Semantic Singularities PDF Download

Author: Keith Simmons
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198791542
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book aims to provide a solution to the semantic paradoxes. It argues for a unified solution to the paradoxes generated by our concepts of denotation, predicate extension, and truth. The solution makes two main claims. The first is that our semantic expressions 'denotes', 'extension' and 'true' are context-sensitive. The second, inspired by a brief, tantalizing remark of Godel's, is that these expressions are significant everywhere except for certain singularities, in analogy with division by zero. A formal theory of singularities is presented and applied to a wide variety of versions of the definability paradoxes, Russell's paradox, and the Liar paradox. Keith Simmons argues that the singularity theory satisfies the following desiderata: it recognizes that the proper setting of the semantic paradoxes is natural language, not regimented formal languages; it minimizes any revision to our semantic concepts; it respects as far as possible Tarski's intuition that natural languages are universal; it responds adequately to the threat of revenge paradoxes; and it preserves classical logic and semantics. Simmons draws out the consequences of the singularity theory for deflationary views of our semantic concepts, and concludes that if we accept the singularity theory, we must reject deflationism.

Author: Keith Simmons
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521430690
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This book is about one of the most baffling of all paradoxes--the famous Liar paradox. Suppose we say: "We are lying now." Then if we are lying, we are telling the truth; and if we are telling the truth we are lying. This paradox is more than an intriguing puzzle, since it involves the concept of truth. Thus any coherent theory of truth must deal with the Liar. Keith Simmons discusses the solutions proposed by medieval philosophers and offers his own solutions and in the process assesses other contemporary attempts to solve the paradox. Unlike such attempts, Simmons' "singularity" solution does not abandon classical semantics and does not appeal to the kind of hierarchical view found in Barwise's and Etchemendy's The Liar. Moreover, Simmons' solution resolves the vexing problem of semantic universality--the problem of whether there are semantic concepts beyond the expressive reach of a natural language such as English.

Author: Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin
Publisher: Vladimir Djambov
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
“Wealth without work Pleasure without conscience Science without humanity Knowledge without character Politics without principle Commerce without morality Worship without sacrifice. https://vidjambov.blogspot.com/2023/01/book-inventory-vladimir-djambov-talmach.html The philosophical meaning of Hegelianism is not to disciple, but to learn independent and objective knowledge about the most important thing in human life. This "philosophy of history" on the subject approaches the "phenomenology of the spirit" and differs from the empirical study of the rerum gestarum. Like the “phenomenology of spirit”, it deals mainly with “images of the world”, but not in a “typical” understanding of them and not in a “speculative” sequence: the philosophy of history treats individual world images and sorts them out in the order of their temporal appearance. This "temporary" order brings it closer to empirical history, but the "speculative" principle of selection, which is used by the philosophy of history, sharply opposes both scientific studies to each other. Empirical history, in principle, does not know "speculatively unworthy" and therefore unexplored historical singularities; she puts herself before the actual composition of the story so that o see everything objectively and adequately, while the philosophy of history does not bother itself with the full scope and creates its own speculative judgment prior to empirical study. As a result of this, empirical history and philosophy of history are given different subjects.4248 … the element of spirit is organically united in its general metaphysical essence and at the same time mechanically multiple in its individual empirical phenomena. Consciousness, which has not speculatively received its light, perceiving one empirical surface of being, fixes a discrete plurality of people and gets used to the structure of external separation and internal solitude; it lives as if there was no other, concrete order at all, and even tends to insist on its impossibility. Speculative insight and acceptance convinces him that the fusion of individual souls has never broken and cannot break, but that it was pushed aside, as if forced into the depths of being and remained in an unrecognized, undisclosed, undeveloped, irrelevant form, leaving separation to dominate on the surface communication. A life that cultivates this superficial separation, surrendered to it by feeling, consciousness and will, is a life that is essentially immoral. The tragicomedy of man consists in the fact that, contemplating only this surface, without seeing anything deeper, he becomes convinced of his own limitations, finiteness and lack of freedom and enters into a struggle with the other being that limits him, not suspecting that this is a struggle with a ghost.

Author: Barbara Cassin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400849918
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1339

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Book Description
Characters in some languages, particularly Hebrew and Arabic, may not display properly due to device limitations. Transliterations of terms appear before the representations in foreign characters. This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy—or any—translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages--English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Originally published in French, this one-of-a-kind reference work is now available in English for the first time, with new contributions from Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more.The result is an invaluable reference for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the multilingual lives of some of our most influential words and ideas. Covers close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms that defy easy translation between languages and cultures Includes terms from more than a dozen languages Entries written by more than 150 distinguished thinkers Available in English for the first time, with new contributions by Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more Contains extensive cross-references and bibliographies An invaluable resource for students and scholars across the humanities

