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Frege's Puzzles
Frege's puzzles are puzzles about the semantics of proper names, although related puzzles also arise in the case of indexicals. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) introduced the puzzle at the beginning of his article "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" ("On Sense and Reference") in 1892 in one of the most influential articles in analytic philosophy and philosophy of language. The puzzles The term "Frege's puzzle" is commonly applied to two related problems. One is a problem about identity statements that Frege raised at the beginning of "On Sense and Reference", and another concerns propositional attitude reports. The first puzzle The first problem considers the following sentences: # Hesperus is Hesperus. # Hesperus is Phosphorus (Lucifer). Each of these sentences is true, since 'Hesperus' refers to the same object as 'Phosphorus' (the planet Venus which few months apart can be seen as the brightest star of morning or of evening). Nonetheless, (1) and (2) seem to differ in their meaning or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sÄ“mantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ..., linguistics and computer science. History In English, the study of meaning in language has been known by many names that involve the Ancient Greek word (''sema'', "sign, mark, token"). In 1690, a Greek rendering of the term ''semiotics'', the interpretation of signs and symbols, finds an early allusion in John Locke's ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'': The third Branch may be called [''simeiotikÃ'', "semiotics"], or the Doctrine of Signs, the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough ter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Propositional Attitude
A propositional attitude is a mental state held by an agent toward a proposition. Linguistically, propositional attitudes are denoted by a verb (e.g. "believed") governing an embedded "that" clause, for example, 'Sally believed that she had won'. Propositional attitudes are often assumed to be the fundamental units of thought and their contents, being propositions, are true or false from the perspective of the person. An agent can have different propositional attitudes toward the same proposition (e.g., "S believes that her ice-cream is cold," and "S fears that her ice-cream is cold"). Propositional attitudes have directions of fit: some are meant to reflect the world, others to influence it. One topic of central concern is the relation between the modalities of assertion and belief, perhaps with intention thrown in for good measure. For example, we frequently find ourselves faced with the question of whether or not a person's assertions conform to his or her beliefs. Disc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Almog
Joseph is a common male given name, derived from the Hebrew Yosef (יוֹסֵף). "Joseph" is used, along with "Josef", mostly in English, French and partially German languages. This spelling is also found as a variant in the languages of the modern-day Nordic countries. In Portuguese and Spanish, the name is "José". In Arabic, including in the Quran, the name is spelled ''Yūsuf''. In Persian, the name is "Yousef". The name has enjoyed significant popularity in its many forms in numerous countries, and ''Joseph'' was one of the two names, along with ''Robert'', to have remained in the top 10 boys' names list in the US from 1925 to 1972. It is especially common in contemporary Israel, as either "Yossi" or "Yossef", and in Italy, where the name "Giuseppe" was the most common male name in the 20th century. In the first century CE, Joseph was the second most popular male name for Palestine Jews. In the Book of Genesis Joseph is Jacob's eleventh son and Rachel's first son, and kn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Perry (philosopher)
John Richard Perry (born 1943) is Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. He has made significant contributions to philosophy in the fields of philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is known primarily for his work on situation semantics (together with Jon Barwise), reflexivity, indexicality, personal identity, and self-knowledge. Life and career John Perry was born in Lincoln, Nebraska on January 16, 1943. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Doane College in 1964. And he received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University in 1968 with a dissertation on "Identity." The latter was taken under the supervision of Sydney Shoemaker. He taught philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, before joining the faculty at Stanford University where he is Henry Waldgrave Professor of Philosophy Emeritus. He sub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scott Soames
Scott Soames (; born 1945) is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California (since 2004), and before that at Princeton University. He specializes in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy. He is well known for defending and expanding on the program in the philosophy of language started by Saul Kripke as well as being a major critic of two-dimensionalist theories of meaning. Life and career Scott Soames was born in 1945. He did his undergraduate work in philosophy at Stanford University and his graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in linguistics and philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from MIT in 1976.From Soames'web page at USC Soames taught briefly at Yale University (from 1976 to 1980) and, then, from 1980 to 2004 at Princeton University. His departure from Princeton in 2004 was seen as a major loss at the philosophy department there. Gilbert Harman, one of So ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Howard Wettstein
