property of existence, have nevertheless other properties. He adopted this counterintuitive position as a solution of some puzzles about intentionality. In his view the idea that there are some non-existent objects explains why thoughts about Pegasus, for instance, are about something even though Pegasus does not exist. Russell’s theory of definite descriptions is intended as a solution of this puzzle that does not make reference to non-existent objects. Mentalese See Language of thought Mention: A term is mentioned, as opposed to used, when the term itself is the topic of discussion. Thus, the term ‘Milan’ is used in the sentence ‘Milan is a city in Italy’ but mentioned in the sentence ‘ “Milan” has five letters’. In order to mention a term, we normally use its name. See Use; Use–mention distinction Meta-language: This is contrasted in logic with the object language. Whilst the object language is the logical language


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in use, the meta-language is the language used to talk about the object language. The distinction between object and meta-language was introduced in order to avoid the paradoxes generated by permitting the existence of self-referential sentences such as the Liar sentences. See Liar paradox Metaphor: ‘The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters’ is an example of a metaphor. Some philosophers have argued that metaphors have metaphorical (as opposed to literal) meanings and express metaphorical truths. Davidson has denied these claims. For him, metaphors only have literal meanings, and are literally true or false. What is distinctive about metaphors, for Davidson, is not their meaning but their use. Their point is to cause us to notice something but not by stating what that something is. Further reading: Moran (1999); Davidson (1991), ch. 17 Minimalism: To take a minimalist attitude towards an area of discourse is to believe that that kind of talk refers only to merely formal properties with no metaphysical nature or hidden structure. The best-known form of minimalism is minimalism about truth, a view first developed by Paul Horwich. See Truth, minimalist theory of Missing-explanation argument: An argument developed by Mark Johnston to show that our ordinary concepts of secondary qualities are not response-dependent concepts. Consider, for example, the concept of redness. We think that statements of the form ‘x looks red (or more precisely: x is disposed to look red to standard observers in standard conditions) because it is red’ can be perfectly good, true empirical explanations. Yet, Johnston claims these statements would be trivial, and

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good explanations would go missing, if the concept of redness were a response-dependent concept. If the concept of red were response-dependent, to be told that something is disposed to look red to standard observers in standard conditions because it is red would be tantamount to being told that something is disposed to look red to standard observers in standard conditions because it is disposed to look red to standard observers in standard conditions. This is not informative. Peter Menzies and Philip Pettit defend response-dependent accounts against this argument. They argue that the good explanations, invoked by Johnston, explain why something is manifesting a disposition (and so looks red) in terms of its possession of that disposition (is red). See Response-dependence; Secondary qualities Modal operator: These are operators such as ‘necessarily’ and ‘possibly’. See Modality Modality: There are four main cases of modality: necessity, impossibility, possibility and contingency. There also are different kinds of modality: alethic modality (concerned with what must or can be true), epistemic or doxastic (concerned with certainty and uncertainty in belief) and deontic (concerned with permissions and obligations). See De dicto modality; De re modality Model: A model for a theory is an interpretation (in the technical sense of the term) that assigns the value true to all the sentences in the theory. Modus ponens: This is a deductively valid form of argument with the structure: If P, then Q; P. Therefore, Q. An


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example is given by the following argument: If John runs regularly, he will improve his level of fitness. John runs regularly. Hence, he will improve his level of fitness. See Validity Modus tollens: This is a deductively valid form of argument with the structure: If P, then Q. Not Q. Therefore, not P. An example is given by the following argument: If you strike the match it will light. The match is not lit. Therefore, you did not strike the match. See Validity Molecularity: In Dummett’s view adequate theories of meaning must be based on a molecular view of language. They must give explanatory priority to the grasping of individual concepts or of the meanings of sub-sentential expressions over the grasping of the language as a whole. Dummett contrasts this molecular view with holism. Mood: A surface grammatical feature of verbs indicating whether the sentence seems to serve a fact-stating purpose (indicative) or expresses a counter-to-fact consideration (subjunctive). ‘Went’ is a verb in the indicative mood; ‘would be rich’ is one in the subjective. Moore, G. E. (1873–1958): A British philosopher and one of the fathers of analytic philosophy, Moore’s main contributions to the philosophy of language consist in his account of the notion of analysis and his discussion of the naturalistic fallacy involved in deriving an ought from an is. See Normativity of meaning; Rule-following Morpheme See phoneme

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N Name: In ordinary parlance names are contrasted with verbs and adjectives. They include expressions such as ‘London’, ‘Tony Blair’, ‘gold’, ‘tiger’, ‘woman,’ and so forth. These terms can play different logical roles in different contexts and thus are said to belong to different logical categories in different contexts of use. Thus, ‘woman’ is a logical subject in ‘woman is the equal of man’, but the same word (orthographically understood) is a predicate in ‘Margaret Thatcher is a woman’. Similarly ‘Vienna’ is a singular term in ‘Vienna is the capital of Austria’ but functions rather differently in ‘Trieste is no Vienna’ where it is intended to convey the idea that Trieste is not a sophisticated metropolis. For this reason, philosophers do not think of ‘name’ as a useful category, instead they use logical categories such as singular term and predicate and assign different uses of names, as ordinarily understood, to different categories. See Category; Predicable Naming: The act by means of which objects are assigned a name. Kripke in his causal theory of reference has developed the idea that a kind of baptism plays an important role in fixing the reference of singular terms and natural kind terms. Narrow content: A notion of content that is contrasted with broad content. It is a matter of dispute whether narrow contents exist. Supporters of externalism deny that they do. Supporters of narrow contents, known as internalists or individualists, have provided different accounts of what they might be. A standard definition states that the narrow content of a psychological state is that content of the state that is individuated exclusively in terms of the


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intrinsic properties of that state. The notion of an intrinsic property used here is that adopted by Lewis according to which any property that must be shared by duplicates is intrinsic. Thus, by analogy, being a magnet would count as an intrinsic property of some objects according to this definition, since if one thing is a magnet, then its exact duplicate is also a magnet. Thus, the property is intrinsic despite the fact that being a magnet is a dispositional property since what makes a magnet what it is a matter of its power to attract iron and steel. See Internalism; Twin Earth Further reading: Brown (2002) Natural kind term: These are names for natural kinds. They include mass terms such as ‘gold’ and ‘water’ and count terms such as ‘tiger’ and ‘tulip’. Kripke argues that the reference of these terms must be understood in terms of a causal theory of reference according to which these terms are not abbreviations for descriptions formulated in terms of the observable properties of samples belonging to those kinds. Instead, the reference is fixed through original contacts with samples of these kinds which are identified by their chemical compositions or biological natures. For realists the distinctions between natural kinds cut nature at its joints. Natural meaning: A label used by Grice to refer to those uses of the verb ‘to mean’ in which it expresses a natural (or non-conventional) relation. The sentences ‘Those clouds mean rain’ and ‘The current budget deficit means that income tax will have to be raised’ are examples of uses of ‘means’ to express natural meaning. Grice contrasts this notion of meaning with the notion of non-natural meaning, which is attributed to language and to other conventional signs.

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Necessary condition: Any condition which is necessary for the obtaining of something else. Thus, for example, being a human being is a necessary condition for being a woman. That is, in order to be a woman it is necessary that one is a human being. Necessary conditions, however, might not be sufficient. Thus, it is not sufficient to be a human being to be a woman, since some human beings are men. Sufficient and necessary conditions are expressed by means of conditionals. Thus, we can state that being a human is necessary for being a woman, by saying: something is a woman only if it is a human being. See Sufficient condition Necessity: There is more than one kind of necessity. Epistemic necessity expresses lack of uncertainty. Alethic necessity is instead concerned with necessary truths. A proposition is said to be necessarily true if and only if it cannot be false. This idea is often reformulated in terms of possible world semantics. Thus understood, a necessary truth is true in all possible worlds. It is a matter of dispute whether there is more than one kind of alethic necessity. Some necessities are broadly logical or conceptual, and their denial is a contradiction. However, following Kripke, some philosophers have argued for the existence of a special kind of metaphysical necessity exemplified by claims such as that water is H2 O. What makes these necessities special is that their negations are not contradictions, and their truth is only discoverable a posteriori. See De dicto modality; De re modality; Possibility Further reading: Kripke (1980); Plantinga (1974) Negation: When discussed by analytic philosophers, negation is conceived as a truth-functional sentential connective expressed by ‘not’. In classical logic, the negation of a true proposition is false, and the negation of a false


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proposition is true. In some other logics, the negation of a true proposition is not true. However, in these logics to be ‘not true’ is not the same as being false. Nominalism: The view that denies the existence of universals. Non-cognitivism: To be a non-cognitivist about a given area of discourse is to hold that judgements made in that area do not express beliefs and do not purport to describe facts. Expressivism, emotivism and quasi-realism are all species of non-cognitivism. Non-cognitivism is opposed to cognitivism. See Frege–Geach problem Further reading: Miller (2003) Non-extensional context See Intensional context Non-natural meaning: A label used by Grice to refer to those uses of the verb ‘to mean’ in which it expresses a nonnatural (or conventional) relation. In Britain as a matter of convention, double yellow lines painted by the side of the road mean that parking is not permitted there. Similarly, it is a matter of convention that in English ‘red’ means red rather than yellow. These are all examples of non-natural meaning. Grice contrasts this notion of meaning with the notion of natural meaning, which is attributed to natural signs. Normativity of meaning: Meaning seems to be a normative notion, since to use a term in accordance with its meaning is to use it correctly or to use it as it ought to be used. Some philosophers, typically supporters of dispositionalism, argue that meaning can be reduced to non-normative notions. In particular, they argue that facts about meaning are reducible to some combination of facts about how

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we are disposed to use linguistic expressions. Others deny these claims and argue that the normativity of meaning is irreducible. See Meaning scepticism Noun See Name Noun-phrase: A phrase, headed by a pronoun, a demonstrative or a noun, that functions like a name, such as ‘that woman in the corner’.

O Object: For Frege an object is the referent of a proper name or singular term. Thus, in the sentence ‘London is the capital of the UK’, ‘London’ is a singular term whose referent is the city of London. See Concept Object-language: The language that is being talked about, as opposed to the meta-language which is the language used to talk about the object language. See Meta-language Objectual quantification: The dominant interpretation of the quantifiers. Thus understood, the sentence ‘something is red’, for example, is true if and only if there is at least one object which is red. And the sentence ‘everything is red’ is true if and only if every object is red. The quantifiers, given this objectual interpretation, are seen as secondorder functions which take predicates (i.e., first-order functions) as their arguments and yield truth-values (true or false) as their values. For instance, the sentence ‘everything is red’ is paraphrased as ‘For anything x, x is


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red’, where ‘For anything x, x . . . ’ is the universal quantifier and ‘. . . is red’ is its argument. We can now reformulate the initial point about the interpretation of these quantifiers in the language of formal semantics. Existential sentences like ‘something is red’ are true if an only if there is at least one object which satisfies the relevant first-order function (in our example ‘. . . is red’). Universal sentences like ‘everything is red’ are true if and only if every object satisfies the relevant first-order function. Given the objectual interpretation, quantified sentences cannot be equivalent to sentences that are not quantified, since there might be objects for which we have no name. No sentence without quantifiers could be construed as being about the nameless, but since quantified sentences cover these cases also, the two cannot be equivalent. See Quantification; Substitutional quantification Observation sentence: A sentence used to report an observation such as ‘this flower is red’. Observation sentences are contrasted with theoretical sentences. Observation sentences can be verified by means of observations, while theoretical sentences can only be verified indirectly by means of the verification of those observation sentences they entail. See Logical positivism Occasion sentence See eternal sentence Ontological commitment: Theories have ontological commitments to the existence of some entities. The entities a theory is committed to are those which have to exist if the theory is to be true. Quine has argued that we do not look at the names in a theory to find out the theory’s ontological commitments. Instead, in his view a theory is committed only to those entities which must be in the

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universe of discourse for the quantified sentences in the theory to be true. See Interpretation; Quantifier Further reading: Quine (1948) Opacity: A construction that changes a position which would be available for substitution salva veritate of coreferential terms into one that is not so available. Thus, for example, ‘Mary believes that . . . ’ is an opaque construction. In the sentence ‘Cicero was a Roman orator’, the name ‘Cicero’ can be substituted with ‘Tully’ (another name of the same man) without changing the truth-value of the sentence. However, if Mary does not know that Cicero was also called Tully, the sentence ‘Mary believes that Cicero was a Roman orator’ might be true, whilst the sentence ‘Mary believes that Tully was a Roman orator’ is false. A construction that is not opaque is transparent. Opaqueness is not the same as non-extensionality, since the modal construction ‘it is necessary that . . . ’ is not extensional, but it is transparent. Open sentence: An open sentence is not a genuine sentence; rather it is the result of substituting in a sentence a variable for a singular term. Thus, ‘X is the capital of Wales’ is the open sentence obtained by substituting the variable X for the name ‘Cardiff’ in the sentence ‘Cardiff is the capital of Wales’. Open texture: The term was introduced by Friedrich Waismann to refer to a phenomenon which he took to be common to most linguistic expressions. In his view, the application of our empirical concepts is only partially defined. For example, our definition of the concept of a cat leaves it open whether a creature capable of speech but that is like a cat in other respects is a cat. This lack of


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precision in our concepts is not thought by Waismann to be a problem, since any concept can be made more precise if the need arises. Operator: A functional expression such as a quantifier or an expression of modality or tense. Operator shift fallacy: A fallacy in reasoning involving an incorrect shift in the scope of an operator such as a quantifier or a modal operator. Examples of such fallacious thinking are concluding that a white wall is necessarily white from the premise that necessarily a white wall is white, or concluding that somebody must be the mother of everybody from the premise that everybody has somebody as his or her mother. Oratio obliqua See Indirect speech Ordinary language philosophy: An approach to philosophy, popular in Britain in the 1950s, which focused on the various ways in which words are used. Austin, a proponent of the approach, engaged in complex taxonomies of the ordinary uses of words. The approach is characterised by a distaste for metaphysics and for formal approaches to language. Ostension: The gesture of pointing or indicating. Wittgenstein has argued that the referent of a term cannot be fixed by ostension alone. He quipped that when somebody points to the moon, the fool looks at the finger. More seriously, if I utter the sentence ‘I call that “Morning Glory”’ and I point in the direction of a steamship, the pointing and my utterance alone do not determine that the ship, rather than, say, its burning furnace, is what ‘Morning Glory’ refers to. What is also needed is the use of a sortal as in ‘I call that ship “Morning Glory”’.

