No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Referential Attribution
Part I of this book is a concise exposition of the expression theory of meaning, according to which meaning consists in the expression of thoughts, their component ideas, or other mental states. The theory is founded on the fact that thoughts are event types with a constituent structure, and that thinking is a fundamental propositional attitude distinct from belief. It can account for interjections, syncategorematic terms, pejorative terms, conventional implicatures, and other cases of nondescriptive meaning that have long been seen as difficult for both ideational and referential theories of meaning. Part II defends the analysis of speaker and word reference in terms of the expression of ideas by exploring the vague connection of reference with predication, and reviewing the difficulties of alternative approaches, both descriptivist and causal. Part III shows how the expression theory can account for the meaning of names, and the distinctive way in which their meaning determines their reference. The problems with Millian theories show that the meaning of a name consists in the expression of an idea. The problems with Fregean theories show that the ideas expressed by names are atomic or basic. A name is directly and rigidly referential because the extension of the idea it expresses is not determined by the extensions of component ideas. This account of names does not preclude the use of a possible worlds or situation semantics to systematize their formal referential properties. The referential properties of ideas can also be set out recursively by providing a generative theory of ideas, assigning extensions to atomic ideas, and formulating rules whereby the semantic value of a complex idea is determined by the semantic values of its contents. Arguments for the logical necessity of identity statements expressed using non-synonymous names are shown to be unsound, along with various twin earth arguments.
This article provides an introduction to the philosophical study of metaphor and a guide for further reading. The focus is the study of metaphor as pursued by analytic philosophy of language, including a brief history and an explanation of the main questions. Among the theories of metaphor described are the Elliptical Simile Theory, Substitution Theory, Comparison Theory, Interaction Theory, Semantic Field Theory, and Perspectival Theory.
Considerable interest has lately been expressed in motor car driving whilst under the influence of drugs. Unlike depressant drugs (e.g. alcohol) dance drugs are often perceived to enhance driving skills. The physical effects and the current lack of police roadside testing are possible contributing reasons for dance drug driving. This paper aims to show through a literature review on the subject, the demographics of those involved in dance drug driving and the extent to which certain dance drugs are implicated in drug driving incidents. Drug driving is found to be highest amongst the 18–35 year age group and more prevalent amongst adult males. Prevalence figures for driving under the influence of individual drugs are also given. The numbers of people involved in accidents/fatalities and testing positive for amphetamine, cocaine and other dance drugs is small. Although self-reporting especially of illegal activities is difficult to accurately evaluate, most of the reported studies use actual blood/urine samples and so can be considered accurate. The literature does not highlight any real concerns regarding dance drug driving in terms of prevalence although it does highlight the paucity of research in this area, in particular ‘Culture E and driving’.
A collection about the intentionality of speech acts and propositional attitudes. The chapters in the first section develop a framework for pragmatics—the study of the interaction of speech acts and the contexts in which they are performed. The framework is used to defend and apply a pragmatic conception of presupposition, to account for the role of indicative conditional statements in reasoning, and to solve some puzzles about statements of identity and existence. The chapters in the second section concern the semantics of the attribution of belief and other propositional attitudes. They attempt to reconcile the possible‐worlds analysis of propositional content with the phenomena, including de re belief attribution and the attribution of indexical or self‐locating belief. The chapters in the third section defend an externalist account of the contents of thought. It is argued that there is no reason to think a viable account of narrow content can be developed, and that none is needed to provide an adequate account of the role of intentional content in the explanation of behaviour and experience. The chapters in the fourth section discuss the relation between the content of thoughts and the forms in which content is represented and expressed. It is argued that the temptation to build linguistic structure into the content of thought should be resisted since it does not provide the material for an adequate solution to the problems that plague the possible‐worlds conception of proposition, such as the problem of logical omniscience.
Versions of this paper-not read from the present manuscript-were given from 1971 onward to colloquia at New York University, M.I.T., the University of California (Los Angeles), and elsewhere. The present version was written on the basis of a transcript of the M.I.T. version prepared by the editors of this volume. Donnellan himself heard the talk at U.C.L.A., and he has a forthcoming paper, “Speaker Reference, Descriptions and Anaphora,” that to a large extent appears to be a comment on considerations of the type mentioned here. (He does not, however, specifically refer to the present paper.) I decided not to alter the paper I gave in talks to take Donnellan's later views into account: largely I think the earlier version stands on its own, and the issues Donnellan raises in the later paper can be discussed elsewhere. Something should be said here, however, about the pronominalization phenomena mentioned on p. 270 below. In his forthcoming paper, Donnellan seems to think that these phenomena are incompatible with the suggestion that speaker's reference is a pragmatic notion. On the contrary, at the end of the present paper (and of the talk Donnellan heard), I emphasize these very phenomena and argue that they support this suggestion. See also footnote 31 below.
Obsessed by the cases where things go wrong, we pay too little attention to the vastly more numerous cases where they go right, and where it is perhaps easier to see that the descriptive content of the expression concerned is wholly at the service of this function [of identifying reference], a function which is complementary to that of predication and contains no element of predication in itself (Strawson [1974], p. 66).
An earlier version of the paper was written during an enjoyable year spent as a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
L'A. plaide en faveur d'une theorie semantique reconnaissant la valeur des caracteres structures, sans lesquels aucune distinction ne peut etre operee du point de vue de la signification des demonstratifs complexes
Metaphorical Reference', Conference on Metaphor and Cognition, Tel-Aviv
- J Berg