Questions tagged [philosophy-of-language]
for philosophical questions concerning the nature, origins, and usage of natural language
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Do images have propositional content?
It's uncontroversial that most declarative sentences have propositional content, and can therefore be true or false. However they are just one way of conveying information. If 'There exists a red wall'...
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Is a stable quantifier-free language really possible?
I'm reading the yesterday-updated SEP entry on generalized quantifiers; throughout, they cash out the following (and many more!) expressions as quantifiers:
Some/all (of course! "base cases"...
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Language and Mind [closed]
I'm creating my own language with a minimal number of words and a maximum of grammar, allowing words to be formed using prefixes, suffixes, and other methods. I'm curious to know how much my thinking ...
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What are some refutations to the etymological fallacy?
The "etymological fallacy" is the proposal that normatively defining a word in terms of its historical or etymological origins is "a fallacy". This claim seems incomplete, because ...
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Possible variants of T-schema
Let me use this notation:
"xxx"(OL) means that "xxx" is a proposition in the Object Language;
"xxx"(ML) means that "xxx" is a proposition in the Meta-Language.
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Why isn't the Liar's Paradox just accepted to be complete nonsense?
I can understand that some self-referential sentences can be sensible and have truth/false values (e.g. "This sentence is written in English." is true, "This sentence has 1,000 words.&...
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Is math (only) a language?
"Math is the langauge in which God has written the universe" ~ Galileo Galilei (no less)
I recall vaguely, dovetailing with Galileo's words supra, reading math is a language. I recognize &...
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Was Frege the first to claim that natural language is logically inconsistent?
Gottlob Frege claimed that natural language was logically inconsistent. After him, most academics seem to have bought the idea, most prominently Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Alfred Tarski and ...
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Is natural language incomplete?
I am pretty sure the “lexical hypothesis” is that the data of natural language is “representative” of whatever “world” (metaphysical, ontological) we live in. There are actually influential scientific ...
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What is a basic characterization of relations among metaphor, analogy, and categorification/classification?
Continuing relation of metaphor, analogy, with symmetry my third question is what is the relation between metaphor/analogy with categorification/classification .Please provide examples
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Was Tarski the first to discuss the logically of the truth predicate?
Tarski famously discussed, formally, the logically of the truth predicate, in The Concept of Truth in Formalised Languages (1935).
Was he the first to do so?
Thank you for any scholarly reference.
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How can syntactic manipulation give rise to understanding?
I am a computer science student new to philosophy.
I have been thinking about the Chinese Room Argument and its replies and have tried to think of it as a different, more physical analogy.
Imagine a ...
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Who first proposed that the Liar sentence is neither true nor false because no sentence L which is either true or false could possibly satisfy L ⇔ ¬L?
One resolution of the Liar Paradox is that the Liar sentence is neither true nor false because no sentence L which is either true or false could possibly satisfy L ⇔ ¬L.
I couldn't attribute this ...
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Is there any evidence of reasoning or argument in ancient texts outside Ancient Greece?
Is there any evidence of reasoning or argument in ancient texts (says before 500BC) outside Ancient Greece?
Thank you for any scholarly reference.
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Chicken or Egg. Does everything begin or is the idea of start/first/origin related to the use of language?
The existence of beginning: origin/start/initiate. Do not all beginnings require something before? Are all just arbitrary measurements of traits we find of interest? The globally persuasive ideas of ...
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Does Not(A and not-A) = Not(A nand A) in intuitionistic logic?
I guess this comes out to: in intuitionistic logic, is the positioning of the negation relative to conjunction nontrivial? Is not-and different from and-not, here?
Motivation: I was trying out a ...
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Are these two radically different kinds of psychological concepts one representing behavior (to mean) and the other cognitive (to understand)?
We could say that ChatGTP does not understand what it is saying, or anything whatsoever,but we can say it still means what it says. So "to mean" is not a same kind of a cognitive concept ...
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Could, "If X is red, X has a coloration," possibly be not true like, "Cucumbers are vegetables," is not strictly true?
I just watched this video, I thought it was a joke video at first, but it turned out to be an explanation as to why the metaphysical concept of "vegetables" is not scientifically stable, and ...
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Is the atomic sentence “There is something” the starting point for all possible human inquiry about anything at all?
I have been developing a sort of foundational basis for not merely philosophy, but all forms of human inquiry. To me it seems obvious that the proposition There is something must be true because of ...
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Why is "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" considered meaningless?
I initially posted this in Linguistics, but wanted to get philosophers' opinions on this as well. (And someone over there is complaining that it's a philosophical rather than a linguistic question... ...
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Can LLMs have intention?
In many movies, you have seen an AI robot moving here and there, doing this and that with an intention. Is it possible that a generative AI-like language model (e.g., ChatGPT) could ever do that?
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Statement Vs Proposition Vs Premise Vs Assertion
I have spent a few days running around the internet trying to find a distinct and simple explanation of how all of these terms fit together. I'm aware it is quite nuanced.
Could someone help me ...
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Is Karl Popper's falsificationism self-refuting?
I am referring here not to falsification as a tool used to judge if something is good science, but rather to judge the meaning of statements such as "God exists".
Suppose that Flew's parable ...
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Does the success of AI (Large Language Models) support Wittgenstein's position that "meaning is use"?
By 'success' we think of current AI/LLMs capacity of producing text that is regarded as coherent, informative, even convincing, by human readers [see for instance Spitale et al. and Salvi et al.]
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Can religions die out specifically lose followers and consequently stop existing? (ontologically speaking)
This question arose after I watched the movie Dune and made some interesting finds regarding the religious and sociopolitical environment of this masterpiece.