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P Paradigm case argument: A form of argument much in use among supporters of ordinary language philosophy, which concludes from the fact that there are paradigmatic uses of an expression of a concept to the conclusion that there are instances that satisfy the concept. Thus, for instance, Antony Flew argued for the existence of free will on the basis of the fact that there are actions which are paradigmatic cases for the use of the word ‘free’. This form of argumentation, together with the kind of philosophy that sustained it, is not generally practised these days. Paradox: We have a paradox whenever by means of seemingly valid reasoning we move from true premises to a false conclusion. There are various kinds of paradoxes. In mathematics, Russell’s paradox concerning the class of all classes that are not members of themselves forced the rejection of na¨ıve class theory. In the philosophy of language a variety of paradoxes has proved recalcitrant to any attempted solution. These include the liar paradox and the sorites paradox. Paraphrase: As used by philosophers, paraphrase serves the purposes of explication and logical simplification. Thus, the paraphrase of an expression should convey the same meaning as the paraphrased expression but have a less misleading logical structure, wear its ontological commitments on its sleeve and serve as an explication for the paraphrased expression. Parataxis: A grammatical construction that involves no subordinate clauses. Davidson has offered a paratactic interpretation of indirect speech, which normally would


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seem to involve subordinate clauses. In his view, the sentence ‘Galileo said that the earth moves’ is understood as composed of two self-standing sentences: ‘Galileo said that’ where ‘that’ functions as a demonstrative; and ‘the earth moves’, where this second sentence provides the reference for the demonstrative in the first. The result is that the initial complex utterance has the significance of ‘an utterance of Galileo said-the-same-as this: the earth moves’. The approach offers a neat solution to the second of Frege’s puzzles. Further reading: Davidson (1991), ch. 7 Parole See Saussure, Ferdinand de Particular: A concrete specific thing or person; London, Mount Everest, David Beckham are all examples of particulars. Thus, particulars are those individuals which are not abstract. See Abstract entity; Individual Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914): He was one of the founders of American pragmatism and of semiotics (the science of signs). Peirce’s main contribution to logic is his formulation of the distinction between three kinds of inference: deductive, inductive and abductive (inference to the best explanation). He also developed an extensive categorisation of different kinds of signs including the distinction between icon, index and symbol. Finally, he also provided one of the first explicit characterisations of the type–token distinction. Performance, linguistic See Linguistic performance Performative: Austin coined the term to refer to utterances which are not truth-evaluable, and are examples of ways

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of doing things by means of words. For instance, in the context of a wedding, ‘I do’ can be a performative utterance, since in saying it one is thereby getting married. Perfomatives are contrasted with constative utterances. See Speech act Perlocutionary act: A term coined by Austin for acts that consist in the production of certain effects in one’s audience by one’s utterance. For example, annoying somebody by talking non-stop is an example of a perlocutionary act. Surprising, frightening, startling a person by one’s utterances are also examples of this category. See Illocutionary act; Locutionary act; Speech act Perlocutionary intention: The intention of a speaker to bring about an effect in his or her audience by means of an utterance. Typically, the effect is to make the audience do something or believe something. See Grice, H. P.; Speaker meaning Permutation argument: An argument formulated by Putnam against metaphysical realism. The argument is sometimes also called ‘Putnam’s model-theoretic argument’. There is more than one version of the argument. Metaphysical realism is the view that the world consists of a fixed number of mind-independent objects, that there is only one true description of the way the world is and that truth is correspondence to reality. As a result, supporters of metaphysical realism are committed to the claim that a scientific theory, which is by human standards epistemically ideal, might none the less be false. Putnam’s argument against the view depends on showing that language cannot stand in the kind of determinate referential relation to reality which the view requires. Putnam’s basic idea is that there is always more than one interpretation


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that assigns all the correct truth conditions to the sentences constituting our complete theory of reality. In other words, we can permutate or change the universe of discourse of the theory, and thus change the assignments of reference to the names and predicates used in the theory without changing the truth-values at each possible world for the sentences in the theory. Thus, reference cannot be fixed in the way required by metaphysical realism. Earlier versions of the argument relied on model-theoretical ¨ results known as Lowenheim-Skolem theorems to argue that any theory that has an interpretation which makes all the sentences in the theory come out as true (i.e., a model) also has other models with domains that have a different number of things in it. Thus, again, the referential relations between names, predicates, things and their collections cannot be uniquely determined. Critics have pointed out that Putnam’s is not a knock-out argument, it is more a challenge to the metaphysical realist to provide an account of what determines referential relations. See Inscrutability of reference; Internal realism Further reading: Hale and Wright (1999); Putnam (1981) Phenomenalism: The view that statements about ordinary objects can be analysed without remainder into statements about actual and possible perceptions. It is also sometimes stated as the view that ordinary objects are logical constructions of our sense data. This view does not have many current supporters, but it was once championed by Carnap and also Ayer. It is a very radical form of empiricism. Phoneme: Basic unit of sounds that compose words (morphemes).

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Platitude: A trivial truth. Common-sense functional definitions of concepts usually begin by stating a number of platitudes that are part of the common understanding of the concept. The concept is not empty if and only if there is one kind of thing that plays all the roles listed by the platitudes. Thus, for instance, belief might be thought as whatever together with desire provides reasons for action, and provides reasons for other beliefs, and can be justified by perception, and so forth. Beliefs exist if and only if there is one kind of state that plays all of these roles. Platonism: A view that is committed to the existence of mindindependent entities which are not spatiotemporally located and are knowable by some sort of non-perceptual intuition. See Grasping a thought Possibility: There is more than one kind of possibility. Epistemic possibility expresses uncertainty. Thus, when I say that the postman might have delivered the parcel, what I mean is that as far as I know it is possible that he has. Alethic possibility concerns instead what is possibly true, which is to say true in some possible world. Thus, when I assert that I might not have been born in Italy, I do not express doubt about my place of birth; I am expressing the fact that I could have been born elsewhere. See Necessity Further reading: Plantinga (1974) Possible world: The notion of a possible world has been introduced in philosophy to provide a semantics for modal discourse, which is to say discourse that is concerned with necessity and possibility. A possible world is a complete way in which things might have been. Thus, when I think


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that I could have won the lottery, what I am thinking is that there is a possible world in which I have won the lottery. There is a debate among philosophers about the nature of possible worlds. Several take them as descriptions, complete stories about how the whole universe might have been. Others take them to be abstract entities of some sort. A minority follows Lewis in believing that they are real universes, like the one in which we live. Each of these universes is completely isolated from the others. See Counterpart; De dicto modality; De re modality Further reading: Divers (2002) Possible world semantics: Possible worlds have been used to develop a semantics for modal sentences about necessity and possibility and counterfactuals. Thus, a necessary proposition is true if and only if it is true in all possible worlds; a possibility is true if and only if it is true in some possible world. While counterfactuals are thought to be true if at the closest possible world in which the antecedent is true, the consequent is also true. Counterfactuals with impossible antecedents, which are false at all possible worlds, are true by default. Further reading: Lewis (1986b) Postulate: It is either an assumption or, in mathematics, a basic principle such as an axiom. Pragmatics: There are different views of what this area of study involves. Some understand it as the study of those features of language which are not covered in semantics, the study of syntax and phonology. An alternative view is to take pragmatics as the study of those properties of linguistic expressions which the expressions have in virtue of their context broadly construed. Some philosophers, who oppose formal semantics, argue that linguistic

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expressions have their meaning in virtue of their contexts. These philosophers thus argue that pragmatics rather than semantics offers the materials for a satisfactory account of meaning. Further reading: Travis (1999) Pragmatism: A North American school of thought first developed by Peirce and William James in the nineteenth century which rejects abstraction in favour of practical utility. They reject views that have no practical consequence or distinctions that make no difference in practice. Pragmatists are well known for supporting a view according to which truth is what works. In contemporary philosophy, Rorty is the most prominent advocate of pragmatism. Further reading: Murphy (1990) Predicable: An expression that produces a proposition about something when attached to another expression that stands for that thing. Thus, ‘woman’ is a predicable because by attaching it to the expression ‘Queen Elizabeth II’, which refers to Queen Elizabeth II, we form the proposition ‘Queen Elizabeth II is a woman’ which is about that same individual. In this proposition, the predicable ‘woman’ plays the role of predicate. But, predicables do not always play the role of predicates in propositions in which they appear. ‘Woman is the equal of man’ is an example. This piece of terminology was introduced by Geach. Predicate: The logical category of expressions used to attribute properties and relations to things. The extension of a predicate is the class of things (or of ordered pairs or triplets and so forth) that fall under it. Hence, the extension of the predicate ‘is red’ is the class of red things,


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while the extension of the relation ‘is the capital of’ is the class of ordered pairs whose first member is a capital city and whose second member is the related country. See Concept; Interpretation Predication: The problem of predication is also known as the problem of the unity of the proposition. A sentence or a proposition is not a list of names, it has a kind of unity. If, in the sentence ‘Tony Blair is British’, we think of the subject as a name for a particular and the general term as a name for a universal, we need to explain how the two are connected. It will not help to say that they are related by the relation of instantiation because this answer only gives rise to a further question about the connection between Tony Blair, Britishness and instantiation. Frege claimed that the unity is given by the fact that the predicate is not a name for a universal. Instead, its reference is a concept which is meant to be unsaturated by nature. More recently, some philosophers have rescued the idea that the predicate names a universal and located the unsaturatedness which unifies the proposition in the copula. Presupposition: This notion has two senses: one logical, the other pragmatic. The logical notion is used to refer to a sentence or statement whose truth is a necessary condition for another statement to have a truth-value. Thus, the sentence ‘The mayor of Newport is a woman’ presupposes the sentence ‘Newport has a mayor’. The pragmatic notion refers to a feature of speakers whose presuppositions are the propositions they believe constitute the background information in their current conversations. Further reading: Stalnaker (1974); Strawson (1949) Primary quality: A perceptible property of things such as shape, size and weight which is not a matter of a relation

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between the thing and the perceiver. Primary qualities are contrasted with secondary qualities, like colour, which are typically thought to be so dependent. See Secondary quality Private language: A logically private language would be a language that only one person could speak and no one else could either learn or understand. It is thus different from a solitary language, which is the language of only one person, but which could at least in principle be understood or learnt by others. Wittgenstein’s private language argument is intended to show that private languages are impossible. Private language argument: In the Philosophical Investigations (1953) Wittgenstein argues that private languages are impossible. A logically private language would be a language that only one person could speak and no one else could either learn or understand. Wittgenstein asks us to imagine a person developing a language to name her inner sensations. Thus, when the person has a sensation, she coins a name for sensations of that kind. Let us say that the name is ‘S’. This language would be private; no one else could learn it, because they could not know what ‘S’ stands for since they have no way of individuating the kind of sensation which corresponds to it. The solitary speaker of the language, instead, is meant to be able by introspection alone to tell when she experiences the same sensation again and reapply the name ‘S’ to it. However, Wittgenstein points out, this would be an illusion. The problem is not that the agent might misremember what the sensation is like, and therefore make mistakes when applying the name ‘S’. The problem is rather that what makes two sensations instances of the same kind is simply the agent’s saying so. Consequently, the very idea that


