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Meaning, Context and Methodology
What methodological impact does Contextualism have on the philosophy of language? This collection sets out to provide some answers. The authors in this volume question three ultimately connected assumptions of the philosophy of language. The first assumption relates to the predominant status of referential semantics and its power to explain truth-conditional meaning. This assumption has come under attack by the context thesis and a number of papers pursue the question of whether this is justified. The second assumption gives priority to assertive sentences when considering language use. The context thesis changes our understanding of language use altogether; possible implications from this methodological shift are addressed in this volume. According to the third assumption, philosophical analysis amounts to nothing more than conceptual analysis. The context thesis risks undermining this project. Whether conceptual analysis can still be defended as a methodological tool is discussed in this volume.
Vagueness and Law
Vague expressions are omnipresent in natural language. As such, their use in legal texts is virtually inevitable. If a law contains vague terms, the question whether it applies to a particular case often lacks a clear answer. One of the fundamental pillars of the rule of law is legal certainty. The determinacy of the law enables people to use it as a guide and places judges in the position to decide impartially. Vagueness poses a threat to these ideals. In borderline cases, the law seems to be indeterminate and thus incapable of serving its core rule of law value. In the philosophy of language, vagueness has become one of the hottest topics of the last two decades. Linguists and philosophers...
Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond
The goal of this collective monograph is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of number and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language with a special focus on Slavic. The book aims at investigating different morphosyntactic and semantic categories including plurality and number-marking, individuation and countability, cumulativity, distributivity and collectivity, numerals, numeral modifiers and classifiers, as well as other quantifiers. It gathers 19 contributions tackling the main themes from different theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to contribute to our understanding of cross-linguistic patterns both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages.
The Normative Animal?
An interdisciplinary group of scholars investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals. They do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms--social, moral, and linguistic--and asking whether they might be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind.
The Semantics of Knowledge Attributions
In this book, Michael Blome-Tillmann offers a critical overview of the current debate on the semantics of knowledge attributions. The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 introduces the reader to the literature on 'knowledge' attributions by outlining the historical roots of the debate and providing an in-depth discussion of epistemic contextualism. After examining the advantages and disadvantages of the view, Part 2 offers a detailed investigation of epistemic impurism (or pragmatic encroachment views), while Part 3 is devoted to a careful examination of epistemic relativism and Part 4 to two different types of strict invariantism (psychological and pragmatic). The final part of the book...
Foundations of Pragmatics
Opening the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the foundations of pragmatics. It covers the central theories as well as concepts and topics characteristic of mainstream pragmatics, i.e. the most widespread approach to the ways and means of using language in authentic social contexts. The articles provide both state of the art reviews and critical evaluations of research in pragmatics. Topics are thus not only considered within their scholarly context but are also critically evaluated from current perspectives.
Subatomic quantification
The goal of this book is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of parthood and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language. The monograph aims to investigate syntactic constructions and lexical categories, e.g., partitives, whole-adjectives, and multipliers, encoding different kinds of part-whole structures both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages. It is envisioned to inspire radical rethinking of the ontology of models accounting for nominal semantics. Specifically, it provides novel evidence for a mereotopological approach to meaning, i.e., a theory of wholes that captures not only parthood but also topological relations holding between parts. This evidence comes from the phenomenon of subatomic quantification, i.e., quantification over parts of referents of concrete count nouns.
Non-Interrogative Subordinate Wh-Clauses
This volume examines subordinate wh-clauses that lack an interrogative interpretation, particularly those in which the wh-word seems to deviate from its literal meaning. These include subordinate manner wh-clauses that have a declarative-like meaning, locative wh-clauses expressing kinds, and headed relatives that serve as recognitional cues, among many others. While regular interrogative embedding has been widely studied in recent years, little is known about the circumstances under which non-interrogative (subordinate) wh-clauses are licensed, nor why some, but not all, wh-phrases can be polyfunctional. The chapters in the book combine the study of cross-linguistic variation in patterns of...
Conceptions of Knowledge
The volume “Conceptions of Knowledge” collects current essays on contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science. The essays are primarily concerned with pragmatic and contextual extensions of analytic epistemology but also deal with traditional questions like the nature of knowledge and skepticism. The topics include the connection between “knowing that” and “knowing how,” the relevance of epistemic abilities, the embedding of knowledge ascriptions in context and contrast classes, the interpretation of skeptical doubt, and the various forms of knowledge.
