Language and Reality

Author: Michael Devitt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262540995
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Book Description
What is language? How does it relate to the world? How does it relate to the mind? Should our view of language influence our view of the world? These are among the central issues covered in this spirited and unusually clear introduction to the philosophy of language. Making no pretense of neutrality, Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny take a definite theoretical stance. Central to that stance is naturalism--that is, they treat a philosophical theory of language as an empirical theory like any other and see people as nothing but complex parts of the physical world. This leads them, controversially, to a deflationary view of the significance of the study of language: they dismiss the idea that the philosophy of language should be preeminent in philosophy. This highly successful textbook has been extensively rewritten for the second edition to reflect recent developments in the field.

Language vs. Reality

Author: N.J. Enfield
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262368773
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
A fascinating examination of how we are both played by language and made by language: the science underlying the bugs and features of humankind’s greatest invention. Language is said to be humankind’s greatest accomplishment. But what is language actually good for? It performs poorly at representing reality. It is a constant source of distraction, misdirection, and overshadowing. In fact, N. J. Enfield notes, language is far better at persuasion than it is at objectively capturing the facts of experience. Language cannot create or change physical reality, but it can do the next best thing: reframe and invert our view of the world. In Language vs. Reality, Enfield explains why language is bad for scientists (who are bound by reality) but good for lawyers (who want to win their cases), why it can be dangerous when it falls into the wrong hands, and why it deserves our deepest respect. Enfield offers a lively exploration of the science underlying the bugs and features of language. He examines the tenuous relationship between language and reality; details the array of effects language has on our memory, attention, and reasoning; and describes how these varied effects power narratives and storytelling as well as political spin and conspiracy theories. Why should we care what language is good for? Enfield, who has spent twenty years at the cutting edge of language research, argues that understanding how language works is crucial to tackling our most pressing challenges, including human cognitive bias, media spin, the “post-truth” problem, persuasion, the role of words in our thinking, and much more.

The Language and Reality of Time

Author: Thomas Sattig
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199279527
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
Thomas Sattig's book develops a comprehensive framework for doing philosophy of time. He brings together a variety of different perspectives, linking our ordinary conception of time with the physicist's conception, and linking questions about time addressed in metaphysics with questions addressed in the philosophy of language. Within this framework, Sattig explores the temporal dimension of the material world in relation to the temporal dimension of our ordinary discourse about theworld.The discussion is centred around the dispute between three-dimensionalists and four-dimensionalists about whether the temporal profile of ordinary objects mirrors their spatial profile. Are ordinary objects extended in time in the same way in which they are extended in space? Do they have temporal as well as spatial parts? Four-dimensionalists say 'yes', three-dimensionalists say 'no'. Sattig develops an original three-dimensionalist picture of the material world, and argues that this pictureis preferable to its four-dimensionalists rivals if ordinary thought and talk are taken seriously. Among the issues that Sattig discusses are the metaphysics of persistence, change, composition, location, coincidence, and relativity; the ontology of past, present, and future; and the semantics ofpredication, tense, temporal modifiers, and sortal terms.

Logic, Language and Reality

Author: Bimal Krishna Matilal
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
ISBN: 8120800087
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
The word 'philosophy' as well as the conjuring expression 'Indian philosophy' has meant different things to different people-endeavours and activities, old and new, grave and frivolous, edifying and banal, esoteric and exoteric. In this book, the author has chosen deliberately a very dominant trend of the classical (Sanskrit) philosophical literature as his subject of study. The age of the material used here demands both philological scholarship and philosophical amplification. Classical pramanasastras usually deal with the theory of knowledge, the nature of inference and language, and the related questions of ontology and semantics. Several important concepts and theories have been singled out for critical analysis and clarification in modern terms so that the results may be intelligible to modern students of both Sanskrit and philosophy. It is hoped that such an attempt will kindle the enthusiasm of young scholars in the field and inspire them to proceed in this comparatively new area of research and explore further and more interesting possibilities.

Language and Reality

Author: Wilbur Marshall Urban
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131785196X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 754

Book Description
First published in 2002. This is Volume XV of seventeen in the Library of Philosophy series on Metaphysics. Written in 1939, this book looks at Language and Reality and the Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism and is related to the movement of Logical Positivism, initiated by Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Language and Reality from a Naturalistic Perspective

Author: Andrea Bianchi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030476413
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 461

Book Description
This book celebrates the many important contributions to philosophy by one of the leading philosophers in the analytic field, Michael Devitt. It collects seventeen original essays by renowned philosophers from all over the world. They all develop themes from Devitt’s work, thus discussing many fundamental issues in philosophy of linguistics, theory of reference, theory of meaning, methodology, and metaphysics. In a long final chapter, Devitt himself replies to the contributors. In so doing, he further elaborates his views on various of these issues, for example defending his claim (in opposition to Chomskyan orthodoxy) that languages are external rather than internal; his well-known causal theory of reference; his “shocking” idea that meanings can be causal, non-descriptive, modes of presentation; his methodological naturalism; his commitment to scientific realism; and his version of biological essentialism. The volume will appeal to all scholars and students interested in contemporary theoretical analytic philosophy, and will be a must-read for any serious researcher in philosophy of language. It provides a deep insight into the work of one of the most important living philosophers, and will help readers to better understand language and reality from a naturalistic perspective.

Reference, Truth and Reality

Author: Mark Platts
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315533871
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Book Description
The papers in this collection discuss the central questions about the connections between language, reality and human understanding. The complex relations between accounts of meaning and facts about ordinary speakers’ understanding of their language are examined so as to illuminate the philosophical character of the connections between language and reality. The collection as a whole is a thematically unified treatment of some of the most central questions within contemporary philosophy of language.

The Underlying Reality of Language and Its Philosophical Import

Author: Jerrold J. Katz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Author: John Piippo
Publisher: WestBow Press
ISBN: 1973610922
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 157

Book Description
This is a book about the primacy and centrality of God and his unsurpassable presence, and what this means for the Church. The presence of God is the core, the sine qua non, of mere Christianity. Gods presence is what is needed to win the day over the present powers of darkness. This book shows what it means for a church to be presence-driven, and what leadership looks like in the presence-driven church.

Borges, Language and Reality

Author: Alfonso J. García-Osuna
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319959123
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Book Description
This book brings together the work of several scholars to shed light on the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges' complex relationship with language and reality. A critical assumption driving the work is that there is, as Jaime Alazraki has put it, 'a genuine effort to overcome the narrowness that Western tradition has imposed as a master and measure of reality' in Borges' writing. That narrowness is in large measure a consequence of the chronic influence of positivist approaches to reality that rely on empirical evidence for any authentication of what is 'real'. This study shows that, in opposition to such restrictions, Borges saw in fiction, in literature, the most viable means of discussing reality in a pragmatic manner. Moreover, by scrutinising several of the author's works, it establishes signposts for considering the truly complicated relationship that Borges had with reality, one that intimately associates the 'real' with human perception, insight and language.