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the subject could be wrong as to whether the name ‘S’ applies to a sensation is incoherent. But if mistakes are impossible, there is no difference between thinking that an application is correct and the application being correct. However, Wittgenstein claims, if the idea of using the name incorrectly makes no sense here, the idea of using it correctly makes no sense either. Consequently, what we have here is not a genuine name, not a real language. See Rule-following Further reading: Hacker (1993) Productivity: A feature which is often attributed to linguistic understanding. See Compositionality; Language of thought Projectivism: The view that we project onto the external world some features which are in fact inner to the agent. Thus, for David Hume we project necessary connections onto the world, even though the world includes only regularities or constant conjunctions. A projectivist, however, does not need to hold that all our beliefs about the relevant area of discourse are false. Instead, he might adopt quasi-realism, defend the utility and correctness of the sort of talk under scrutiny, and explain why it seems to state facts when in reality it expresses attitudes. Pronoun: An expression like ‘he’ or ‘it’ or ‘I’. These have two kinds of uses: (1) as demonstratives or indexicals; and (2) as expressions standing in cross-referencing (or anaphoric) relation to nouns. There are three kinds of anaphoric uses of pronouns: the so-called lazy use, as in ‘When John came for dinner, he brought a bottle of wine’; the e-type use, as in: ‘Someone picked up the glass. He made a toast’; and, finally, the quantificational use, such as ‘For every number there is a number which is

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greater than it’. The first kind of use is called lazy because in these instances the name could be substituted for the cross-referencing pronoun; not so in the other two cases. In the e-type, however, the pronoun can be substituted with a noun-phrase constructed from the context. Thus, in the example above we can substitute ‘the person who picked up the glass’ for the pronoun ‘he’. In the quantificational case, which is so called because the antecedent of the anaphor is an expression that functions as a quantifier, it is not possible to substitute a name or a noun-phrase for the pronoun. See Anaphora Proper name See Singular term Proposition: Propositions are what sentences express. The same sentence can in different contexts express different propositions. For instance, the sentence ‘I am hungry’ expresses different propositions when it is uttered by different people at different times. Thus, if Tony Blair says it, it expresses the proposition that Tony Blair is hungry at that time. If, instead, George W. Bush says it, the sentence expresses the proposition that George W. Bush is hungry at that time. Propositions are also generally taken to be the primary bearers of truth and falsity. Sentences would be true or false only in the derivative sense of expressing a true or false proposition. Some philosophers do not take talk of propositions very seriously. They use it for convenience’s sake, but do not really believe that there exist entities called ‘propositions’. Other philosophers believe in their existence. Some take propositions as sets of possible worlds. Thus, the proposition expressed by the sentence ‘George W. Bush is the US President in 2006’ is the set of possible worlds in which George W. Bush is the US President in 2006. A problem for this


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view of propositions is that it discriminates them very coarsely. It is a counterintuitive consequence of the view that all tautologies, such as ‘all triangles have three sides,’ and ‘all squares have four sides’, express the same proposition, since they are both true in every possible world. In order to avoid this problem, some philosophers have suggested that propositions are instead structured entities which typically have things, properties and relations among their components. These are called ‘structured propositions’. See Singular proposition; Truth-bearer Further reading: McGrath (2006) Propositional attitude: A psychological relation, such as intending, believing, desiring, knowing, wanting, knowing, discovering, and so forth, which is usually understood as a two-place relation between a person and a proposition. Belief, for example, would be a relation of believing that holds between a person (the believer) and a proposition, which is what is believed. See propositional attitude reports Propositional attitude reports: Sentences used to attribute a propositional attitude to a person. Thus, ‘John believes that Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens’ is a propositional attitude report, since it is used to report that John has the propositional attitude of belief toward the proposition which is expressed by the sentence ‘Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens’. These reports give rise to one of Frege’s puzzles. Further reading: McKay and Nelson (2005) Prosentence: Supporters of the prosentential theory of truth take expressions such as ‘that is true’ and ‘it is true’ to be prosentences. Prosentences are standardly considered

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semantically atomic; their parts are not thought to be independently meaningful. This point can be made by writing the prosentence thus: ‘that-is-true’. Prosentences relate to tokens of sentences in the same way in which pronouns relate to tokens of nouns. This relation, which is called anaphora, is one of cross-referencing. See Truth, prosentential theory of Psychologism: A view of the nature of logic which Frege vehemently opposed. According to this view, logic is the branch of psychology concerned with describing patterns of inference used by human beings in reasoning. Putnam, Hilary (1926–): At the time of writing Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, Putnam has made numerous contributions to the philosophy of language. Before the 1980s he developed his celebrated Twin Earth and brain in a vat thought experiments in favour of semantic externalism. At that time he was a supporter of the causal theory of reference and a metaphysical realist. In the 1980s he abandoned these views. He formulated his well-known permutation argument, and developed a position he called internal realism. In his later years Putnam’s views have become more sympathetic to pragmatism.

Q Qua-problem: A problem for a purely causal theory of reference. According to this view names would be initially introduced into the language by baptisers who first perceive the object so named. These people are not meant to associate any description with the name. Instead, they are assumed to succeed in referring to the object, and


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name it, merely in virtue of being causally related to it. But at any one time there are many different things the baptisers are equally causally related to. Suppose they utter the noise ‘gatto’ when in the presence of a cat. They could be naming that particular cat, they could be introducing the general name ‘cat’, they could be introducing the general name ‘feline’, they could even be introducing the general term ‘tail’ or ‘whisker’. Nothing could determine whether they are referring to the cat qua-cat or qua-feline, since when one perceives a cat one also perceives a feline. What this problem shows is that in order to be able to name something, it is not enough to point to it and utter a word. Reference can be fixed only if we associate a description or a general term (sortal) with the newly introduced name. We succeed in referring to the particular cat if we use the description ‘that cat’ when introducing the cat’s name. Quantification: It concerns the use of quantifiers. These are expressions of generality; they are the means to talk about a collection of things. ‘All’, ‘any’, ‘every’, ‘there is’, ‘most’, ‘many’, ‘few’, ‘at most one’ are all examples of quantifiers in English. The two main quantifiers used in logic are the universal and the existential quantifier, which can be translated respectively as ‘every’ and ‘some’. See Quantifying-in Quantifier: First introduced by Frege, quantifiers are used to express general sentences in logic. There are two main quantifiers: the universal (symbolised as (x) or (∀x)) and the existential (symbolised as (∃x)). Either of the two can be defined in terms of the other, together with negation. The universal quantifier is used to translate expressions such as ‘all’, ‘every’ and ‘any’, the existential quantifier to translate expressions like ‘some’ and ‘there is’, ‘there

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are’, ‘exist’. Quantification can be unrestricted, when the quantifiers are intended to range over everything there is. It can also be taken to be restricted where the quantifier is taken to range over part of what there is, i.e., a class of things. Some philosophers have argued that natural languages have expressions such as ‘some flowers’, ‘all animals’, ‘someone’ which are best read as restricted quantifiers ranging respectively over flowers, animals and people. However, since most philosophers believe that all restricted quantification can be paraphrased away using the unrestricted quantifiers, they use unrestricted quantification to translate sentences from natural languages. An exception is Geach, whose support of a notion of relative identity has as a consequence the irreducibility of restricted to unrestricted quantification. Unrestricted quantifiers have been interpreted in two ways. The first substitutional interpretation, which is largely discredited, takes a sentence like ‘Something is tall’ to be true if and only if there is a name, say ‘John’, which can be substituted in the argument place of the predicate ‘. . . is tall’, to yield a true subject–predicate sentence such as ‘John is tall’. The second dominant interpretation of the quantifiers is called objectual. Thus understood the sentence ‘Something is tall’ is true if and only if there is at least one object which is tall. See Objectual quantification; Substitutional quantification; Variable Quantifying-in: In some sentences involving quantifiers, the quantifier is said to be quantifying-in to a context. These are non-extensional contexts such as modal contexts (about possibility and necessity) or doxastic contexts (about belief). Thus, for example, the sentence ‘Everything red could have been blue’ can be paraphrased ‘For any object, if it is red, then it is possible that it is blue’. In


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this example, we have a modal context (it is possible that it is blue) which includes a pronoun which cross-refers to a quantified expression (‘everything’) outside the modal context. The quantifier, which is outside, is therefore said to be quantifying inside the context. In formal logical languages we express this point by saying that there is in the non-extensional context a variable which is bound by a quantifier that is outside that context. See Anaphora Quasi-realism: A form of anti-realism. In the realm of moral discourse this view has been developed by Blackburn. He holds, with the supporters of expressivism, that the main purpose of moral discourse is to express emotions and attitudes. It is not to make statements. The quasi-realist, however, acknowledges that ordinary moral discourse seems to be used to make claims which are true or false rather than being merely a way of conveying approval or disapproval. The quasi-realist intends to explain this phenomenon. He wants to show that moral discourse can seem to involve making claims about moral reality when, as a matter of fact, it provides a sophisticated way of expressing approval and disapproval. One of the greatest challenges for a quasi-realist is to provide a satisfactory answer to the Frege–Geach problem. See Non-cognitivism Further reading: Blackburn (1993) Quietism: The approach taken by those philosophers who aim to deflate metaphysical controversies, especially the debate between realism and anti-realism. Typically, quietists are happy to use the same vocabulary as realists. Thus, they will assert that entities such as stars would exist even though we had never been around, and that statements are true when they correspond to reality. However,

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quietists also add that they can make these assertions without thereby committing themselves to the substantive metaphysics of realism. Quine, W. V. O. (1908–2000): A very influential American philosopher, Quine spent most of his academic life at Harvard University. He made several ground-breaking contributions to the philosophy of language. He is particularly well known for his debunking of the analytic– synthetic distinction for his arguments in favour of the indeterminacy of translation, and his scepticism about de re modality. Further reading: Quine (1951), (1960) and (1969) Quotation: It involves the use of quotes to mention a word or expression. See Disquotation; Quote name; Use–mention distinction Quote name: The name of a word, an expression or a sentence obtained by putting that word, expression or sentence within quotes. ‘Rome’, ‘Tony Blair’, ‘snow is white’ are all quote names. ‘Rome’ names the name, not the city. Thus, it is true to say that ‘Rome’ has four letters, and that ‘snow is white’ is composed of three words. See Use–mention distinction

R Radical interpretation: A notion introduced by Davidson which bears a close relation to Quine’s radical translation. The radical interpreter provides an interpretation of the sentences uttered by other speakers without presupposing that they mean the same things by their words as the interpreter means by hers. The problem faced by the


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interpreter is that belief and meaning are interdependent. She cannot figure out what a person might mean by his words unless she knows what he believes, and she has no other access to his beliefs besides his verbal reports of what they are. The interpreter succeeds in providing an interpretation by deploying the principle of charity. She assumes that the individuals she interprets mostly hold beliefs which are true. That is, she takes belief to be constant, to be something she shares with those she interprets. The interpreter can presuppose that most of her beliefs and most of the beliefs held by the people she interprets are true because omniscient interpreters, whose beliefs are true, would also assume that they share most of their beliefs with the individuals whose speech they interpret. See Humanity, principle of Further reading: Davidson (1991), ch. 9 Radical translation: An idea introduced by Quine in the context of his arguments in favour of the indeterminacy of translation. Quine imagines an anthropologist encountering a group of people, who had been completely isolated up to that point. The anthropologist attempts to translate the native language from scratch, relying at the beginning exclusively on prompting the natives in various circumstances with expressions of their language to see whether they assent or not. So, the anthropologist might try out the expression ‘gavagai’ with the natives both when rabbits are present and when they are not, in order to see whether ‘gavagai’ means rabbit. Quine points out that even if natives only and always assent to ‘gavagai’ in the presence of rabbits, ‘gavagai’ might mean undetached rabbit part rather than rabbit. See Argument from above; Argument from below; Stimulus-meaning Further reading: Quine (1960)

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Ramsey sentences: These are existentially quantified sentences. They are the result of a method developed by F. P. Ramsey for producing explicit definitions while avoiding circularity. Thus, for instance, suppose that the definition of a state makes reference to other states whose definitions make reference to the first. In such an instance we would have a case of circularity. This can be avoided by substituting all the names for the other states in one’s definition with variables which are bound by the existential quantifier. For example, suppose one wishes to provide a definition of a mental state such as the desire to have a beer (let us call it M1 ). The definition will make a reference to other mental states. Thus, John is in state M1 (desires a beer) if and only if John is in state M2 (believes a beer is present) and in state M3 (believes that he can reach the beer), . . . , and in state Mi . The Ramsey sentence for this definition is: John is in state M1 (desires a beer) if and only if there is an x2 , there is an x3 , . . . and there is an xi , such that John has x2 and John has x3 and, . . . . John has xi , and (x2 , x3 , . . . xi ) are mental states. In logical notation this Ramsey sentence reads as follows: (∃x2 ) (∃x3 ) . . . (∃ xi ) [John has x2 and John has x3 and . . . John has xi , and M (x2 , x3 , . . . , xi ). Realism: A realist about a given area of discourse believes that talk about objects and properties in that area of discourse can be true because those objects and properties have objective, mind-independent existence. A scientific realist is typically also committed to the view that the objects of current scientific theories exists independently of us and actually have most of the properties we take them to have. See Anti-realism Further reading: Devitt (1991) Recognition transcendence See Verification transcendence


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Reference: The reference of an expression is what it stands for. Thus, the reference of a proper name or a definite description is the thing named or designated. Hence, the reference of ‘the Queen of England in 2004’ is a person, Elizabeth II. Frege uses the expression Bedeutung, which has been variously translated into English as reference, designation or meaning to indicate that for which a linguistic expression stands. Currently, two different theories of reference are widely debated: the description or cluster theory and the causal theory. According to the first, the reference of a name is secured by means of a description which uniquely identifies the referent. According to the second, the reference is secured by a causal link to the thing referred to. See Causal theory of reference; Description theory of reference; Inscrutability of reference; Semantic value; Sense Reference borrowing: This occurs when speakers use their words in order to borrow their references from the uses of those words made by other, generally more competent, speakers. Thus, even somebody who knows almost ¨ ¨ nothing about Kurt Godel can use the name ‘Godel’ and succeed in referring to him. In this instance, the speaker when using the name defers to the authority of others in order to have the reference fixed. Supporters of the cluster theory of reference rely on this phenomenon to explain how we can use names to refer to their bearers, even though we do not associate an individuating cluster of descriptions to each name. Supporters of the causal theory of reference also use the notion of reference borrowing in order to explain the dependence of uses of a name by later speakers on the use made by initial dubbers of the names. Supporters of the causal view explain reference borrowing in terms of a causal chain.

