Questions tagged [philosophy-of-language]
for philosophical questions concerning the nature, origins, and usage of natural language
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If Large Language Models can do Maths, is Formalism true?
A slightly flippant question, but curious to see what my platonist rivals might have to say!
One of the proported reasons that Open-AI was having business politics trouble was the suggestion that ...
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Question about Differences in Existential Quantification
Existent objects don't exist.
There are no existent object.
It seems 1 is inconsistent and 2 consistent. Both propositions seem to declare something exists, but is there a difference in these claims? ...
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If "the king of France isn't bald" is not definite description [duplicate]
If "the king of France isn't bald" is not definite description, but it's "a king of France isn't bald", does it not necessarily imply the existence of a king of France?
The king ...
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The relationship between logical systems and natural language semantics
Every student of philosophy knows that there are systems of logic and that those systems are analyzed in terms of logical properties like soundness, consistency, decidability, completeness, etc. These ...
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Is mathematics analytic or synthetic?
This question is related to another question I posted but I think it requires its own treatment since of the already wide scope of the other question i.e. Is the classical theory of concepts ...
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What's the name of a fallacy when a debater selectively picks facts and ignores others?
In many debates in various fields of political science, it happens that historical events are called upon to make a case or support an argument. However, it also happens quite often that a debater, in ...
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Why do some philosphers including Russell paraphrase this sentence?
To say “Pegasus doesn’t exist” is to say “it is not the case that there is exactly one
x
which is a flying horse of Greek mythology”.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonexistent-objects/
“Pegasus ...
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In what shape do opposites exist?
A common notion is that the opposite of “cold” is “warm” and that the opposite of “slow” is “fast”.
Would it be equally correct to say that the opposite of “cold” is “fast”?
How come that most people ...
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Is "that nose is fake" nonsense?
As you know, a fake nose is not a nose.
Why I think "that nose is fake" is nonsense is this:
"That nose" supposes there's a nose, but "that nose which is fake" supposes ...
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Can semantics work independently apart from philosophy?
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
It implies grammar can work independently apart from semantics.
So I was thinking: "Can semantics work independently apart from philosophy."...
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Omniscience leads to necessitarianism
You have probably seen these types of arguments before on incompatibility of omniscience and free will. The question is are these arguments valid and what can be a good refutation?
Let G= x is known ...
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"Unround circles don't exist." Is it nonsense?
All circles are round.
All circles are not unround.
Then, is "unround circles don't exist" nonsense itself because "unround circles" is a contradiction?
I think even if circles ...
user68874
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How does a language contain its own semantics?
I'm baffled by one phrase in Tarski's papers: "the language which contains its own semantics".
Here is the passage:
The analysis of the antinomies mentioned shows, on the contrary, that the ...
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Is necessary existence a property?
If existence is not a property then doesn't it follow that necessary existence is also not a property? If it is then why?
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On philosophy of language? [closed]
What are the current theories which deal with the time evolution of language? Are they retroactive or predictive?
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Does saying "a morally good singer is a morally good person" undermine Geach's attempt to undermine Moore?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Peter Geach used the infelicity of statements like, "A good singer is thusly a good person," to try to show that G. E. Moore's sense of the word "good" ...
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Michael Dummett on the indeterminacy thesis
In his work "The Significance of Quine's Indeterminacy Thesis," Michael Dummett explores Quine's philosophy. In the beginning of section 3, he states: "Indeterminacy of translation ...
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General sentence operators
There are lots of operators that act on sentences. Here are a few examples:
P and Q
not P
forall x.P
necessarily P
eventually P
x believes that that P
it is obligatory that P
etc. The first two ...
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Are there any pairs of things that are fully irrelevant to each other?
Alternatively, does relevance come in degrees or amounts, and if so, can that measure ever be reduced to zero between two topics?
I had hoped to explain this question in terms of relevance logic, but ...
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Does meaning begin with what can usefully be inferred?
There's linguistic meaning, and then there's meaning in the sense of purpose. I want to talk about a kind of non-linguistic, non-purposeful meaning. Let me give a few examples.
You see that the lower ...
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Is there a difference between an I-private and a we-private language?
Alternatively, is the privacy clause in the argument relative? So to say, imagine two people A and B looking at a patch of blue together, while standing next to someone C who's blind. A says to B, &...
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Does logical pluralism imply conceptual pluralism?
By "conceptual pluralism," I mean something like, "Multiple conceptual analyses of the same concept are true." The example for the sake of which this question occurred to me is the ...
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Does a large language model show signs of an emergent awareness of semantics?
It is well established that computers have semantics of some sort. After posting the question Is non-deterministic automated reasoning a viable strategy for solving problems in mathematical logic? (...
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How far is this statement likely to be true, "the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot"? [closed]
Excerpt from Rebecca Solnit's book 'Men Explain Things to Me':
My friend Chip Ward speaks of “the tyranny of the quantifiable,” of
the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over ...
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Is the compound statement "Every bachelor is a man without a wife AND the Earth revolves around the Sun,” synthetic or analytic?
Is the compound statement "every bachelor is a man without a wife and the Earth revolves around the Sun” (where "and" is a conjunction) synthetic or analytic?
Kant, for example, talks ...