Author: Yoad Winter
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262265041
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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An investigation of the logical flexibility principles needed for a formal semantic account of coordination, plurality, and scope in natural language. Since the early work of Montague, Boolean semantics and its subfield of generalized quantifier theory have become the model-theoretic foundation for the study of meaning in natural languages. This book uses this framework to develop a new semantic theory of central linguistic phenomena involving coordination, plurality, and scope. The proposed theory makes use of the standard Boolean interpretation of conjunction, a choice-function account of indefinites, and a novel semantics of plurals that is not based on the distributive/collective distinction. The key to unifying these mechanisms is a version of Montagovian semantics that is augmented by flexibility principles: semantic operations that have no counterpart in phonology. This is the first book to cover these areas in a way that is both linguistically comprehensive and formally explicit. On one hand, it addresses questions of primarily linguistic concern: the semantic functions of words like and and or in different languages, the interpretation of indefinites and their scope, and the semantic typology of noun phrases and predicates. On the other hand, it addresses formal questions that are motivated by the treatment of these linguistic problems: the use of Boolean algebras in linguistics, the proper formalization of choice functions within generalized quantifier theory, and the extension of this theory to the domain of plurality. While primarily intended for readers with a background in theoretical linguistics, the book will also be of interest to researchers and advanced students in logic, computational linguistics, philosophy of language, and artificial intelligence.

Author: M. Emre Celebi
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319092596
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This book focuses on partitional clustering algorithms, which are commonly used in engineering and computer scientific applications. The goal of this volume is to summarize the state-of-the-art in partitional clustering. The book includes such topics as center-based clustering, competitive learning clustering and density-based clustering. Each chapter is contributed by a leading expert in the field.

Author: Richard Gaskin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000167216
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
This book defends a version of linguistic idealism, the thesis that the world is a product of language. In the course of defending this radical thesis, Gaskin addresses a wide range of topics in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and syntax theory. Starting from the context and compositionality principles, and the idea of a systematic theory of meaning in the Tarski–Davidson tradition, Gaskin argues that the sentence is the primary unit of linguistic meaning, and that the main aspects of meaning, sense and reference, are themselves theoretical posits. Ontology, which is correlative with reference, emerges as language-driven. This linguistic idealism is combined with a realism that accepts the objectivity of science, and it is accordingly distinguished from empirical pragmatism. Gaskin contends that there is a basic metaphysical level at which everything is expressible in language; but the vindication of linguistic idealism is nuanced inasmuch as there is also a derived level, asymmetrically dependant on the basic level, at which reality can break free of language and reach into the realms of the unnameable and indescribable. Language and World will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and linguistics.

Author: Stephen J. Harrison
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311061023X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in classical studies in the ways meaning is generated through the medium of intertextuality, namely how different texts of the same or different authors communicate and interact with each other. Attention (although on a lesser scale) has also been paid to the manner in which meaning is produced through interaction between various parts of the same text or body of texts within the overall production of a single author, namely intratextuality. Taking off from the seminal volume on Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations, edited by A. Sharrock / H. Morales (Oxford 2000), which largely sets the theoretical framework for such internal associations within classical texts, this collective volume brings together twenty-seven contributions, written by an international team of experts, exploring the evolution of intratextuality from Late Republic to Late Antiquity across a wide range of authors, genres and historical periods. Of particular interest are also the combined instances of intra- and intertextual poetics as well as the way in which intratextuality in Latin literature draws on reading practices and critical methods already theorized and operative in Greek antiquity.

Author: Samantha Laporte
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260087
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
This book takes an integrated approach to the fields of Corpus Linguistics, Construction Grammar, and World Englishes through a thorough constructional and corpus-based examination of the patterning of the versatile high-frequency verb make in British English and New Englishes. It contributes to Construction Grammar theory by adopting a verb-based, rather than construction-based, perspective on argument structure. This allows the probing of the interface between verb-independent generalizations and item-specificity from an underexplored angle that offers new insights into the shape of the constructicon. From a variationist perspective, it seeks to (i) identify features of New Englishes and gauge whether these features exhibit traces of conventionalization, and (ii) assess whether the degree of institutionalization of the New Englishes correlates with linguistic behavior, both from a social and cognitive perspective, thereby contributing to the budding effort to integrate the cognitive and social dimensions into the modeling of linguistic variation in World Englishes.

Author: Michael Glanzberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191502650
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 833

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Book Description
Truth is one of the central concepts in philosophy, and has been a perennial subject of study. Michael Glanzberg has brought together 36 leading experts from around the world to produce the definitive guide to philosophical issues to do with truth. They consider how the concept of truth has been understood from antiquity to the present day, surveying major debates about truth during the emergence of analytic philosophy. They offer critical assessments of the standard theories of truth, including the coherence, correspondence, identity, and pragmatist theories. They explore the role of truth in metaphysics, with lively discussion of truthmakers, proposition, determinacy, objectivity, deflationism, fictionalism, relativism, and pluralism. Finally the handbook explores broader applications of truth in philosophy, including ethics, science, and mathematics, and reviews formal work on truth and its application to semantic paradox. This Oxford Handbook will be an invaluable resource across all areas of philosophy.