Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake? And Other Essays / Howard Wettstein.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wettstein, Howard, Author.

Series:

Stanford Series in Philosophy

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (248 p.)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The nature of reference, or the relation of a word to the object to which it refers, has been perhaps the dominant concern of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Extremely influential arguments by Gottlob Frege around the turn of the century convinced the large majority of philosophers that the meaning of a word must be distinguished from its referent, the former only providing some kind of direction for reaching the latter. In the last twenty years, this Fregean orthodoxy has been vigorously challenged by those who argue that certain important kinds of words, at least, refer directly without need of an intermediate meaning or sense. The essays in this volume record how a long-term study of Frege has persuaded the author that Frege's pivotal distinction between sense and reference, and his attendant philosophical views about language and thought, are unsatisfactory. Frege's perspective, he argues, imposes a distinctive way of thinking about semantics, specifically about the centrality of cognitive significance puzzles for semantics. Freed from Frege's perspective, we will no longer find it natural to think about semantics in this way.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction

ONE Can What Is Asserted Be a Sentence?

TWO Indexical Reference and Propositional Content

THREE Proper Names and Propositional Opacity

FOUR Demonstrative Reference and Definite Descriptions

FIVE The Semantic Significance of the Referential-Attributive Distinction

SIX Did the Greeks Really Worship Zeus?

SEVEN How to Bridge the Gap Between Meaning and Reference

EIGHT Frege-Russell Semantics?

NINE Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake?

TEN Cognitive Significance Without Cognitive Content

ELEVEN Turning the Tables on Frege, or How Is It That "Hesperus Is Hesperus" Is Trivial?

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)

ISBN:

1-5036-2189-8

OCLC:

1294426222