Compositionality

By Richard, Mark

A language is compositional if the meaning of each of its complex expressions (for example, ‘black dog’) is determined entirely by the meanings its parts (‘black’, ‘dog’) and ...

Sense and reference

By Marti, Genoveva

The ‘reference’ of an expression is the entity the expression designates or applies to. The ‘sense’ of an expression is the way in which the expression presents that ...

Semantics, conceptual role

By Block, Ned

According to conceptual role semantics (CRS), the meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent, for example, in perception, ...

Nihilism, metaphysical

By Coggins, Geraldine

Metaphysical nihilism is an answer to the question ‘could there have been nothing?’ In recent analytic philosophy this tends to be interpreted as ‘could there have been no ...

Daodejing

By Lafargue, Michael

The Daodejing (or Tao Te Ching) is a brief work probably composed during the period 350–250 bc. It later became the most authoritative ‘scripture’ in the Daoist ...

Quantifiers

By Hintikka, Jaakko; Sandu, Gabriel

The quantifiers ‘some’ and ‘every’ were the object of the very first logical theory, Aristotelian syllogistic. An example of a syllogism is ‘Every Spartan is Greek, every Greek ...

Frege, Gottlob (1848–1925)

By George, Alexander; Heck, Richard

A German philosopher-mathematician, Gottlob Frege was primarily interested in understanding both the nature of mathematical truths and the means whereby they are ultimately to be justified. In general, ...

Propositional attitude statements

By Taylor, Kenneth A.

Propositional attitude statements – statements about our beliefs, desires, hopes and fears – exhibit certain logical peculiarities. For example, in apparent violation of Leibniz’s law of the indiscernibility ...

Propositions, sentences and statements

By Engel, Pascal

A sentence is a string of words formed according to the syntactic rules of a language. But a sentence has semantic as well as syntactic properties: the words ...

Semantics, possible worlds

By Perry, John R.

Possible worlds semantics (PWS) is a family of ideas and methods that have been used to analyse concepts of philosophical interest. PWS was originally focused on the important ...

Belief

We believe that there is coffee over there; we believe the special theory of relativity; we believe the surgeon; some of us believe in God. But plausibly what ...

Counterfactual conditionals

By Doring, Frank

‘If bats were deaf, they would hunt during the day.’ What you have just read is called a ‘counterfactual’ conditional; it is an ‘If…then…’ statement the components of ...

Davidson, Donald (1917–2003)

By Lepore, Ernie

Donald Davidson’s views about the relationship between our conceptions of ourselves as people and as complex physical objects have had significant impact on contemporary discussions of such topics ...

Davidson, Donald (1917–2003)

Donald Davidson is a central figure in twentieth-century American philosophy. Of the five volumes that make up Davidson’s collected essays, the best known are the first two, ...

Frege–Geach problem

By Schroeder, Mark

The Frege–Geach problem is an important and well-known obstacle to metaethical theories belonging to the broadly noncognitivist tradition, including emotivism, prescriptivism and expressivism. It is also sometimes called ...

Logic, philosophy of

By Forbes, Graeme

Philosophy of logic can be roughly characterized as those philosophical topics which have emerged either from the technical development of symbolic (mathematical) logic, or from the motivations that ...

Meaning and truth

By Williams, Stephen G.

Analytic philosophy has seen a resurgent interest in the possibility of explaining linguistic meaning in terms of truth, which many philosophers have seen as considerably more tractable than ...

Proper names

By Forbes, Graeme

The Roman general Julius Caesar was assassinated on 14 March 44 bc by conspirators led by Brutus and Cassius. It is a remarkable fact that, in so ...

Syntax

By Neale, Stephen

Syntax (more loosely, ‘grammar’) is the study of the properties of expressions that distinguish them as members of different linguistic categories, and ‘well-formedness’, that is, the ways in ...

Semantics, game-theoretic

By Hand, Michael

Game-theoretic semantics (GTS) uses concepts from game theory to study how the truth and falsity of the sentences of a language depend upon the truth and falsity of ...

Predicate calculus

By Smiley, Timothy

The predicate calculus is the dominant system of modern logic, having displaced the traditional Aristotelian syllogistic logic that had been the previous paradigm. Like Aristotle’s, it is a ...

Creativity

By Young, James O.

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Persons

By Olson, Eric

A person, as most philosophers use the term, is something with certain special mental properties. Locke, for example, defined ‘person’ as ‘a thinking intelligent being, that has reason ...

God, Indian conceptions of

By Bhattacharyya, Sibajiban

In the Ṛg Veda, the oldest text in India, many gods and goddesses are mentioned by name; most of them appear to be deifications of natural powers, such ...

Language, philosophy of

By Crimmins, Mark

Philosophical interest in language, while ancient and enduring (see Language, ancient philosophy of; Language, medieval theories of; Language, Renaissance philosophy of; Language, early modern philosophy of), has blossomed ...