An Essay on Names and Truths

✍ Scribed by Wolfram Hinzen

• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 253
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.The book makes important and radical contributions to theory and debate in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science. The author frames his argument in a way that will be readily comprehensible to scholars and advanced students in all three disciplines.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgements......Page 8
Prologue......Page 10
1.1 Truth as a human universal and as explanandum......Page 17
1.2 An internalist approach to the origin of human truth......Page 22
1.3 Child truth, animal truth......Page 39
1.4 On ‘mind’ and its architecture......Page 49
1.5 On ‘language’ and ‘thought’......Page 57
1.6 Conclusions......Page 68
2.1 Language as a particulate system in nature......Page 72
2.2 The essence of an ‘atom’......Page 85
2.3 Spencerism then and now......Page 105
2.4 Conclusions......Page 122
3.1 Stage-setting: The analytic content of a concept......Page 124
3.2 Conceptual structures......Page 136
3.3 Play it again, Sam......Page 147
3.4 Exploding the lexical atom......Page 155
3.5 Conclusions......Page 168
4.1 The fate of truth: deflation and elimination......Page 173
4.2 Two kinds of predication......Page 189
4.3 Predicating truth......Page 197
4.4 Alethic attitudes......Page 204
4.5 Implications for the metaphysics of truth......Page 207
4.6 Conclusions......Page 211
5.1 Explaining rigidity......Page 213
5.2 Atomicity and reference......Page 229
5.3 Conclusions......Page 235
Conclusions......Page 238
References......Page 240
E......Page 250
N......Page 251
T......Page 252
W......Page 253