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Reflexivity: The relation a thing has with itself. See Equivalence relation Regimentation: It involves translating a piece of ordinary language into the canonical notation of a formal language, thus allowing the logical form of the piece of language under consideration to be made explicit. Relation: There are different sorts: ‘. . . is a brother of . . . ’ is an expression for a two-place (dyadic) relation; ‘. . . gives . . . to . . . ’ is an expression for a triadic relation. Relations can have any number of places. It is generally thought that in order for the relation to exist, its relata (the things it relates) must also exist. Some make exception for intentional relations such as believing or thinking, since it is possible to think about what does not exist. Others rely on the same facts to conclude that talk of thinking and believing does not express a genuine relation to what is believed or thought about. See Intentionality Relative identity: A notion that has been defended by Geach, who puts forward two distinct theses on this topic. First, he argues that it is not possible for any language to express the standard absolute notion of identity. Instead, he states that any claim that a is identical with b is in fact a shorthand for the claim that a is the same F as b where F is a sortal, such as ‘apple’ or ‘gold’. For Geach relative identity cannot be explained in terms of absolute identity. In his opinion the claim that a is the same F as b cannot be understood as saying that a is F and b is F, and a is identical with b. Second, Geach also claims that it is perfectly possible for a and b to be the same F, but also to be different Gs. Geach offers a variety of arguments for the truth of this second thesis, some of which presuppose the notion of a sortal, but some that do not.


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See Quantifier; Sortal Further reading: Noonan (1999) Representation: Words and pictures are representations because they represent something. Arguably, thoughts are also representations. There are different kinds of representations. Thus pictures, for example, represent by resembling that of which they are a picture. Linguistic representations do not resemble what they represent, instead they depend on conventions. Thus, it is in virtue of a convention that the English word ‘cat’ represents cats. Some philosophers attempt to explain these conventions in terms of associations between words and ideas in the mind. Thus, the word ‘cat’ would represent cats, because it is associated with the mental idea of a cat. Philosophers who adopt this approach take the notion of mental representation to be basic. See Indicator semantics; Teleosemantics Further reading: Crane (2003), ch. 1 Response-dependence: Intuitively, a property is said to be judgement- or response-dependent if and only if having that property is a matter of the judgements or responses issued by suitable subjects in suitable conditions. Thus, response-dependent properties do not exist independently of subjects’ responses or judgements. For example, one might hold that red is a response-dependent property, and claim that being red is simply a matter of looking red to standard observers in standard conditions. As a matter of contrast one might claim that being square is responseindependent because it is not true that to be square is nothing over and above being judged to be square by suitable subjects in suitable conditions. These intuitive notions have been made precise by Wright by means of the idea of provisional equations. Wright uses these equations to clarify the notion of a judgement-dependent predicate.

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The equation for the predicate ‘red’ would state that under ideal conditions, the predicate ‘ . . . is red’ co-varies with the predicate ‘a suitable subject S judges . . . to be red’. In other words, in those conditions, whenever something is red, S would judge it to be red, and vice versa. The mere existence of a co-variation between being red and being judged to be red does not settle whether the subjects’ judgements infallibly track mind-independent red, or – on the contrary – the judgements themselves constitute what being red is. For this reason, Wright claims that a predicate is judgement-dependent if and only if its provisional equation satisfies four conditions. (1) The a-prioricity condition requires that the equation must be true a priori. (2) The substantiality condition requires that the ideal conditions are not specified in a trivial way. (3) The independence condition requires that it must be possible in each case to ascertain whether the ideal conditions obtain independently of the truth of any attributions of the predicate whose status as response-dependent is under consideration. (4) The extremal condition requires that there is no better account for why the covariance presented by the provisional equation obtains than the hypothesis that the judgements in question determine the extension of the relevant predicate rather than merely reflect its pre-determined extension. See Missing-explanation argument Further reading: Wright (1992), Appendix to ch. 3 Restricted quantification See Quantification Rigid designator: An expression that refers to the same entity in all possible worlds in which that entity exists, and has no reference otherwise. Proper names such as ‘Tony Blair’, ‘London’, ‘Ben Nevis’ are often considered examples of rigid designators. They are contrasted with


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non-rigid designators of which many common definite descriptions are examples. Thus, ‘the Prime Minister of the UK in 2006’ is not rigid because it could have referred to Gordon Brown. ‘Gordon Brown’ would instead be rigid because it always refers to him or to nothing if he did not exist. Some definite descriptions, however, are rigid. ‘The sum of 2 + 2’ is a rigid definite description since it refers to the number 4 in all possible circumstances. ‘The actual winner of the Tour de France in 2004’ is also rigid since it refers to Lance Armstrong in all possible worlds in which he exists. Kripke makes a distinction between de jure and de facto rigid designators. The first are those designators that are stipulated to refer to a single object, Kripke thinks proper names are like this. De facto rigid designators, on the other hand, are those definite descriptions which refer only to one thing because in every possible world the same thing is the one thing which satisfies the description. See Causal theory of reference; Cluster theory of reference; Description theory of reference; Direct reference; Reference Further reading: Kripke (1980) Rigidifying expression: An expression which, when used to qualify a non-rigid designator such as a definite description, transforms it into a rigid one. ‘Actual’ is one such rigidifying expression. For example, ‘the President of the United States in 2005’ refers to George Bush, but it could have referred to somebody else had the outcome of the 2004 presidential elections been different. On the other hand, ‘the actual President of the United States in 2005’ is a rigid designator, if Bush is the actual President in 2005, nobody else could be the actual President in 2005. Rigidity: The semantic property of being a rigid designator.

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Rorty, Richard (1931–): He is an American philosopher who has held posts at Princeton University and at the University of Virginia. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980) Rorty argued that philosophy since the early modern period has been mired by a picture of the mind as containing representations that mirror reality. Rorty describes himself as a supporter of pragmatism; he also defends deflationism about truth. He has written many articles on topics ranging from politics and deconstruction, to Davidson’s views on truth and epistemology. Rule: A norm which is usually taken to be codified by means of an explicit formulation. Lewis Carroll offered a neat argument why not all norms can take the form of explicitly formulated rules. Consider the following argument, which has the form of modus ponens: 1. If today is Sunday, tomorrow is Monday; 2. Today is Sunday. Therefore, 3. tomorrow is Monday. Carroll wants us to imagine somebody who accepts 1 and 2 but rejects 3. One might try to convince this person by stating the following rule: 4. If ‘if P then Q’ and ‘P’ are true, then ‘Q’ is also true. The interlocutor, however, can accept 4 as well as 1 and 2, and still reject 3, and the addition of further rules to the premises will be of no help in getting him to accept the conclusion. What is required is the acceptance of a rule or norm of inference which cannot itself take the form of a premise of the argument. Rule-following: This issue was first discussed by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations (1953) and subsequently revived by Kripke inWittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982). Wittgenstein made several important remarks about rules and connected these to his private language argument. First, Wittgenstein points out that following or obeying a rule is different from acting in a way that accords with it. He also notes that to think that


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one is following a rule is not the same as following it, and that the two notions should not be allowed to collapse into one other. Finally, Wittgenstein shows that when trying to elucidate the idea of following or obeying a rule we are tempted by two equally unsatisfactory accounts. The first account would explain rule-following in terms of offering an interpretation of the rule. The account fails, as Wittgenstein shows, because it generates an infinite regress. In order to interpret the rule, we need an interpretation of how to interpret the interpretation, and a further interpretation to interpret that interpretation, and so forth ad infinitum. The second account attempts to explain rule-following in terms of regularities of behaviour. This account also fails because it cannot ground the distinction between behaviour that accords with the rule and behaviour that follows it. Any account in terms of regularity might explain what the person will do but not what it ought to do, and it is the second normative notion that is required by any satisfactory account of rule-following. See Dispositionalism; Meaning scepticism; Normativity of meaning Further reading: McDowell (1998), ch. 11 Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970): A British philosopher and committed pacifist, Russell was educated at Cambridge University where he subsequently lectured. His main contributions to the philosophy of language are his account of definite descriptions, his version of the correspondence theory of truth, and some features of his account of thought that has inspired others to develop the notion of Russellian thoughts. He is perhaps most famous for his contributions to mathematical logic, and in particular for his formulation of the paradox of the class whose members are all the classes which do not have themselves as a member, and for his solution to this paradox by means of his theory of types.

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Russell’s principle: The principle attributed by Evans to Russell according to which ‘in order to be thinking about an object . . . one must know which object it is one is thinking about’. For Evans, Russell took his principle to imply that one must be able to distinguish that object from all other objects. Further reading: Evans (1982) Russellian proposition See Singular proposition Russellian singular term See Logically proper name Russellian thought: A thought is said to be Russellian if and only if it has, as one of its constituents, the object it is about. Thus, Russellian thoughts would be a kind of singular or object-involving thought since their existence depends on the existence of the objects the thoughts purport to be about. These thoughts are called ‘Russellian’ because sentences used to express their contents involve what Evans has labelled a ‘Russellian singular term’, namely a logically proper name which is a singular term whose meaning depends on it having a reference. There is disagreement even among supporters of the existence of singular thoughts as to whether Russell’s account of their constituents is correct. See Demonstrative thought; Descriptive thought; singular proposition

S Salva veritate: A Latin expression meaning ‘saving the truth’. Two expression are said to be intersubstitutable salva veritate when one can be substituted for the other


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in the context of a given sentence without changing the truth or falsity of that sentence. See Extensional context Satisfaction: A notion developed by Tarski as part of his theory of truth. See truth, semantic theory of Satisfaction condition See Truth, semantic theory of Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913): A Swiss linguist, the forefather of structuralism, who famously held that the meaning (signified) of a word (signifier) is determined by the relations between that word and other parts of language, rather than by connections to extra-linguistic reality. There are two kinds of intra-linguistic relations: syntagmatic and paradigmatic. Syntagmatic relations hold between a word and other words with which it can be conjoined in a syntactically correct string (syntagm). For instance, ‘a’ and ‘dog’ can form the syntagm ‘a dog’ and thus are syntagmatically related. Paradigmatic relations hold between words which can be inter-substituted in strings without damaging their syntactical correctness. For instance, ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ are thus related. He also drew a distinction between a rule-governed abstract linguistic system (langue) and its manifestation in the behaviour of actual speakers of the language (parole). This distinction bears significant similarities to Chomsky’s distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic performance. Saussure’s most influential work, the Cours de linguistique générale (1916), was published after his death and consists mainly of amalgamated lecture notes taken by his students. Further reading: Devitt and Sterelny (1999), ch. 13. Saying/showing: A distinction that plays an important role in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1922). In that book

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Wittgenstein appears to claim that there are features of reality and of language that show themselves but cannot be said. Any attempt to put them into words is destined to end up as nonsense. See Elucidation; Meaning, picture theory of Scepticism about meaning See Meaning scepticism Scope: Functions, operators and quantifiers when used in complex expressions have a scope which is the part of the expression to which they apply. Thus, in (5 + 3) − 4, the whole expression is within the scope of the subtraction, whilst addition has a narrower scope which is indicated by the brackets. Similarly, in the sentence ‘Not everybody smokes’, the negation has a wider scope than the universal quantifier. Secondary quality: A perceptible property of things, like colour or texture, which is in some sense relative to a perceiver. John Locke thought of secondary qualities as powers or dispositions of things to cause in us a certain experience. More recently, secondary qualities have been thought to be response-dependent. Thus, the property of being red is defined in terms of looking read to standard perceivers in standard circumstances. See Primary quality; Response-dependence Sellars, Wilfrid (1912–89): He was an American philosopher who held posts at the University of Minnesota and the University of Pittsburgh. His most significant contribution to philosophy has been his sustained attack on the myth of the given. Sellars provided an account of meaning in terms of functional classification and for this reason he has been seen as one of the forefathers of inferentialism.