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Did Spinoza say "to name it is to limit it"?
I have seen this quote attributed second-hand and I wonder if anyone can document its source. Greatly appreciated.
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Evolution of Logos [closed]
I asked this question in linguistics but I don't know if you have a better idea
So this term has had a lot of impact religiously and philosophically, yet I still do not understand why logos as ...
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Confused On The Definition Of A Proposition
One definition I encountered was something that is either true or false.
(for example, I ate vegetables yesterday is a proposition).
Another definition I encountered is the meaning of a sentence
(for ...
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Is the mass/count-noun distinction the same as the continuous/discrete one?
Justification for this as a PhilosophySE questions: there are two SEP articles concerning this topic:
The Logic of Mass Expressions (Nicolas[18]).
The Metaphysics of Mass Expressions (Steen[22]).
...
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Don't some grammar rules in natural language imply or require classical logic to be true?
Languages, natural like English or French, or subject to specification
like the mathematical language or formal logic itself, do not make any
assumption, and this for the obvious reason that ...
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Philosophy presupposes the individuality of the Whole?
I thought of a flaw in the very essence of philosophy
Philosophy presuppose that the individualisation of the Whole, which is created by language, corresponds with the Whole as it is, and that it is ...
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In the liar/similar sentences, are the characteristic predicates being used more generally or more particularly, or neither?
Between (1) and (2), it seems like "is true" is more particular in the latter than the former:
The truth predicate ("is true") is a predicate attaching to (interpreted) sentences ...
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How serious are believers in the private language argument?
From time to time I come across people who endorse Wittgenstein's notion that language is a fundamentally public activity, and that a private language would be meaningless.
I always feel somewhat ...
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Who ever argued that natural languages have an exact logic?
Peter F. Strawson famously concluded his 1950 critique of Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions by the somewhat irrelevant remark that ordinary language has "no exact logic". Russell, in ...
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Do performative utterances fix conditions of satisfaction?
I recently listened to a lecture by John Searle regarding performative utterances, in which he argued that performative utterances require both a performative verb and extralinguistic information. For ...
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Going against the limits of language
I vaguely remember a sentence of Wittgenstein which was about the duty of philosophy: that is, to go against the limits of the language. This was in his late period of philosophy.
What is the precise ...
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Asking a question in the "True Language"
Definition: the True Language is so named not because it satisfies the concept from antiquity of a language whose expressions were naturally isomorphic to their referents in some essentialistic way, ...
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Liar's Paradox and Truth
I found myself thinking about the liar's paradox of the form "This sentence is false" and how it relates to one's conception of "Truth" and "Falsity". After deliberating ...
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What's the meaning and roots of the notion of "fault"?
This may sound naive and I'm not a native english speaker, but recently I've started wondering what people really mean by the notion of "fault", for example in the context of saying "it'...
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What are some ways of understanding plural predication (and what are some academic resources on the matter)?
The particular case I'm thinking about has to do with existence. Peter Van Inwagen writes:
'When I say that affirmation of existence is denial of the number zero, I
mean only that to say that Fs exist ...
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Can vague concepts have a modality?
Can vague concepts, which I am thinking of as concepts without boundaries, though there are I assume other ways of thinking about them, be necessary, especially if that modality changes?
Supposing it'...
user66760
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Conjunction with questions: an issue more of logic or of language (if not both)?
Assume that questions can be conjoined with other questions, e.g.:
Who is Shawn Balt? What is prawn salt?
Who is Shawn Balt and what is prawn salt?
Assume that wh-terms are (plurally) agglomerative ...
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What is the philosophy of words in languages? [closed]
It has always been a question for me that when we humans did not have a language to communicate with each other and then we needed to create a language to communicate with each other, how exactly did ...
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What is the point of philosophy if it is itself the fruit of words and that therefore is limited?
Philosophy is often considered as the pursuit of wisdom, the love of knowledge, or the quest for truth. However, philosophy relies entirely on language, which is itself a human construct that may not ...
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Relative to Quine's indeterminacy of translation thesis, was it ever resolved for a person to deduce what a scientific theory states?
In science, if I want to falsify someone's theory, then before embarking on a venture to do such, I need to be able to correctly interpret what the theory states. From what I have read about Quine's ...
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Why not creat more words for philosophy?
I often get the impression that philosophy is about replacing words (concepts) with others. If that's the case, then why not create more words, more concepts?
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What's the difference between analytic and synthetic AND implicit/explicit?
The statement 'a bachelor is an unmarried man' is an implicit and analytic statement.
What is the difference between implicit/explicity and analytic/synthetic? Is there even a difference?
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Would there be a concept of lying in a philosophical zombie world?
I asked a similar question before, here: Would language have meaning, if there was no consciousness?, but the current question is more specific.
Consider a world like ours, but without consciousness, ...
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What does it mean "to provide semantics" in the context of formal logic?
When reading some SEP articles, this is a phrase I commonly came across, "this provides a semantics for this logic". But what does it mean?
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If calculating the p-value post-hoc is meaningless, why is it reasonable to believe the Grimm's Law (and other laws of historical phonology) is true?
Why is it reasonable to believe that the Grimm's Law is true? How can those things be scientifically investigated?An obvious answer is that we can take an dictionary of native Gothic words and the ...
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