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 ...

Intensionality

By Christmas, Simon

The truth or falsity of many sentences depends only on which things are being talked about. Within intensional contexts, however, truth values also depend on how those ...

Animal thought, recent work on

By Rey, Georges; Hauser, Marc

In recent years there has been a good deal of experimental work on the question of animal cognition, much of it modelled on recent experiments in infant cognition. ...

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

By Crimmins, Mark

Semantics is the systematic study of meaning. Current work in this field builds on the work of logicians and linguists as well as of philosophers. Philosophers are interested ...

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 ...

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 ...

Imperative logic

By Green, Mitchell

Imperatives lie at the heart of both practical and moral reasoning, yet they have been overshadowed by propositions and relegated by many philosophers to the status of exclamations. ...

Intensional logics

By Garson, James W.

Intensional logics are systems that distinguish an expression’s intension (roughly, its sense or meaning) from its extension (reference, denotation). The purpose of bringing intensions into logic is to ...

Prior, Arthur Norman (1914–69)

By Williams, C.J.F.

Prior is most often thought of as the creator of tense logic. (Tense logic examines operators such as ‘It will be the case that’ in the way that ...

Semantics, teleological (teleosemantics)

By Godfrey-Smith, Peter

Teleological/biological theories of meaning use a biological concept of function to explain how the internal states of organisms like ourselves can represent conditions in the world. These theories ...

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 ...

Indirect discourse

By Segal, Gabriel

Indirect discourse is a mode of speech-reporting whereby a speaker conveys the content of someone’s utterance without quoting the actual words. Thus, if Pierre says, ‘Paris est belle’, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Reference

By Devitt, Michael

It is usual to think that referential relations hold between language and thoughts on one hand, and the world on the other. The most striking example of such ...

Content: wide and narrow

By Bach, Kent

A central problem in philosophy is to explain, in a way consistent with their causal efficacy, how mental states can represent states of affairs in the world. Consider, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Colour and qualia

By Levine, Joseph

There are two basic philosophical problems about colour. The first concerns the nature of colour itself. That is, what sort of property is it? When I say of ...

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, ...

Intensionality and hyperintensionality

By Nolan, Daniel

Roughly speaking, the extension of an expression is what it picks out in our world: an object for a name, a set of objects for a predicate, and ...

Intentionality

By Crane, Tim

Intentionality is the mind’s capacity to direct itself on things. Mental states like thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes (and others) exhibit intentionality in the sense that they are always ...

Semantics, informational

By McLaughlin, Brian P.; Rey, Georges

Information-theoretic semantics (ITS) attempts to provide a naturalistic account of the conditions under which a psychological state such as a belief or desire has a particular mental content: ...