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Semantic anti-realism: A view first formulated by Dummett in terms of its opposition to semantic realism. A semantic anti-realist about any given area of discourse claims that sentences in that area of discourse should not be seen as being made true or false by verification-transcendent truth conditions, which is to say conditions whose obtaining or failure to obtain might be undetectable by us. Dummett has provided several arguments against semantic realism and in support of anti-realism. These include the acquisition argument and the manifestation argument. Further reading: Wright (1993) Semantic ascent: A common move in recent analytic philosophy. It involves an ascent to language. It is a shift away from using certain terms to talk about the terms themselves. Thus, semantic ascent is involved when disputes about ethics, for example, are reformulated as disputes about the function and truth conditions of ethical discourse. Semantic externalism See Externalism Semantic irrealism See Meaning irrealism Semantic naturalism: The view that semantic properties such as meaning are instantiated in virtue of the instantiation of natural properties expressible in the vocabulary of the natural sciences. Supporters of the view believe that semantic properties are therefore ultimately explainable in naturalistic terms. They might, for example, attempt to explain them in terms of the causal relations between bits of reality and mental states. See Indicator semantics

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Semantic realism: A supporter of semantic realism about a given area of discourse holds that sentences in that area of discourse have verification-transcendent truth conditions; that is to say, truth conditions whose obtaining can outstrip our ability to recognise or verify them. Semantic realism is opposed by supporters of semantic anti-realism. Dummett’s acquisition argument and manifestation argument are intended as global arguments against semantic realism. Further reading: Wright (1993) Semantic value: The semantic value of an expression, a name, predicate or sentence, is the contribution that expression makes to the determination of the truth or falsity of the (possibly complex) sentences of which that expression is a part. Thus, for example, the semantic value of a name is the thing named, that of a sentence is its truth-value (true or false). The semantic value of a predicate has been thought by Frege to be a concept, a property or a relation; others have taken it to be its extension. See Bedeutung; Reference Semantics: In recent years semantics has come to mean the study of formal theories of meaning rather than simply the study of the semantic (world-language) properties of some expression. Paradigmatically, a formal semantics for a fragment of a natural language consists first in assignments of semantic values to various subsentential portions of the language, such as objects to names and extensions to predicates, and truth functions to various operators. Second, the semantic theory provides interpretations for complex sentences relative to a time, possible worlds and index. The notion of an index is crucial to the interpretation of sentences including indexical terms, whose reference is not fixed independently of a context. See pragmatics


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Semantics, assertibility conditions: It is Dummett who first elaborated an account of meaning in terms of the assertibility conditions associated with statements or sentences. Roughly speaking, the meaning of a statement is what is known by the person who understands it. Dummett contends that what that person would have knowledge of is the conditions that warrant asserting that statement; in other words, its assertibility conditions. See Assertibility conditions; Meaning, theories of Further reading: Dummett (1996), chs 1–6; Wright (1993) Semantics, conceptual role: A theory that explains the contents of mental states in terms of their conceptual connections to other mental states. More specifically, the contents thus attributed to mental states are a matter of the conceptual roles played by those states in the whole economy of mental states. Conceptual roles are often explained inferentially in terms of the roles played by the states in reasoning, their connections to perceptual inputs and behavioural outputs. The content thus attributed typically is understood as a narrow content. See Semantics, inferentialist Semantics, inferentialist: A theory that explains the meaning of a sentence or utterance in terms of its inferential connections. Thus, the meaning of ‘Leo is a mammal’ is understood in terms of its entailing ‘Leo is an animal’, being incompatible with ‘Leo is a plant’, and being entailed by ‘Leo is a lion’. This is a version of meaning holism because the meaning of each sentence is determined by its connections to the meanings of other sentences. Semantics, possible-world: First elaborated by Kripke, possible-world semantics provides a way of assigning truth conditions to, and understanding the logical relations

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between, sentences expressing counterfactuals or involving various modalities. Thus, for instance, necessary truths are interpreted as being true in all possible worlds. Further reading: Divers (2002) Semantics, situational: A formal semantics that deploys the notion of a situation which is a partial representation of the universe. Further reading: Barwise and Perry (1983) Semantics, truth-conditional: Includes all formal theories of the meanings of linguistic sentences or utterances in terms of their truth conditions. The basic idea is that if a person knows that the Italian sentence ‘la neve e` bianca’ is true if and only if snow is white, one knows what that sentence means. Davidson developed this idea in detail. He argued that any adequate formal theory of meaning for a natural language such as English or Italian should generate T-sentences for each sentence of the target language as theorems. Thus, an adequate theory of meaning for Italian formulated in English should have as theorems, T-sentences such ‘“la neve e` bianca” is true if and only if snow is white’, ‘“l’erba e` verde” is true if and only if grass is green’, and so forth for each sentence in the language. It has been objected that Davidson’s adequacy requirement is too lax. It would seem possible to have a theory which generates T-sentences which are all true but which, intuitively, do not seem to capture the meanings of the relevant sentences. Thus, for example, the following T-sentences are all true: ‘“la neve e` bianca” is true if and only if snow is white’; ‘“la neve e` bianca” is true if and only if snow is white and 2 + 2 = 4’; ‘“la neve e` bianca” is true if and only if grass is green’. Yet they cannot all be giving the meaning of the Italian sentence. These different sentences are all true because any sentence of the


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form ‘P if and only if Q’ is true provided P and Q are both true or both false. In this instance the biconditional T-sentences are equivalent because it is true that snow is white, that grass is green, and that snow is white and 2 + 2 = 4. Davidson has replied to this objection by arguing that in his view the T-sentences must be generated by a recursive theory. As a result it generates T-sentences in which parts of sentences such as the noun ‘neve’ (‘snow’) make the same contribution to the meanings of the sentences in which it occurs. Thus the theory respects the principle of the compositionality of language, and rules out the two rogue T-sentences above. Davidson also argues that a theory of meaning as a theory of truth is an empirical theory, evidence for which must be found when engaged in the project of radical interpretation. See Convention T Further reading: Davidson (1991), chs 1–5 Semiology See Semiotics Semiotics: The most general science of signs was called ‘semeiotic’ by Peirce. For Peirce, signs are one kind of representation, namely those whose interpretant is a mental cognition. Contemporary semiotics is best seen as a development of Saussure’s linguistics rather than Peirce’s semeiotics. Sense (Sinn): A notion introduced by Frege to solve a puzzle about identity statements. He offered several, not exactly equivalent, accounts of the notion of sense. About proper names he writes that the sense is the mode of presentation of the thing named. For Frege, all kinds of expressions have a sense as well as a reference. Thus, more generally, he characterises the sense of an expression as what determines the reference of that expression. Further, the

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sense of an expression is identified as that expression’s contribution to the cognitive content of the sentences of which the expression is a part. Thus, Frege writes that the sense of a sentence is a thought, and that such sense determines the reference of the sentence, which is its truthvalue (the true or the false). For Frege, expressions might have a sense without a reference. An example is provided by names such as ‘Pegasus’. Since Pegasus does not exist, this name lacks a referent. However, sentences in which the name occurs still have content, they express thoughts, although they lack a truth-value. Hence, the name must have a sense which contributes to these thoughts. If the sense of a proper name is understood as the mode of presentation of the thing named, it is hard to see, as Evans pointed out, how names could have a sense while lacking a reference. If a thing does not exist, there could not be a mode of presentation of that thing either. See Frege’s puzzles; Semantic value Further reading: Frege (1892a) Sentence: A complex linguistic expression typically constituted by, at least, either a singular term and a predicate or a quantified expression and a verb. It is the smallest unit of speech by means of which it is possible to perform a speech act. Sentence meaning See Linguistic meaning; Word meaning Sign See Semiotics Signified: The meaning of a linguistic expression. See Saussure, Ferdinand de Signifier: Any word or linguistic expression. See Saussure, Ferdinand de


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Singular proposition: A singular proposition is a proposition whose identity is a function of the object it concerns, so that the proposition exists only if the object does. In its simplest Russellian version a singular proposition has an actual object as a constituent. The proposition would thus be about that object in virtue of having it as one of its constituents. It is a matter of dispute, over and beyond the dispute of whether propositions exist, whether there are any singular propositions. Those who believe in their existence take them to be expressed by sentences such as ‘Mount Everest is over 8,000 metres high’, ‘Tony Blair is a man’, and ‘He [while pointing to Bob] is British’. They contrast these propositions with those expressed by sentences such ‘Whales are mammals’, which are about a class of things rather than a particular one, and sentences such as ‘The Prime Minister of the UK in 2004 was a man’ which express propositions about particulars, but where the particular is singled out by means of a description. The sentence ‘Tony Blair is a man’ is true in any actual or counterfactual situation if and only if in that situation Tony Blair exists and he is a man. The sentence ‘The Prime Minister of the UK in 2004 was a man’ is true in any actual or counterfactual situation if and only if in that situation the UK had one and only one Prime Minister in 2004 and that person, whoever it might be, was a man. So the two sentences can plausibly be said to express different propositions, and the proposition expressed by the second is not about the same person in all possible circumstances, and thus cannot be said to involve one specific person. See Indexical; Rigid designator; Sense; Singular thought; Structured proposition; Thought Further reading: Fitch (2002) Singular term: An expression that refers to one object and is translated into logic as a constant. Kripke takes ordinary

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names like ‘London’ or ‘David Beckham’ as singular terms. Russell, instead, thought of them as abbreviations of definite descriptions, which are in his view quantified expressions. Singular thought: A thought which is object-involving in the sense that the thought’s existence depends on the existence of the object it is about. Thus, for example, the sentence ‘That [while pointing to Fido] is a dog’ could be said to express a singular thought about Fido. The thought would exist only if Fido exists, so that if one were hallucinating Fido’s existence, and uttered the words ‘That is a dog’, these words would express no thought at all. The view that at least some thoughts are singular is not universally accepted. There is also a certain amount of variation in the terminology used by those discussing these topics. Thus, the expression ‘singular proposition’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘singular thought’ since in their Fregean conception thoughts, which are the senses of declarative sentences, are basically the same as propositions. Also, it is not uncommon to see singular thoughts referred to as Russellian thoughts, although not all supporters of singular thoughts agree with Russell in taking the object itself to be a constituent of the thought. Finally, a few have used the expression ‘singular thought’ simply to mean the thought expressed by a proposition containing a singular term. See Demonstrative thought; Descriptive thought; Russell’s principle Further reading: Evans (1982) Sinn See Sense Sorites paradox: Also known as the heap paradox. It was first formulated by Eubulides of Miletus a contemporary of


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Aristotle (circa 350 BCE). It is obvious that one grain of sand is not a heap, and it seems true that adding one grain to something which is not a heap does not turn it into a heap. However, by repeated applications of this principle we are led paradoxically to conclude that even one million grains of sand do not make a heap. The same paradoxical results can be obtained when thinking about subtracting one grain of sand from a heap; we are forced to conclude that even one grain of sand alone is a heap. The root of this paradox is the vagueness of the term heap. Sortal: A term like apple or book which supplies a criterion of identity or identification for the individuals that fall under it. It is a matter of dispute whether mass terms count as sortals or if only count terms are to be included. Mass terms do supply criteria of identification, but do not supply criteria of individuation, and that is why some philosophers do not consider them to be sortals. Further reading: Lowe (1999) Soundness: This notion has two separate senses: (1) In the first sense, it is arguments that are said to be sound or unsound. An argument is sound if and only if it is valid and has true premises. So all sound arguments are valid, but not all valid arguments are sound, because some valid arguments have at least some false premises. (2) In the second sense, it is formal systems that are said to be sound or unsound. A formal system is sound if and only if only valid arguments are provable in it. Otherwise, the formal system is unsound. A formal system, however, can be sound without being complete. That is to say, there might be valid arguments for which no proof can be provided in the system. See Completeness; Validity

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Speaker meaning: A notion used by Grice to refer to what a speaker means by his or her words in a specific utterance, which is to say what the speaker intends to convey by means of the utterance. On many occasions the speaker meaning and the linguistic meaning of the expression used can be quite different. For instance, I may sarcastically utter the words ‘that’s great’ to mean quite the opposite. Also, out of ignorance or due to a temporary lapse, I may use a word to mean something when its linguistic meaning is quite different. Grice analyses speaker meaning in terms of the speaker’s intention to produce a certain effect in his or her audience by his or her utterance, her intention that the first intention is recognised by the audience, and that this recognition plays a role in the explanation of why the effect was produced. Typically, the effect that the speaker intends to produce in the audience is coming to believe something, or doing something. Thus, for example, by uttering the words ‘The book belongs to John’ I mean that the book in question belongs to John if and only if in uttering those words I intend to produce in my audience the belief that the book belongs to John, I also intend my audience to recognise that that is my intention in making that utterance, and finally I intend that the audience’s recognition of my intention plays a part in the explanation of why they produce the belief in question. Grice did not assume that speakers are conscious of these complex intentions. Instead, he took these intentions to be tacit. There are, however, counterexamples to this account of speaker meaning. For instance, John Searle proposes the case of an American captured by Italian soldiers during the Second World War who tries to pass off as a German by uttering aloud in German a line of poetry from Goethe in which the poet asks the audience whether they know the land where the lemon blooms. By his utterance, the American intends