Howard is an English-language given name originating from Old French Huard (or Houard) from a Germanic source similar to Old High German ''*Hugihard'' "heart-brave", or ''*Hoh-ward'', literally "high defender; chief guardian". It is also probably in some cases a confusion with the Old Norse cognate ''Haward'' (''Hávarðr''), which means "high guard" and as a surname also with the unrelated Hayward. In some rare cases it is from the Old English ''eowu hierde'' "ewe herd". In Anglo-Norman the French digram ''-ou-'' was often rendered as ''-ow-'' such as ''tour'' → ''tower'', ''flour'' (western variant form of ''fleur'') → ''flower'', etc. (with svarabakhti). A diminutive is "Howie" and its shortened form is "Ward" (most common in the 19th century). Between 1900 and 1960, Howard ranked in the U.S. Top 200; between 1960 and 1990, it ranked in the U.S. Top 400; between 1990 and 2004, it ranked in the U.S. Top 600. People with the given name Howard or its variants include: Given ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nathan Salmon
Nathan U. Salmon (; né Nathan Salmon Ucuzoglu on January 2, 1951) is an Americans, American philosopher in the Analytic philosophy, analytic tradition, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of logic. Life and career Salmon was born January 2, 1951, in Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles to a working-class family of Sephardi Jews of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, Spanish-Turkish people, Turkish heritage. He is the grandson of archivist Emily Sene (née Emily Perez) and oud player Isaac Sene. Salmon attended Lincoln Elementary School in Torrance, California, Torrance, California through eighth grade, where he was a classmate and friend of the child prodigy, James Newton Howard. Salmon graduated from North High School (Torrance) in 1969. The first person in his family to go to college, Salmon graduated from El Camino College (1971) and from the University of California, Los Angeles (B.A. 1973, M.A. 1974, Doctor of Philosophy, Ph.D. 1979). At UCLA De ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Kaplan (philosopher)
David Benjamin Kaplan (; born September 17, 1933) is an American philosopher. He is the Hans Reichenbach Professor of Scientific Philosophy at the UCLA Department of Philosophy. His philosophical work focuses on the philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of Frege and Russell. He is best known for his work on demonstratives, propositions, and reference in intensional contexts. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1983 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2007. Education and career Kaplan began as an undergraduate at UCLA in 1951, admitted on academic probation "owing to poor grades." While he started as a music major due to his interest in jazz, he was soon persuaded by his academic counselor Veronica Kalish to take the logic course taught by her husband Donald Kalish. Kaplan went on to earn a BA in philosophy in 1956 and a BA in mathematics in 1957, continuing in the department of philosophy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (; July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem. Putnam was known for his willingness to apply equal scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposed its flaws. As a result, he acquired a reputation for frequently changing his positions. In philosophy of mind, Putnam is known for his argument against the type-identity of mental and physical states based on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Ruth Barcan Marcus (; born Ruth Charlotte Barcan; 2 August 1921 – 19 February 2012) was an American academic philosopher and logician best known for her work in modal and philosophical logic. She developed the first formal systems of quantified modal logic and in so doing introduced the schema or principle known as the Barcan formula. (She would also introduce the now standard "box" operator for necessity in the process.) Marcus, who originally published as Ruth C. Barcan, was, as Don Garrett notes "one of the twentieth century's most important and influential philosopher-logicians". Timothy Williamson, in a 2008 celebration of Marcus' long career, states that many of her "main ideas are not just original, and clever, and beautiful, and fascinating, and influential, and way ahead of their time, but actually – I believe – ''true''". Academic career and service Ruth Barcan (as she was known before marrying the physicist Jules Alexander Marcus in 1942 Gendler, T. S."Ruth B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Saul Kripke
Saul Aaron Kripke (; November 13, 1940 – September 15, 2022) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. He was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and emeritus professor at Princeton University. Since the 1960s, Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical logic, modal logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and recursion theory. Much of his work remains unpublished or exists only as tape recordings and privately circulated manuscripts. Kripke made influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic. His principal contribution is a semantics for modal logic involving possible worlds, now called Kripke semantics. He received the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. Kripke was also partly responsible for the revival of metaphysics after the decline of logical positivism, claiming necessity i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Keith Donnellan
Keith Sedgwick Donnellan (; June 25, 1931 – February 20, 2015) was an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy (later Professor Emeritus) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Donnellan contributed to the philosophy of language, notably to the analysis of proper names and definite descriptions. He criticized Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions for overlooking the distinction between referential and attributive use of definite descriptions. Donnellan spent most of his career at UCLA, having also previously taught at the university where he had earned his PhD, Cornell University. Philosophical work Proper names By 1970, analytic philosophers widely accepted a view regarding the reference-relation that holds of proper names and that which they name, known as '' descriptivism'' and attributed to Bertrand Russell. Descriptivism holds that ordinary proper names (e.g., 'Socrates', 'Richard Feynman', and 'Madagascar') may be paraphrased by definite descr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
