Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Similarly, Fodor (1998, 9) writes: "Learning English ... is learning how to associate its sentences with the corresponding thoughts.

Hence a predicate can be seen as mapping names onto sentences and, on the semantic level, referents of names, i.e. objects, on the truth values of sentences.

However, to know which rules are correct and meaning-conferring we first need to know what the sentences involved mean.

There is also no help in recourse to talking of 'neural events' or the like: it is true that these, unlike mental entities, are specifiable independently of the sentences whose usage they may accompany (at least in principle); however they are quite like thoughts in that if they are specified in this way, they cannot really provide us with meanings.

Another story, however, can be told: a story which construes the switch from the more traditional, "static" semantic theories to the more recent, "dynamic" ones, like DRT, in terms of acknowledging certain inferential properties of certain sentences (prototypically those involving anaphora) - properties which are hard to account for with recourse only to traditional tools.

Evincing Kamp's own example (personal communication), if we analyze the sentences One of the three candidates is over forty and Two of the three candidates are under forty by traditional means, we are unable to account for the important difference between them, namely that the former can, while the latter cannot, be followed by We eliminate him. This vantage point lets us see DRT, and semantic theory in general, as an explicit reconstruction of structural, inferential patterns governing our use of language carried out via explicating the roles of individual expressions within these patterns.

What we do in explicating semantics of words and sentences via formulas and diagrams is not picturing extralinguistic things or concepts or structures purported to be the meanings of the expressions; we rather envisage the roles of the words and sentences within the structure (esp. inferential structure) of language13.

To ask whether (3) is a reasonable semantic analysis is to ask whether DRS's can be put into correspondence with English sentences in such a way that (A) there is a 'reasonable' extent to which DRS's defined to imply (to be implied by) other DRS's correspond to sentences intuitively implying (being 13 Thus providing what Sellars (1974) calls their functional classification.

DRS's; (B) the inferential properties of DRS's are in some sense more explicit than those of English sentences (the properties can be somehow read off from the DRS's themselves); and (C) (3) corresponds to Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it. This yields an understanding of the nature of the praxis of semantic analysis which may differ dramatically from the commonsense view.

Frege and Wittgenstein also realized that the elements of language that are primarily significant are not words, but rather sentences, and that the discernment of the meanings of parts of a sentence is 'parasitic upon its structure' .