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the Italians to believe he is German, he intends them to recognise his intention and this recognition plays a part in the explanation why they come to believe he is German. Yet, arguably, he does not mean by his words that he is German. See Meaning, communicative-intention theory of; Natural meaning; Non-natural meaning Speech act: Warning, apologising, baptising, sentencing, ordering, quoting and asserting are among the things that can be done with words. These are all called speech acts. ‘Speech’ is here understood in a broad sense to cover every employment of language, including writing and signing (in sign language). Similarly, talk of uttering words and sentences is intended also to cover cases in which the words or sentences are either signed or written down. There is no simple one-to-one correlation between speech acts and sentences. The same sentence, like ‘the gate is open’, can be used to make a statement or issue a warning, and these are speech acts of different kinds. Similarly, the same speech act can be performed by uttering different sentences. For instance, it is possible to make an apology either by saying ‘I apologise’ or ‘I am sorry’. Austin classified speech acts into locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. See Illocutionary acts; Locutionary act; Perlocutionary act Further reading: Austin (1975) Statement: This notion is closely related to that of assertion. It is notoriously ambiguous. Sometimes ‘statement’ is used to mean what is stated or asserted, typically a propositional content expressed by an indicative sentence. On other occasions, ‘statement’ is used to refer to the speech act itself. Thus, when two people say the same thing, they

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have in the first sense of the term made the same statement, but in the second sense what we have are two different statements with the same content. Stimulus-meaning: A notion introduced by Quine. The stimulus-meaning of an expression is the ordered pair consisting first of all of the sensory stimulations that prompt native speakers to assent to an expression, and second of the sensory stimulations that prompt native dissent from the expression. Hence, for example, the stimulus-meaning of ‘there is a blue flower here’ consists of an order pair whose first member is the sensory stimulations as of a blue flower, and whose second member is sensory stimulations as of a yellow flower, or a rabbit, or a person, and so forth. For Quine, while the notion of stimulus-meaning is scientifically respectable, the notion of meaning is not. Further, for Quine since meaning is not determinate by stimulus-meaning, it is indeterminate. Hence, Quine is a supporter of meaning irrealism. See Indeterminacy of translation; Inscrutability of reference Strawson, P. F. (1919–2006): A British philosopher at Oxford University, Strawson is perhaps best known for his work on Kant and descriptive metaphysics. He was a supporter of ordinary language philosophy, and developed an alternative to Russell’s account of definite descriptions based on the notion of a logical presupposition. For Strawson, an assertion of the King of France is bald is neither true nor false since it presupposes (but does not state) falsely that there is one King of France. Further reading: Strawson (1950) Strengthened liar paradox See Liar paradox


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Structuralism: This label covers a broad range of views in anthropology and continental philosophy as well as linguistics. It originates in Saussure’s account of language in terms of its internal relations. Saussure offered a view of language as a formal structure which can be understood in terms of relations between elements in the structure, without any need to establish referential relations between the structure and anything outside. Structuralists apply this methodological approach to all meaningful practices, institutions, rituals and systems. Structured proposition: According to this view, propositions are complex entities that have parts. Supporters of the view trace its lineage to Russell. There are different versions of the view, but typically its supporters argue that the parts of a structured proposition are the semantic values of words or phrases occurring in the sentence expressing the proposition. Thus, for example, the structured proposition expressed by the sentence ‘John shakes Fred’s hand’ has as parts John, Fred’s hand and the relation of shaking. If propositions are structured, the propositions expressed respectively by the sentences ‘all triangles have three sides’ and ‘all squares have four sides’ are different because, among other things, one has the property of being a triangle as one of its parts and the other does not. Hence, this account avoids one of the problems besetting the view that propositions are sets of possible worlds, since it is capable of explaining how logically equivalent sentences (i.e., sentences which are true at exactly the same possible world) can nevertheless express different propositions. Supporters of direct reference have used the notion of a structured proposition to characterise a directly referential expression as one that only contributes its referent to the structured proposition expressed by the sentence of which it is a part.

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Subject: This term has two distinct meanings: (1) In some instances it is used as a synonym of ‘agent’. (2) Elsewhere it indicates a distinct grammatical category. The subject in a sentence is the expression which refers to the object or objects the sentence is about. Subjunctive conditional: Conditionals such as ‘If the president were to reduce the level of taxation, the country would be bankrupt in no time at all’. All of these conditionals have the auxiliary verb ‘would’ in the consequent. Some of these conditionals involve an antecedent which is known or conceded to be false. These are known as counterfactuals. Subjective conditionals are contrasted with indicative conditionals. Substantival term: An expression introduced by Geach as a label for those general terms for which ‘the same’ gives a criterion of identity. Thus, ‘cat’ is a substantival term because the expression ‘the same cat’ supplies a criterion of identity. Names like ‘red thing’ are not substantival. ‘The same red thing’ supplies no criterion of identity. Imagine I have a red jumper, it is unclear how many red things I have. Is one of its sleeves a red thing? Is the thread used to stitch it another? See Relative identity Substitutional quantification: One of two interpretations of the quantifiers. According to this interpretation, a sentence like ‘something is red’ is true if and only if there is a name, say ‘John’, which can be substituted in the argument place of the predicate ‘. . . is red’, to yield a true subject – predicate sentence such as ‘John is red’. A universally quantified sentence such as ‘everything is red’ is true if and only if for each and every name the sentence


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that results by substituting that name in the argument place of the predicate ‘. . . is red’ yields a true sentence. Hence, quantified sentences are treated as shorthand for long (perhaps infinitely so) sentences without quantifiers. The sentence ‘everything is red’ is interpreted as shorthand for the sentence ‘a is red, and b is red, . . . , and n is red, . . . ’ where ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘n’, and so forth are the names of each thing there is. The sentence ‘something is red’ is taken as shorthand for the sentence ‘either a is red, or b is red, . . . , or n is red, . . . ’. This interpretation of the quantifiers is largely discredited because of the problem of the nameless. There are more things than there are names for them, so there are bound to be things without a name. The long sentences without quantifiers cannot refer to them; hence, they are not about everything. The quantified sentences, on the other hand, are meant to cover these nameless things as well. See Objectual quantification; Quantification Sufficient condition: Any condition which is sufficient for the obtaining of something else. Thus, for example, being a woman is a sufficient condition for being a human being. That is, in order to be human it is enough or sufficient that one is a woman. Sufficient conditions, however, might not be necessary. Thus, it is not necessary to be a woman in order to be a human being since men are also human beings. Sufficient and necessary conditions are expressed by means of conditionals. Thus, we can state that being a woman is sufficient for being a human by saying: if something is a woman, then it is a human being. See Necessary condition Superassertibility: A statement is said to be superassertible if and only if it is warranted, and its warrant would survive no matter how closely we scrutinise its pedigree and how

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much further information we acquire. Thus, superassertibility is a stable property because a statement that has it cannot lose it. The notion was developed by Wright as a plausible candidate for a notion of truth as an epistemic notion. See Truth, epistemic theories of Further reading: Wright(1992), ch. 2 Supervaluation: A valuation is an assignment of a truth-value to a sentence or of an extension to a predicate. A supervaluation is a quantification over valuations. Thus, a supervaluation is the assignment of truth (or super-truth) to a sentence if and only if the sentence is true in all valuations, false (or super-false) if and only if the sentence is false in all valuations, and neither true nor false in all other cases. Further reading: Williamson (1996), ch. 5 Supervenience: There are various notions of supervenience (weak, strong, global and local), but the basic idea is that some facts or properties supervene on other facts or properties (base) if and only if there cannot be any difference in the supervenient facts unless there is a difference in the base facts. Thus, if moral facts are supervenient upon physical facts, two acts could not differ morally, unless there is also some physical difference in the surrounding circumstances. Symbol: In semiotics, a symbol is a sign that represents what it stands for by being connected to it by means of a conventional relation. Words are the paradigmatic example of symbols. Syncategorema: A term used by medieval logicians to refer to expressions that have no meaning by themselves but


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only acquire a meaning when they are linked to other expressions. Synonymy: Two expressions are synonymous if and only if they have the same meaning. Quine has argued in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1951) that both this notion and the notion of an analytic statement stand on an unsound footing. These days few would adopt Quine’s stark position. Syntax: Contrasted with semantics and pragmatics, syntax concerns the formal and grammatical features of linguistic structures. Synthetic: A statement, claim or sentence which is true (false) partly in virtue of how things are. For instance, ‘there is a cat on the mat’ is, if true, a synthetic truth. Synthetic truths are opposed to analytic truths whose truth depends only on the meanings of the words. Until recently, it was not uncommon for philosophers to assume that all and only analytic truths were necessary, and also that all and only analytic truths were knowable a priori. See Synthetic a priori Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 4 Synthetic a priori : Claims, statements or sentences which are true or false not merely in virtue of the meanings of the words, and yet are knowable a priori. Kant believed in the existence of such claims partly because he had a very narrow understanding of the notion of an analytic truth. The notion, or something like it, has been revived by Kripke. In his view the statement ‘S is a metre long’, where S names the standard metre, is a contingent truth which is knowable a priori. It is contingent truth because that very object S might not have been one metre in length,

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and yet since it is the standard metre, we do not need to measure it to know its length. Kripke’s notion of the synthetic a priori is significantly different from what Kant had in mind. See Contingency Systematically misleading expressions: In his paper ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’ (1932) Gilbert Ryle argued that many ordinary linguistic expressions are systematically misleading about their logical form. Thus the expression ‘the thought of going to hospital’ misleadingly appears to refer to an object when it is appears in the sentence ‘Jones hates the thought of going to hospital’. Misleading formulations can be substituted by paraphrases of the original sentence that are not equally liable to mislead. Systematicity: A feature which is often attributed to linguistic understanding. See Compositionality; Language of thought

T T-schema: The schema first used by Alfred Tarski to formulate his convention T. The schema is: S is True in language L if and only if p. There are different accounts of what can be put in place of the place-holders S and p depending on whether the schema is thought to apply directly to sentences of a language or propositions. If sentences, then the place of p is to be occupied by a sentence, and that of S by a structural description or a quote name of that sentence. If propositions, what replaces S is the name of the proposition that is expressed by the sentence that replaces p. The following are instances of T-schemes: ‘La


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neve e` bianca’ is True in Italian if and only if snow is white; ‘Snow is white’ is True in English if and only if snow is white; or given the second account: The proposition that snow is white is True if and only if snow is white. Tarski claimed that any materially adequate theory of truth should have all the instances of the T-schema as theorems. This schema has also been used by Davidson to develop a theory of meaning as a theory of truth. See Semantics, truth-conditional; Truth, semantic theory of T-sentence: Instances of the T-schema. See Convention T Tacit knowledge: Some philosophers, such as Dummett, have invoked this notion to explain the relation that holds between competent speakers of a language and a theory of meaning, consisting of axioms and theorems for that language. Speakers are said to know these axioms and theorems, although their knowledge of them is tacit because they might not be able to formulate them or even recognise them as axioms or theorems when presented with them. Evans has argued that such knowledge that speakers are credited with cannot be taken as a genuine propositional attitude because it does not interact in the appropriate way with other propositional attitudes held by speakers. Instead, Evans proposed a dispositional account. See Semantics, truth-conditional Further reading: Miller (1999) Tarski, Alfred (1901–83): A Polish logician whose permanent contribution to philosophy is his formal definition of the semantic concept of truth. See Truth, Semantic theory of

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Tautology: A logical truth in propositional logic, such as either Cardiff is in Wales or Cardiff is not in Wales. This sentence can be symbolised in propositional logic as ‘P or not-P’ which is a logical truth because it is true no matter what is actually the case in the world. Teleosemantics: One kind of reductive naturalistic account of the semantics of mental representations. Reductive naturalistic accounts aim to explain the meanings of mental states by showing that they are nothing over and above some combination of non-normative states or properties of the organism which can be accounted for in scientific terms. The basic idea behind the teleosemantic approach is to explain the content of some of the most basic mental states, typically the most basic desires for food, water or shelter in terms of biological functions. Supporters of the view claim that at least some mental states have biological purposes (teleology), which consist in bringing about situations that enhance the survival of the organism. They also claim that these situations give the contents or meanings of these mental states. Thus, the state whose biological function is to bring about that one has water is understood as a desire whose content is that one wants water. This approach has some distinctive advantages over some of its rivals because arguably it avoids both the misrepresentation problem, since it allows for the possibility of error and the disjunction problem. It does, however, face some serious difficulties. First, its supporters need to offer a different kind of account of the contents of more sophisticated desires that appear to have no evolutionary purpose, such as the desire to buy a Prada bag. Typically, they will account for these sophisticated desires by building on the content of basic desires. Second, the theory rules out the possibility of minds that have not evolved; yet it seems to be possible, albeit extremely unlikely, that


