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How to understand language : a philosophical inquiry / Bernhard Weiss.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Weiss, Bernhard.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Language and languages--Philosophy.
- Language and languages.
- Philology.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (xiii, 271 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).
- Edition:
- 1st ed.
- Place of Publication:
- Durham : Acumen, 2010.
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- Why are philosophers - as opposed to, say, linguists and psychologists - puzzled by language? How should we attempt to shed philosophical light on the phenomenon of language? How to Understand Language frames its discussion of the philosophy of language with these two central questions. Bernhard Weiss first explores the reasons why language is so hard to understand from a philosophical point of view and then begins the search for a productive approach to the philosophical task of understanding language. After finding fault with approaches based on philosophical analysis or translation, Weiss undertakes an extended investigation of the programme of constructing a theory of meaning. Weiss endorses Donald Davidsons advocacy of that approach, which is pivotal to the discussion, but he argues strongly against the roles of both truth theory and radical interpretation. In doing so, he offers novel arguments for a number of distinctive claims about some key issues in philosophy of language, centrally, those of the normativity and publicity of meaning. How to Understand Language presents a fresh approach to many issues of abiding interest in the philosophy of language.
- Contents:
- The puzzles of language
- The starting-point for analysis
- Analysing sentence-meaning
- Analysing synonomy
- Radical translation
- The structure of a theory of meaning
- Radical interpretation
- Linguistic norms, communication and radical interpretation
- Linguistic normativity
- Radical or robust?
- Language and community
- Rules and privacy : the problem
- Rules and privacy : the solution?
- Truth-conditions versus use-conditions.
- Notes:
- Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015).
- Includes bibliographical references (p. 261-266) and index.
- Description based on metadata supplied by the publisher and other sources.
- ISBN:
- 1-317-49228-5
- 1-317-49229-3
- 1-315-71155-9
- 1-283-45680-X
- 9786613456809
- 1-84465-446-X
- 9781315711553
- OCLC:
- 898104231
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