So the question arose, when I realized ...
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Can definitions in the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language be considered definitive in informal philosophical presentations?
I ran into an interesting problem recently, in which several definitions I extrapolated from the subject dictionary catastrophically failed to support the validity of my position. Full disclosure, I ...
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Is there the language in the mind and how it changes based on the language in the world?
I have realized that I was thinking in keywords, just like I use on Google, and not in the words itself. So I started to think if there is a "language" that the mind uses to create language ...
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Does a sentence exist if it is not written, spoken, or even thought of?
If a sentence is never written, spoken, or even thought of, does it still exist? Let me illustrate what I mean. Suppose there is a mathematical sentence, say in some first-order language L, which is a ...
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Non sequitur claims when deducing meaning from historical artifacts or texts (problem of presentism)
So my question arises from an argument that I have seen regarding some people debating over some ancient inscriptions.
My question is as follows, "Wouldn't any possible explanation for the ...
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Is there a partly physical nature to infinitesimal limits that connects the utility of calculus with the quantized nature of small-scale physics?
One argument against calculus being physical is that since quantum mechanics has a quantized discrete nature, then physics does not truly have infinitesimal quantities. Yet, calculus and its ...
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Why is identifying Frege's indirect sense with customary sense problematic?
In Miller's Philosophy of Language, it is explained that the identification of an expression's indirect sense (i.e. its referent in a doubly indirect context) with its customary sense (i.e. its ...
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Is the failure of substitutivity in an intensional context simply due to a lack of clarity in terms of the identity operator?
The oft-given example to demonstrate the failure of substitutivity in an intensional context goes as follows:
(P1) Lois Lane believes Superman can fly
(P2) Superman is Clark Kent
(C) Lois Lane ...
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Can we know that something exists even if we can't explain or define it?
Can a person know that something like "free will" must exist even though an exact definition in words, using language, cannot be provided, and in the absence of a complete theory that ...
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When is the proposition expressed by "I am here" necessary?
I'm currently reading Kaplan's On The Logic of Demonstratives (1979). He considers the example
(1) I am here now.
and on page 84 he argues that
(b) In almost (if not all) contexts, an utterance of (...
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Is belief nothing but a feeling of certainty about what something means?
Or to rephrase, can beliefs also be shaped by doubts and intuitions?
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In the field of exploring the fusion of pragmatics and semantics, which scholars and papers are worth paying attention to?
In the field of exploring the fusion of pragmatics and semantics, which scholars and papers are worth paying attention to? For example, I'm interested in John Perry's "Belief Semantics" and ...
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Can ChatGPT provide any value as a sounding board for philosophical exploration?
In my experiences with ChatGPT (3 sessions - 6 hrs, 2hrs and 4 hrs) it has done amazingly, exceedingly, mind-blowingly well. (And I am an ex-programmer, not so easy to surprise or impress).
I asked ...
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Arguments Against Quantifier Neutralism?
Are there any good arguments for rejecting quantifier neutrality advocated in Azzouni’s “Ontology Without Borders”?
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Unusual change of meaning of word "any" in negative sentences form "for all" to "there exists". Predicate logic
Question. Why does the word "any" in negative sentences changes its meaning from "for all" to "there exists"?
Origin of the question. I have a question about translating ...
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The problem of philosophy?
“The problem of philosophy is a linguistic problem, and every disagreement can be traced back to a difference in interpretation.”
“No wonder we know that the deepest problems are not really problems ...
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Are we incapable of loving ourselves, does love only come from the outside?
Love only comes from the outside, it brings you back into attachment to what you cannot control and instigate. Love is an alienated area that advances from the unknown, from a place different from me.
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How does the claim that existence is not a predicate of objects interact with abstract objects?
It's occured to me that Kant's famous argument that "existence" is not a predicate whatsoever, which eventually became the prevailing position on the subject due to Frege and Russell, seems ...
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What's the point of developing various theories of reference?
I cannot comprehend how is it philosophically interesting to research this stuff: whether causal historical-theory is correct or not etc. I am really puzzled by people working in the field: Clearly, ...
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Are these introductory logic textbooks wrong to teach ‘unless’ = ‘or’?
Colin Fine answered on
Unless" does not equal "or" 'directly and intuitively'.
This contradicts the textbooks beneath. Who is correct? Let me ask this here, as I prefer answers from ...
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By what generic method do we correctly determine that an analytical expression of language is true?
The answer to this is a philosophy of logic question would seem to unify the notion of analytic truth across all formal and natural languages. This subject of this question seems to refer to the ...
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Is it feasible to alter "well-established" languages?
I have met this problem several times. I think many natural languages are not really particularly usefully structured, because they contain things like irregularities and unnecessary syntax variations....
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Could general-AI language generation be a test for sentience, sapience, or consciousness?
One of the oft-cited examples of how to test if Artificial Intelligence (AI) is intelligent (often expanded to sentient) is the Turing test. Simply, an AI or machine passes the Turing test if it can ...
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Is it possible the shattered glass has never been shattered? [closed]
You know we usually say "broken windown" when window has broken, "rotten food" when food has rotten.
Is it possible the shattered glass has never been shattered?
I'm wondering ...
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Is Hegel's system really without presuppositions?
It is stated that Hegel was looking to start his system of logic and philosophy in general with what has absolutely no assumptions, frameworks, or presupposed things whatsoever.
Is this really ...
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What are the arguments for innatism, essentialism, and rationalism?
How do people justify some existents being absolutely necessary.
Why cant it just be against a backdrop of a relative nothingness?
How can someone justify certain ideas being absolutely essential and ...