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a mind might emerge suddenly by chance. Third, supporters of the view need to provide substantial evidence for their claim that the contents of desires are explained in terms of the biological purposes of the desires themselves. This claim requires evidence in support because it goes beyond stating only that at least some of our desires have evolutionary origins, or even that some desires have evolutionary purposes, since it states that these alleged purposes explain the contents of the desires. See Indicator semantics Further reading: Neander (2004) Tense: Tensed expressions such as the verbs ‘was’ or ‘will laugh’ are used to indicate time. There are structural parallels between the logic of tense and that of modality. There are also similarities between tensed sentences and sentences containing indexicals. See De se attribution Further reading: Galton (2003) Term: A subsentential expression. Before modern logic was developed it was thought of as the primary logical unit. Tertium non datur, principle of: The logical principle that there is no third truth-value besides truth and falsity. Some systems of logic reject this principle and have other truth-values, such as indeterminate or neither true nor false. See Excluded middle, law of Thought: For Frege, a thought is the objective content that we grasp when thinking. Thoughts, in Frege’s view, are not psychological entities since they exist independently of our ability to think them. Further, thoughts are public so that different individuals can literally have the same

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thought, rather than having thoughts which are only exactly alike. Thus, for Frege a thought is a proposition. A thought, so understood, is the sense of a declarative sentence and has as its constituents the senses, or modes of presentation, of the logical parts of that sentence. An alternative to Frege’s theory can be found in Russell’s work. Russell takes at least some propositions, with which Fregean thoughts have been identified, to have objects and properties (rather than their modes of presentation) as their constituents. These are known as singular propositions. It has been argued by John McDowell that it is possible to wed a Fregean theory of thought as having modes of presentation as its constituents with the view that some thoughts are singular or object-involving. McDowell claims that some senses or modes of presentation (Fregean thought-constituents) are object involving since the singular terms, whose senses they are, have no semantic value if the objects they purport to refer to do not exist. He thus rejects the idea that these singular terms could have genuine senses when they lack a referent. See Descriptive thought; Demonstrative thought; Russellian thought; Singular thought Token: The type–token distinction was introduced by Peirce. It is a distinction between sorts of things (types) and their instances (tokens). The sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’ consists of six word tokens and five word types (because it includes two tokens of the type ‘the’). Tone: A term attributed to Frege by Dummett used to refer to any feature of the meaning of an expression that makes no difference to the truth or falsity of the sentences in which it occurs. Thus, the difference between ‘dead’ and ‘deceased’ or between ‘sweat’ and ‘perspiration’ are differences in tone only. Tone, sense and force are the three ingredients of meaning as ordinarily understood.


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Transformative grammar: It consists of rules of transformation which transform the product of the generative grammar into sentences with the surface structure of language. See Chomsky, Noam Translation: This issue has been discussed by Quine, who argued that it is indeterminate. See Indeterminacy of translation; Radical translation Truth: There is a vast array of different philosophical theories of truth: robust theories which take truth to be a property with a substantive metaphysical nature, and deflationary or minimalist views which either deny that truth is a property or take it to have no substantive nature. See Truth, deflationary theories of; Truth, robust theories of Further reading: Alston (1996); Kirkham (1992) Truth, as what works: Classical pragmatists defined truth as what is good in the way of belief. In their view, the truth of a belief is a matter of its practical utility on the whole and in the long run. In other words, they think that ‘true’ is the label we use for beliefs that, on the whole and in the long run, work to get us what we want. Critics point out that it is not inconceivable that some beliefs might be useful and yet false. They might also add that it is the truth of a belief that might explain its utility, and not, as classical pragmatists would have it, the other way round. See Pragmatism; Truth, epistemic theories of Further reading: Kirkham (1992), chs 3.2 and 3.3 Truth, coherence theory of: The view that truth is a matter of coherence. It is one of the oldest theories of truth going back at least to the nineteenth-century neo-Hegelian philosopher F. H. Bradley. According to this view, truth is primarily a property of a whole system of beliefs or

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claims. Individual beliefs (claims) are said to be true only in so far as they belong to a system which is true. The system is true if and only if the beliefs (claims) it includes cohere with one another. This notion of coherence is not easy to spell out. At the very least it requires consistency, since a system that includes contradictions is not coherent. But consistency alone is not enough. It is usually supplemented with ideas of mutual support, comprehensiveness, explanatory power, and so forth. Thus, a system of beliefs (claims) is said to be true if and only if it contains no contradictions, it has great power of explanation, it is comprehensive, the beliefs contained in it mutually support each other to a high degree, and so forth. Since the notions of mutual support and of explanatory power are epistemic concepts, the coherence theory belongs to the family of the epistemic theories of truth. A persistent objection to this theory consists in the fact that we can always conceive of a system of beliefs (claims) that possesses all these good epistemic features, but is nevertheless false. If such a system is genuinely conceivable truth cannot be the same as these good epistemic features, because something can have these features but lack truth. See Truth, epistemic theories of; Truth, robust theories of Further reading: Kirkham (1992), chs 3.5 and 7.4 Truth, correspondence theory of: The view that truth is a matter of a relation of correspondence between sentences, utterances, beliefs, or propositions and reality. Thus, this is not an epistemic theory of truth. It is the oldest theory of truth which was arguably endorsed by Aristotle with his claim that ‘to say that that which is, is, and that which is not is not, is true’. There are several versions of the correspondence relation which is intended to explain truth: correlation and congruence are the two most common.


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The first takes correspondence to be a relation involving exclusively whole sentences, claims, beliefs or propositions and whole facts or states of affairs. Aristotle’s claim might be an expression of this view. The second takes correspondence to involve also relations between the parts of sentences, claims, beliefs or propositions and the parts of the facts or states of affairs which are said to correspond to them. This is the view put forward by Russell. The correspondence theory of truth has intuitive appeal. Its main problems lie with providing a detailed specification of the notions of fact or state of affairs and of correspondence so as to make fully clear what it means to say that something corresponds to the facts. See Truth, identity theory of; Truth, robust theories of Further reading: Kirkham (1992), ch. 4 Truth, deflationary theories of: A family of theories of truth including the redundancy theory, the disquotational theory and the prosententional theory. These theories deny that ‘true’ refers to a substantive property. Some of these theories also include the claim that, despite contrary appearances, ‘is true’ is not a predicate. Arguably, minimalism about truth, which is committed to treating truth as a merely formal property, belongs at least in spirit to the deflationist family. See Deflationism; Minimalism; Truth, disquotational theory of; truth, minimalist theory of; Truth, prosentential theory of; Truth, redundancy theory of; Warranted assertibility Further reading: Stoljar (1997); Kirkham (1992) ch. 10; Truth, disquotational theory of: Supporters of this view claim ‘is true’ is a disquotational device. Thus, for example, A. ‘snow is white’ is true

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has the same content as B. snow is white since the sole function of ‘. . . is true’ is to cancel out the effect of the quotation marks. See Disquotation; Truth, deflationary theories of Truth, epistemic theories of: These are robust theories that identify truth with a property which is, at least in part, epistemic. Epistemic properties are those that concern justification, warrant, evidence or knowledge. Many different theories belong to this family, including coherentism, verificationism and pragmatism. Epistemic theories of truth are typically associated with various forms of anti-realism. See Truth, as what works; Truth, coherence theory of; Truth, verificationist theory of Further reading: Alston (1996), ch. 7 Truth, identity theory: The view that the contents of thoughts are identical with the facts that make them true. Further reading: Hornsby (2001) Truth, minimalist theory of: The view developed by Paul Horwich that involves thinking of truth as a merely formal property with no hidden structure. Consequently, the minimalist theory of truth consists of nothing more than a list of all the (uncontroversial) instances of the equivalence or T-schema: it is true that p if and only if p. In other words, the theory would consist of a list which includes: it is true that snow is white if and only if snow is white; it is true that London is in England if and only if London is in England; and so on and so forth. See Deflationism; Minimalism; Truth, deflationary theories of Further reading: Kirkham (1992), ch. 10


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Truth, prosentential theory of: A theory of truth which denies that the expression ‘. . . is true’ is a predicate, and consequently also denies that truth is a property. Instead, supporters of the view claim that in all its uses ‘true’ appears as a syncategorematic fragment of a prosentence such as ‘that is true’ or ‘it is true’. The advantage of this theory over other versions of deflationism is its ability to cope with sentences such as ‘everything the pope says is true’ which the prosententialist analyses as ‘for anything that can be said, if the pope said it, it is true’. The theory cannot be applied to uses of the noun ‘truth’. See Anaphora; prosentence; Truth, deflationary theories of Further reading: Kirkham (1992), ch. 10 Truth, redundancy theories of: All those theories that take the expression ‘true’ to be redundant. Earlier versions took ‘true’ to be force redundant, they stated that to say that p is true is equivalent to asserting p, for any sentence p. These theories fail because, as Frege pointed out, they cannot explain embedded uses of ‘true’. For example, in the conditional ‘If it is true that today is Wednesday, tomorrow is Thursday’, the sentence ‘today is Wednesday’ which is said to be true, is not asserted. Later versions of this approach took ‘true’ to be contentredundant; they stated that the content or meaning of ‘it is true that p’ is the same as the content of ‘p’ for any sentence p. The disquotational theory of truth is an example of a content-redundant theory of truth. All redundancy theories are examples of a deflationist approach to truth since they take truth to be metaphysically unimportant. See Truth, deflationary theories of; Truth, disquotational theory of Further reading: Kirkham (1992), ch. 10

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Truth, robust theories of: A theory of truth is robust when it takes truth to be a property which has a substantial nature. Robust theories of truth are opposed to deflationary accounts that deny that ‘true’ stands for any property at all, and to minimalist accounts which hold that truth is a mere formal property with no nature or hidden structure. Robust theories of truth include accounts of truth as correspondence, as coherence or theories that identify truth with a suitable epistemic property. See Truth, as what works; Truth, coherence theory of; Truth, correspondence theory of; Truth, deflationary theories of; Truth, verificationist theory of Truth, semantic theory of: This theory was developed by Tarski during the first half the twentieth century. Tarski takes truth to be a semantic concept which is to be defined in terms of another semantic concept: satisfaction. For Tarski any correct theory of truth will have to meet a criterion of material adequacy which is known as convention T. A theory of truth in L is materially adequate if and only if the theory entails for each sentence p of the language, the corresponding T-sentence: S is True-in-L if and only if p (where S is the name of p). If the language only had a finite number of sentences, the conjunction of the corresponding T-sentences would provide an adequate theory of the truth predicate in that language. For languages with an infinite number of sentences recursive rules are necessary. However, one cannot directly offer a recursive theory of truth because some sentences, like ‘Something is white’, which are not atomic, have constituents that are not sentences. Instead, they are obtained from the open sentences and quantifiers. These components are not sentences and therefore do not have a truthvalue. Tarski uses the notion of satisfaction of an open sentence or a sentence by a sequence of objects in order


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to define truth. The intuitive idea of satisfaction is simple: the open sentence ‘x1 is in England’ is satisfied by a sequence of objects that has London in its first place, if and only if London is in England. Open sentences are satisfied by some sequence and not others, but if a sentence is satisfied by a sequence, it is satisfied by all sequences, and if it is not satisfied by a sequence, it is satisfied by no sequence. Hence, Tarski defines truth as satisfaction by all sequences. Further reading: Kirkham (1992), ch. 5; Tarski (1944) and (1969) Truth, verificationist theory of: It is the view that truth is a matter of verification. The main idea behind this position is that there is a close connection between the evidence available for a claim and its truth, such that truth cannot in principle outstrip verification. This idea can be fleshed out thus: to say that a sentence is true is to say that there is a warrant to assert it. This view was first developed by Dummett. It constitutes one of the main planks of the kind of anti-realism he has articulated in several articles. See Acquisition argument; Manifestation argument; Verification transcendence Further Reading: Alston (1996), ch. 4; Kirkham (1992), ch. 8 Truth aptness: Sentences in an area of discourse such as ethics or aesthetics are said to be truth apt if and only if they can be assessed for their truth or falsity. Some supporters of non-cognitivism about a given area of discourse deny that sentences in that area are truth apt, so that in their view nothing either true or false can be said in that area. Further reading: Wright (1992)

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Truth-bearer: It is what is said to be true or false. More specifically, it is the object of which the property truth is predicated. Philosophers disagree about the nature of these objects. Some argue that propositions are the primary truth-bearers, and that sentences or statements are said to be true only in so far as they express true propositions. Others, who think that propositions are dubious entities, prefer to take the truth-bearers to be linguistic entities such as utterances. See truth-maker Truth condition: The condition which must be satisfied for the sentence or utterance, whose truth condition it is, to be true. For instance, the truth condition of the sentence ‘snow is white’ is snow’s being white. See semantics, truth-conditional Truth function: A function which takes truth-values as its arguments and yields truth-values as its values. Negation, disjunction, conjunction, the material conditional and the material biconditional are the best-known examples of truth-functions. See Conditional Truth-functional sentential connective: A part of speech, such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’ and ‘if . . . then . . . ’ which connects sentences. It is said to be truth-functional because the truth or falsity of the resultant composite sentence is a function of, or completely determined by, the truth-values of the component sentences. Thus, for instance, the composite sentence ‘Edinburgh is in Scotland and Cardiff is in Wales’ is true because both its component sentences are true. The meaning of a truth-functional sentential connective is given by its associated truth-table. See Truth function


