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Theory Of Descriptions
The theory of descriptions is the philosopher Bertrand Russell's most significant contribution to the philosophy of language. It is also known as Russell's theory of descriptions (commonly abbreviated as RTD). In short, Russell argued that the syntactic form of descriptions (phrases that took the form of "The aardvark" and "An aardvark") is misleading, as it does not correlate their logical and/or semantic architecture. While descriptions may seem fairly uncontroversial phrases, Russell argued that providing a satisfactory analysis of the linguistic and logical properties of a description is vital to clarity in important philosophical debates, particularly in semantic arguments, epistemology and metaphysical elements. Since the first development of the theory in Russell's 1905 paper "On Denoting", RTD has been hugely influential and well-received within the philosophy of language. However, it has not been without its critics. In particular, the philosophers P. F. Strawson and ...
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Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"Bertrand Russell" 1 May 2003. He was one of the early 20th century's most prominent logicians, and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism". Together with his former teacher A. N. Whitehead, Russell wrote '' Principia Mathematica'', a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole of m ...
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Law Of The Excluded Middle
In logic, the law of excluded middle (or the principle of excluded middle) states that for every proposition, either this proposition or its negation is true. It is one of the so-called three laws of thought, along with the law of noncontradiction, and the law of identity. However, no system of logic is built on just these laws, and none of these laws provides inference rules, such as modus ponens or De Morgan's laws. The law is also known as the law (or principle) of the excluded third, in Latin ''principium tertii exclusi''. Another Latin designation for this law is ''tertium non datur'': "no third ossibilityis given". It is a tautology. The principle should not be confused with the semantical principle of bivalence, which states that every proposition is either true or false. The principle of bivalence always implies the law of excluded middle, while the converse is not always true. A commonly cited counterexample uses statements unprovable now, but provable in the futu ...
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Sense And Reference
In the philosophy of language, the distinction between sense and reference was an idea of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in 1892 (in his paper "On Sense and Reference"; German: "Über Sinn und Bedeutung"), reflecting the two ways he believed a singular term may have meaning. The reference (or "referent"; ''Bedeutung'') of a ''proper name'' is the object it means or indicates (''bedeuten''), whereas its sense (''Sinn'') is what the name expresses. The reference of a ''sentence'' is its truth value, whereas its sense is the thought that it expresses."On Sense and Reference" Über Sinn und Bedeutung" ''Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik'', vol. 100 (1892), pp. 25–50, esp. p. 31. Frege justified the distinction in a number of ways. #Sense is something possessed by a name, whether or not it has a reference. For example, the name "Odysseus" is intelligible, and therefore has a sense, even though there is no individual object (its referenc ...
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Russellian View
In metaphysics and the philosophy of language, the round square copula is a common example of the dual copula strategy used in reference to the problem of nonexistent objects as well as their relation to problems in modern philosophy of language. The issue arose, most notably, between the theories of contemporary philosophers Alexius Meinong (see Meinong's 1904 book ''Investigations in Theory of Objects and Psychology'') and Bertrand Russell (see Russell's 1905 article "On Denoting"). Russell's critique of Meinong's theory of objects, also known as the Russellian view, became the established view on the problem of nonexistent objects. In late modern philosophy, the concept of the "square circle" (german: viereckiger Kreis) had also been discussed before in Gottlob Frege's ''The Foundations of Arithmetic'' (1884). The dual copula strategy The strategy employed is the dual copula strategy, also known as the dual predication approach, which is used to make a distinction between re ...
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Nathan Salmon
Nathan U. Salmon (; né Nathan Salmon Ucuzoglu on January 2, 1951) is an American philosopher in the analytic tradition, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of logic. Life and career Salmon was born January 2, 1951, in Los Angeles to a working-class family of Sephardi Jews of Spanish- 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 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, Ph.D. 1979). At UCLA he studied with Tyler Burge, Alonzo Church, Keith Donnellan, Donald Kalish, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke, and Yiannis Moschovakis. Salmon was a ...
