Foundations Of Intensional Semantics

This book provides a systematic study of three foundational issues in the semantics of natural language that have been relatively neglected in the past few decades. focuses on the formal characterization of intensions, the nature of an adequate type system for natural language semantics, and the formal power of the semantic representation language proposes a theory that offers a promising framework for developing a computational semantic system sufficiently expressive to capture the properties of natural language meaning while remaining computationally tractable written by two leading researchers and of interest to students and researchers in formal semantics, computational linguistics, logic, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of language

The book is about logical analysis of natural language. Since we humans communicate by means of natural language, we need a tool that helps us to understand in a precise manner how the logical and formal mechanisms of natural language work. Moreover, in the age of computers, we need to communicate both with and through computers as well. Transparent Intensional Logic is a tool that is helpful in making our communication and reasoning smooth and precise. It deals with all kinds of linguistic context in a fully compositional and anti-contextual way.

In recent years the notion of determinate meaning?the idea that a word or a line in a literary text means one thing rather than another thing, X rather than Y?has been widely rejected in the name of Derrida and diffärance, reader-response criticism, and "ideological" approaches proclaiming meaning to be no more than a site of political contestation. ø Yet determinate meaning, says William C. Dowling, cannot be rejected in this way. Like the ratio named by p or the primeness of prime numbers in mathematics, it has been there all along, waiting for our theories to catch up. The proof that this is so, he argues, is today most compellingly available in the New Intensionalism of Jerrold J. Katz, which provides a powerful demonstration that the method of "close reading" developed by New Criticism remains the only valid basis for higher-order interpretation. For readers with no technical background in linguistics or logic, The Senses of the Text provides a clear and easily-understood introduction to the "Chomskyan revolution" in linguistic theory and to major issues in the philosophy of language, including the work of Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine, Carnap, Kripke, and Davidson.

Although philosophical semantics has become both a discipline in its own right and the source of the analytic techniques used in the rest of philosophy, its foundations have themselves been problematic. To provide a unified account of the field, John L. Pollock discusses issues including the nature of possible worlds, modalities, counterfactuals, and causation. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this challenging and provocative analysis, Dale Jacquette argues that contemporary philosophy labours under a number of historically inherited delusions about the nature of logic and the philosophical significance of certain formal properties of specific types of logical constructions. Exposing some of the key misconceptions about formal symbolic logic and its relation to thought, language and the world, Jacquette clears the ground of some very well-entrenched philosophical doctrines about the nature of logic, including some of the most fundamental seldom-questioned parts of elementary propositional and predicate-quantificational logic. Having presented difficulties for conventional ways of thinking about truth functionality, the metaphysics of reference and predication, the role of a concept of truth in a theory of meaning, among others, Jacquette proceeds to reshape the network of ideas about traditional logic that philosophy has acquired along with modern logic itself. In so doing Jacquette is able to offer a new perspective on a number of existing problems in logic and philosophy of logic.

Get to grips with the fundamentals of semantics research. Written by a team of world-class experts, this book introduces the subject for a broad audience of linguists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists. It explores the core concepts of sentential semantics and includes sections on questions, imperatives, copular clauses, and existential sentences. It also features essential research on sentence types, and explains central concepts in the theory of information structure and discourse structure. Now in paperback for the first time since its original publication, the material in this modern classic is an ideal resource for anyone involved in semantics research.

This volume clusters together issues centered upon the variety of types of intensional semantics. Consisting of 10 contributions, the volume is based on papers presented at the Trends in Logic 2019 conference. The various chapters introduce readers to the topic, or apply new types of logical semantics to elucidate subtleties of logical systems and natural language semantics. The book introduces hyperintentional systems that aim at solving some open philosophical problems. Specifically, the first three studies focus on relating semantics, while the following ones discuss fundamental issues related to hyper-intensional semantics or develop hyper-intensional frameworks to address issues in modal, epistemic, deontic and action logic. Authors in this volume present original results on logical systems but also extend beyond this by offering philosophical considerations on the topic as well. This volume will appeal to students and researchers in the field of logic.

No detailed description available for "Foundations of pragmatics and lexical semantics".