Terms and Truth: Reference Direct and Anaphoric

✍ Scribed by Alan Berger

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 253
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In this book, Alan Berger further develops the new theory of reference -- as formulated by Kripke and Putnam -- applying it in novel ways to many philosophical problems concerning reference and existence. Berger argues that his notion of anaphoric background condition and anaphoric links within a linguistic community are crucial not only to a theory of reference, but to the analysis of these problems as well.The book is organized in three parts. In part I, Berger distinguishes between two styles of rigid designation. Based on this distinction, he develops a theory of reference change for rigid designator terms and shows how this distinction sheds light on identity statements. In part II, he offers an account of belief attribution containing vacuous names within the belief context, of intentional identity statements, and of true negative existential statements. In part III, he analyzes anaphoric expressions (i.e., expressions whose reference is determined in part by other clauses or sentences in a given discourse) and presents a formalization of anaphora and plural quantification.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 8
Preface......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 16
I / A Distinction between Two Styles of Rigid Designation and Its Applications......Page 20
1. A Distinction between Two Styles of Rigid Designation......Page 22
1.1 F-Style Rigid Designation......Page 23
1.2 S-Style Rigid Designation......Page 25
1.3 F-Type and S-Type General Terms......Page 27
2. A Theory of Reference Transmission and Reference Change......Page 32
2.1 Reference Transmission for F-Type Terms......Page 33
2.2 Reference Change for F-Type Terms......Page 37
2.3 Reference Transmission for S-Type Terms......Page 44
2.4 Reference Change for S-Type Terms: Singular Terms......Page 48
2.5 Reference Change of S-Type General Terms......Page 50
2.6 Conceptual Change......Page 53
2.7 Trivial Conceptual Change and Conceptual Confusion: Relativity and Twin Earth Relativity......Page 54
2.8 Genuine Conceptual Change, Newtonian Mass, and Relativistic Mass......Page 56
3. S-Type Terms and Anaphoric Chains......Page 60
3.1 F-Type and S-Type Terms and Their Semantic Contributions to Sentences......Page 61
3.2 Kaplan on Directly Referential Terms, Character, Content, and Cognitive Significance......Page 69
3.3 Objections to Kaplan, and the Role of Anaphoric Chains and A-B Conditions......Page 74
3.4 Some New Puzzles about Identity Statements and Rigid Designation......Page 76
II / Propositional Attitudes and Vacuous Names......Page 90
4. The Disquotational Principle, De Re and De Dicto Belief Attributions, and an Agent’s Perspective......Page 92
4.1 Principles of Belief Attribution......Page 93
4.2 Conditions for Secondary Belief Attribution......Page 103
5. Propositions and Belief Attributions Containing Vacuous Names......Page 110
5.1 Belief Attribution with Vacuous Names......Page 111
5.2 Naming Conditions and Expressing a Definitive Proposition......Page 113
5.3 The Representation of Authentic Naming Conditions and A-B Conditions......Page 118
5.4 Conditions for Belief Attributions Containing Vacuous Names......Page 121
6. Intentional Identitiy and True Negative Existential Statements......Page 138
6.1 The Problem of Intentional Identities......Page 139
6.2 Idealized Rational Agent, Epistemically Complete World Views, and a Given Agent’s Perspective......Page 143
6.3 Mentioning an Object......Page 152
6.4 Mentioning the Same Thing from a Given Agent’s Perspective and Intentional Identity Statements......Page 154
6.5 Conditions under which Intentional Identity Statements Are Appropriate......Page 166
6.6 True Negative Existential Statements......Page 169
III / Pronouns and Anaphora......Page 176
7. Anaphoric Pronouns: Some Proposed Analyses......Page 178
7.1 Some Problems in the Analysis of Anaphoric Uses of Pronouns......Page 179
7.2 The Analysis of Anaphoric Pronouns as Descriptive Referring Expressions......Page 181
7.3 Discourse Semantics, Dynamic Predicate Logic, and a Semantics for Monadic Second-Order Logic......Page 208
8. A Formal Semantics for Plural Quantification, Intersentential Binding, and Anaphoric Pronouns as Rigid Designators......Page 222
8.1 Some Examples of Formalization in the Extended Language......Page 223
8.2 Rules of English for Determining the PSC......Page 234
8.3.2 Formation Rules of LA......Page 239
8.4 Anaphoric Chains, Covarying and Free Occurrences of Variables......Page 240
8.5 The Formal Semantics for LA: Truth and Satisfaction for Sentences in Anaphoric Chains......Page 242
Index......Page 248