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Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books by decree in 1586, it is the second oldest university press after Cambridge University Press. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics known as the Delegates of the Press, who are appointed by the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford. The Delegates of the Press are led by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as OUP's chief executive and as its major representative on other university bodies. Oxford University Press has had a similar governance structure since the 17th century. The press is located on Walton Street, Oxford, opposite Somerville College, in the inner suburb of Jericho. For the last 500 years, OUP has primarily focused on the publication of pedagogical texts ...
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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, claimi ...
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Oxford
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the University of Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world; it has buildings in every style of English architecture since late Anglo-Saxon. Oxford's industries include motor manufacturing, education, publishing, information technology and science. History The history of Oxford in England dates back to its original settlement in the Saxon period. Originally of strategic significance due to its controlling location on the upper reaches of the River Thames at its junction with the River Cherwell, the town grew in national importance during the early Norman period, and in the late 12th century became home to the fledgling University of Oxford. The city was besieged during The Anarchy in 1142. The university rose to ...
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John Locke Lectures
The John Locke Lectures are a series of annual lectures in philosophy given at the University of Oxford. Named for British philosopher John Locke, the Locke Lectures are the world's most prestigious lectures in philosophy, and are among the world's most prestigious academic lectures. They were established in 1950 by the bequest of Henry Wilde. Another comparable lecture series is the Gifford Lectures, which are delivered annually at several universities in Scotland. The first lecture series was offered to Ludwig Wittgenstein Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is consider ..., who eventually declined. He felt uncomfortable giving formal lectures where the audience would not be asking or answering questions. Lecturers The lectures began as an uncertain biannual series, with the first ...
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Ernie Lepore
Ernest or Ernie Lepore (born November 20, 1950) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist and a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. Education and career Lepore earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1978, and began teaching at the University of Notre Dame before joining the philosophy department at Rutgers University in 1981, where he has taught ever since. Philosophical work He is well known for his work on the philosophy of language and mind, sometimes in collaboration with Jerry Fodor, Herman Cappelen and Kirk Ludwig, as well as his work on philosophical logic and the philosophy of Donald Davidson. Selected publications *''Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language'', with Matthew Stone (Oxford University Press, 2015) *''Handbook in Philosophy of Language'', ed. with B. C. Smith, (Oxford University Press, 2006) *''Insensitive Semantics'', with Herman Cappelen (2004, Basil Blackwell) *''Donald Davidso ...
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Truth Value
In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth, which in classical logic has only two possible values ('' true'' or '' false''). Computing In some programming languages, any expression can be evaluated in a context that expects a Boolean data type. Typically (though this varies by programming language) expressions like the number zero, the empty string, empty lists, and null evaluate to false, and strings with content (like "abc"), other numbers, and objects evaluate to true. Sometimes these classes of expressions are called "truthy" and "falsy" / "false". Classical logic In classical logic, with its intended semantics, the truth values are '' true'' (denoted by ''1'' or the verum ⊤), and '' untrue'' or '' false'' (denoted by ''0'' or the falsum ⊥); that is, classical logic is a two-valued logic. This set of two values is also called the Boolean domain. Corresponding sem ...
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Definite Description
In formal semantics and philosophy of language, a definite description is a denoting phrase in the form of "the X" where X is a noun-phrase or a singular common noun. The definite description is ''proper'' if X applies to a unique individual or object. For example: " the first person in space" and " the 42nd President of the United States of America", are proper. The definite descriptions "the person in space" and "the Senator from Ohio" are ''improper'' because the noun phrase X applies to more than one thing, and the definite descriptions "the first man on Mars" and "the Senator from some Country" are ''improper'' because X applies to nothing. Improper descriptions raise some difficult questions about the law of excluded middle, denotation, modality, and mental content. Russell's analysis As France is currently a republic, it has no king. Bertrand Russell pointed out that this raises a puzzle about the truth value of the sentence "The present King of France is bald." The sen ...
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