An essay on names and truth / Wolfram Hinzen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hinzen, Wolfram.

Series:

Oxford linguistics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language and languages--Philosophy.

Language and languages.

Truth.

Thought and thinking.

Names.

Physical Description:

vi, 244 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Summary:

This pioneering book lays new foundations for the study of reference and truth. It seeks to explain the origins and characteristics of human ways of relating to the world by means of an understanding of the inherent structures of the mind. Wolfram Hinzen explores truth in the light of Noam Chomsky's Minimalist Program. Truth, he argues, is a function of the human mind and, in particular, likely presupposes the structure of the human clause.

Professor Hinzen begins by setting out the essentials of the Minimalist Program and by considering the explanatory role played by the interfaces of the linguistic system with other cognitive systems. He then sets out an internalist reconstruction of meaning. He argues that meaning stems from concepts, originating not from reference but from intentional relations built up in human acts of language in which such concepts figure. How we refer, he suggests, is a function of the concepts we possess, rather than the reverse in which reference to the world gives us the concepts to realize it. He concludes with extended accounts of declarative sentences and names, the two aspects of language which seem most inimical to his approach.

Contents:

1 Roots of the Intentional 8

1.1 Truth as a human universal and as explanandum 8

1.2 An internalist approach to the origin of human truth 13

1.3 Child truth, animal truth 30

1.4 On 'mind' and its architecture 40

1.5 On 'language' and 'thought' 48

2 Where Meaning Begins: The Atoms of Thought 63

2.1 Language as a particulate system in nature 63

2.2 The essence of an 'atom' 76

2.3 Spencerism then and now 96

3 Structures for Concepts 115

3.1 Stage-setting: The analytic content of a concept 115

3.2 Conceptual structures 127

3.3 Play it again, Sam 138

3.4 Exploding the lexical atom 146

4 Structure for Truth 164

4.1 The fate of truth: deflation and elimination 164

4.2 Two kinds of predication 180

4.3 Predicating truth 188

4.4 Alethic attitudes 195

4.5 Implications for the metaphysics of truth 198

5 Structure for Names 204

5.1 Explaining rigidity 204

5.2 Atomicity and reference 220.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [231]-239) and index.

ISBN:

0199274428

0199226520

9780199274420

9780199226528

OCLC:

136779951