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Truth-maker: What makes a truth true. Thus, for instance, the truth-maker of a sentence (say, ‘Pussy, the cat, is on the mat’), or of one of its an utterances, or of the proposition it expresses is something – a fact (that Pussy is on the mat) or a thing (Pussy) – which makes that sentence, utterance or proposition true. Not everybody agrees that every truth requires a truth-maker. Rather, this is a view held only by some of those philosophers who believe that truth is a metaphysical property with an interesting nature. See Truth, robust theories of; Truth-bearer Further reading: Armstrong (2004) Truth-table: A table which provides all the possible combinations of the truth-values taken by complex truthfunctional sentences given the values assigned to their atomic sentential constituents. For instance, a truth-table shows that the conjunction of the sentences ‘it is raining’ and ‘it is windy’ is true when it is both raining and windy, and false in all other cases. Thus: It is raining

It is windy

T T F F

T F T F

It is raining and it is windy T F F F

Truth-tables are used to illustrate the meaning of truthfunctional sentential connectives. They also offer an effective method for testing the validity of arguments in propositional (sentential) logic. See Wittgenstein, Ludwig Truth-value: The value yielded by a function like a predicate or like a truth function for a given argument or arguments. Classically, there are only two truth-values: the

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true and the false. More recently, non-classical logicians have explored other types of truth-value such as both true and false, neither true nor false, and indeterminate. Truth-valueless sentence: A sentence is said to be truthvalueless if it lacks a truth value. Strawson introduced this idea when he argued that sentences whose subject fails to denote (e.g., Pegasus is a winged horse) can only be used to make pseudo-statements which lack a truthvalue. Twin Earth: The term is now used to refer to a family of thought experiments the first of which was formulated by Hilary Putnam. Putnam used the thought experiment to defend the slogan that meanings are not in the head. This is the view, now known as semantic externalism, which proposes that physical and environmental factors external to a speaker contribute to the individuation of the meanings of her utterances. In his thought experiment, Putnam asks us to imagine a faraway planet, which he calls Twin Earth, that is an exact duplicate of Earth with the exception that on Twin Earth what fills the lakes, and is the odourless colourless liquid drunk by the inhabitants of the planet, has the chemical composition XYZ and not H2 O. Inhabitants of Twin Earth use the word ‘water’ when talking about this stuff. Putnam asks us to imagine an earthling, ¨ Oscar, and his doppelganger on Twin Earth, Twin Oscar, both living in 1750. Oscar points to the contents of a glass and utters the words ‘That’s water’. Twin Oscar also points to the contents of a glass and utters the words ‘That’s water’. Since they live in 1750 when chemistry had not been developed, neither has any knowledge of the chemical composition of the stuff they point to. Putnam’s intuition is that the stuff on Twin Earth is


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not water, it is something else, let us dub it ‘twater’. He also thinks that both Oscar and Twin Oscar say something true by means of their utterances. Therefore, he concludes that their words have different meanings. Oscar’s word ‘water’ is an English word that refers to water, namely H2 O. Twin Oscar’s word ‘water’ is a word in Twin English that refers to twater, namely XYZ. But now, since Oscar and Twin Oscar are exactly alike, what gives their words different meanings must be not a matter of what goes on in their heads, but the result of differences (although these are undetectable by them) in their physical environments. See Broad content; Content; Individualism Further reading: Putnam (1979) Type See Token

U Understanding: Contemporary philosophers tend to assimilate understanding, especially linguistic understanding with knowledge. Thus, they provide accounts of what speakers must know in order to count as understanding the language. See Tacit knowledge Universal: The existence of universals is a matter of dispute. If they exist, they are those abstract entities which are the referents of general terms such as ‘red’ or ‘apple’. There are two versions of realism about universals. Some believe universals to transcend particulars and to be capable of existing uninstantiated. Thus, the universal could exist even though no particular instance or example of it would exist. Others believe that universals only exist when

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instantiated in particulars. Supporters of nominalism deny the existence of universals. See Abstract entity Universal grammar: First defined by Chomsky as the initial stage of the language faculty, he later characterises it as a set of innate universal principles combined with parameters whose settings vary from language to language. Universe of discourse See Domain Univocal meaning: Said of an expression when it is used with only one meaning. Unrestricted quantification See Quantification Use: Wittgenstein famously remarked in the Philosophical Investigations (1953) that for the most part when we ask about the meaning of a term we are seeking instructions about how to use it. Subsequently, some philosophers have interpreted this remark to indicate that facts about meaning can be reduced to facts about use. Others disagree because they think that meaning is irreducibly normative. That is, they argue that the meaning of a term determines how it ought to be used (its correct use) rather than how it is used (its actual use). See Berkeley, George; Dispositionalism; Meaning, use theory of; Normativity of meaning Use–mention distinction: In the sentence, ‘Cardiff is the capital of Wales’, the words ‘Cardiff’ and ‘is’ are used. In the sentences ‘“Cardiff” has seven letters’ and ‘“Is” is a verb’ those words are mentioned. Thus, to mention a word or expression is to talk about the word or expression itself, rather than to use the word or expression to talk about


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something else. In standard English quotations are typically used to indicate that an expression is mentioned rather than used. The distinction between use and mention is not always mutually exclusive. At times expressions are both used and mentioned simultaneously. Consider, for example, the following: Davidson writes that in lectures the introduction of quotation ‘was accompanied by a stern sermon on the sin of confusing the use and mention of expressions’. In this sentence the words within the quotation marks are mentioned since they are presented as Davidson’s words, but they are also used since the whole sentence is not about those words themselves but what they convey. Utterance: It consists in the writing or speaking of a sentence or an expression by one individual at a specific time. What is uttered in an utterance is a token of a word, expression or sentence type. Some philosophers, who are not keen on propositions, take utterances to be the primary truthbearers.

V Vagueness: A term is said to be vague if its range of application has borderline cases. Thus, for instance ‘bald’ is vague since there are individuals who are neither clearly bald nor clearly not bald. The phenomenon of vagueness is complicated by the existence of higher-order vagueness. We have higher-order vagueness when the demarcation of borderline cases is also vague. Thus, we do not just have borderline cases of application, we have also instances where it is a borderline case whether the case is a borderline case. There are competing philosophical accounts of vagueness. Some see vagueness as a feature

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of reality itself; others take it to be a feature of language or a consequence of human ignorance. Further reading: Williamson (1996) Validity: An argument is said to be valid if and only if its premises offer the right kind of support for its conclusion. The most common notion of validity is deductive validity, which is the validity of a deductive argument. There are two definitions of this latter notion. An argument is deductively valid if and only if it is not possible for the conclusion to be false when all the premises are true. Alternatively, an argument is deductively valid if and only if it is necessarily the case that if all the premises are true, the conclusion is also true. In classical logic these definitions are equivalent. Value: In mathematics and in logic the output of a function. For example, the value of the addition function for the arguments 2 and 3 is 5. ¨ Value-range (Werthverlaufe): A technical term used by Frege to refer to the extension of a function. A concept is for Frege a one-place function from objects to truth-values. Thus, for instance, the concept of being a cat is a function that yields the values true or false for each object in the universe. Its extension is the class of all things for which the function takes the value true. In other words, its extension is the class that has as a member each and every cat. Frege’s value-range for this concept is identical to this class. It is understood in terms of the range of values, true or false, associated by the function with each object in the universe. But, for Frege, all sorts of functions, not only concepts, have value-ranges that give their extension. Different functions can have the same value-range or extensions. Thus, the mathematical functions x2 − 4x and


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x (x − 4) have the same value-range, because they yield the same course of values for each argument. Similarly the concepts of being a trilateral closed figure and being a triangular closed figure have the same extension because any closed figure with three sides has three angles, and vice versa. Variable: In logic, variables are place-holders. They offer a convenient means of representing gaps in sentences or arguments which can be filled by a name or a sentence. Thus, in ‘x runs’, ‘x’ is variable for which a name ‘John’, for instance, can be substituted. In predicate logic, the occurrences of variables are distinguished between free and bound. A bound occurrence of a variable is one that is associated with a quantifier. For example, in logic, ‘everything has a mass’ is rendered ‘for everything x, x has a mass’. The variable ‘x’ is in this instance bound by the quantifier everything. The occurrence of ‘x’ in ‘x runs’, on the other hand, is free because it is not bound by a quantifier. Sentences do not have free variables as components. Verdictive: A term coined by Austin for a type of (illocutionary) speech act which consists in the giving of a verdict or the exercising of judgement. The acquittal of a defendant by a jury by uttering the words ‘Not guilty’ is the paradigmatic example of a verdictive. Verification condition: The verification conditions of a statement are the conditions under which it would be verified. Thus, the existence of a black swan is the condition that verifies the statement that some swans are black. Logical positivists have developed accounts of the meaning of statements in terms of their verification conditions. See Logical positivism; Meaning, verification theory of

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Verification principle: The principle according to which the meaning of any a posteriori sentence or statement is given by its method of verification. The principle was first formulated in terms of conclusive verification, so that only statements that could actually be conclusively verified were thought to be meaningful. The statement that Boston is in Massachusetts would have a meaning, according to this view because the observation that Boston is in Massachusetts conclusively verifies it. There are, however, many other statements which would fail to have a meaning in accordance with this formulation of the principle. Some of these seem legitimate scientific statements. They include all universal statements since these could always be falsified by a future observation, and are therefore never conclusively verified. They also include statements about any part of the universe which in practice or in principle is not accessible to observation. Ayer has attempted to provide weaker formulations of the principle which would treat statements such as these as meaningful. He took statements to be meaningful if they could be weakly verified, which is to say if there are possible observations which would render the truth of the statement probable. Unfortunately, this formulation, once made more precise, allows for far too many statements to count as meaningful. Critics of the view often complain that any statement of the verification principle fails by its own lights to be meaningful since there are no possible observations which would make its truth probable. Supporters might reply that the principle is not intended as a factual statement. See Logical positivism; Meaning, verification theory of Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 3 Verification transcendence: The truth conditions of a proposition are said to transcend verification if and only if even


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in ideal conditions we are not in a position to tell whether they obtain or not. For Dummett this account of the truth conditions of sentences in a given area of discourse is a trademark of semantic realism. Further reading: Miller (1998), ch. 9.3 Verificationism See Meaning, verification theory of

W Warranted assertibility: A sentence has this property when one is entitled to its assertion. Wright has argued that supporters of deflationism about truth are committed to the identification of truth with warranted assertibility. He also claims that such an identification is mistaken. He concludes that deflationism is untenable. See Superassertibility Further reading: Wright (1992), ch. 1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951): Born in Austria, Wittgenstein spent most of his life in Britain. He was educated at Cambridge where he studied with Russell. He soon held teaching positions at Cambridge, where he taught the next generation of British philosophers. Wittgenstein had an uneasy relation with philosophy and with Cambridge. He volunteered to fight for Austria in the First World War, and subsequently he abandoned academia to be become a school teacher and then a gardener. He returned to Cambridge in 1929 and lectured in the 1930s, before volunteering as a medical orderly in Newcastle during the Second World War. He finally resigned from Cambridge in 1947. Wittgenstein’s contribution to philosophy is immense. In his early work the Tractatus (1922) he developed the idea of

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truth-tables as well as the picture theory of meaning. In the Philosophical Investigations (1953) he formulated the private language argument, his rule-following considerations discussed the relation of meaning to use, and developed the vocabulary of language games and family resemblances. See Meaning, picture theory of; Ostension; Sayingshowing Further reading: Kenny (1975) Word: The individuation of word-types is much harder than it might appear at first sight. Take the sentence ‘British left waffles on Falkland Islands’. This sentence is open to two interpretations. In one of them ‘waffles’ functions as a verb, in the other as a name. If we were to translate the sentence into logic we would use different symbols for ‘waffles’ depending on whether it is a verb or a name. There are many examples of this phenomenon (known as homonymy) which indicate that we cannot rely on orthography (or phonetics) alone to individuate words, that is to recognise for any two signs whether they are tokens of the same or of different words. Word meaning: Many philosophers, following Frege’s context principle, argue that sentential meaning is primary in any philosophical account of meaning. The meanings of words, according to this view, are derivative; it is a matter of the contributions made by the words to the meanings of the sentences in which they can occur. On the other hand, the compositionality of language suggests that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meanings of its constituent words together with facts about the sentence’s structure. This position suggests that word meaning is primary and sentence meaning is derivative.


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Wright, Crispin (1942–): A British philosopher who is at the time of writing working at the University of St. Andrews and at Columbia University. He is well known for his revival of Frege’s logicism in arithmetic, for his refinement of Dummettian semantic anti-realism and for his elaboration of the notion of response-dependence.

Z Zeugmas: This is a figure of speech in which one word which qualifies other words in the sentence is used with two different senses. Gilbert Ryle’s famous example of a zeugma is: ‘She came home in a sedan chair and a flood of tears’. The use of ‘in’ in that sentence is zeugmatic because it does two jobs: it indicates what she travelled in, and the emotional state she was in. These are different senses of ‘in’.

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