Concepts of Meaning includes contributions from well-known philosophers of language and semanticists. It is a useful collection for students in philosophy of language, semantics and epistemology. This work discusses new research in semantics, theory of truth, philosophy of language and theory of communication from a trans-disciplinary perspective.
An integrated theory of linguistic behavior should provide a framework to make behavior intelligible. This work addresses issues such as sentence meaning, utterance meaning, speaker's intention and reference, linguistic...

Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychologism presents a remarkable diversity of contemporary opinions on the prospects of addressing philosophical topics from a psychological perspective. It considers the history and philosophical merits of psychologism, and looks systematically at psychologism in phenomenology, cognitive science, epistemology, logic, philosophy of language, philosophical semantics, and artificial intelligence. It juxtaposes many different philosophical standpoints, each supported by rigorous philosophical argument.
Philosophy, Psychology, and...

The text before you is a study ofthe problematic issue ofmental causation: causation by minds. On hearing the expression 'mental causation, ' you may at first think ofsomething like bending spoons by 'psychic' powers. But no, we are dealing here with something much more puzzling: doing things for reasons, i. e., what we call agency. Psychic spoon-bending would be a fairly straightforward issue. You just exert some psychic force and bend a spoon, just like you might bend it by hand, i. e., by physical force. The only trouble here is that psychic forces may not be in fact available '. But now...

This is the final work of the distinguished philosopher Paul Ziff, whose earlier books include Understanding Understanding, Philosophical Turnings, and Semantic Analysis. It is carefully crafted and written in numbered paragraphs rather than chapters, in style of the later Wittgenstein. The work concerns morality, rationality, symbolism and imagery.
In the words of the author: "The primary thesis of this essay is that, although there are many different and conflicting moralities, both here in America and throughout the world, some of them can be criticized and rejected on rational...

Artistic Judgement sketches a framework for an account of art suitable to philosophical aesthetics. It stresses differences between artworks and other things; and locates the understanding of artworks both in a narrative of the history of art and in the institutional practices of the art world. Hence its distinctiveness lies in its strong account of the difference between, on the one hand, the judgement and appreciation of art and, on the other, the judgement and appreciation of all the other things in which we take an aesthetic interest. For only by acknowledging this contrast can one do...

This book investigates central issues in the philosophy of memory. Does remembering require a causal process connecting the past representation to its subsequent recall and, if so, what is the nature of the causal process? Of what kind are the primary intentional objects of memory states? How do we know that our memory experiences portray things the way they happened in the past? Given that our memory is not only a passive device for reproducing thoughts but also an active device for processing stored thoughts, when are thoughts sufficiently similar to be memory-related?

The...

When I was Dickinson Miller's assistant from 1940 to 1942, I soon realized that I had encountered an unusually powerful, acute, and original mind and a writer whose clear but vivid style matched the high quality of his intelligence. These traits were apparent in his comments about eminent philosophers with whom he had associated - particularly William James but also Santayana, Dewey, Husserl, and Wittgenstein - and in the mutual criticism he demanded of his writing and my first efforts. I was pleased and felt immensely privileged to share in his planning of a book devoted to "analysis, the...

With one exception, all of the papers in this volume were originally presented at a conference held in April, 1978, at The Ohio State University. The excep tion is the paper by Wilfrid Sellars, which is a revised version of a paper he originally published in the Journal of Philosophy, 1973. However, the present version of Sellars' paper is so thoroughly changed from its original, that it is now virtually a new paper. None of the other nine papers has been published previously. The bibliography, prepared by Nancy Kelsik, is very extensive and it is tempting to think that it is complete. But I...

Conscious experience and thought content are customarily treated as distinct problems. This book argues that they are not. Part One develops a chastened empiricist theory of content, which cedes to experience a crucial role in rooting the contents of thoughts, but deploys an expanded conception of experience and of the ways in which contents may be rooted in experience. Part Two shows how, were the world as we experience it to be, our neurophysiology would be sufficient to constitute capacities for the range of intuitive thoughts recognized by Part One. Part Three argues that physics has...

This volume examines the affective and social dimensions of self-related activities. This is a novel way of approaching traditional questions such as the scope and purpose of self-knowledge, the interrelation between the social and the individual person, and the significance of emotional appraisal. Focusing on self-evaluation instead of self-knowledge in shifting from a doxastic to an axiological perspective. The scientific added value created by this approach is threefold: i) it opens up a broadr perspective on the structure of self-reflection which includes a matrix of values; ii) as...