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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Logical Form And The Vernacular Revisited, Andrew Botterell, Robert J. Stainton
Logical Form And The Vernacular Revisited, Andrew Botterell, Robert J. Stainton
Robert J. Stainton
Logical Form And The Vernacular, Reinaldo Elugardo, Robert J. Stainton
Logical Form And The Vernacular, Reinaldo Elugardo, Robert J. Stainton
Robert J. Stainton
Vernacularism is the view that logical forms are fundamentally assigned to natural language expressions, and are only derivatively assigned to anything else, e.g., propositions, mental representations, expressions of symbolic logic, etc. In this paper, we argue that Vernacularism is not as plausible as it first appears because of non-sentential speech. More specifically, there are argument-premises, meant by speakers of non-sentences, for which no natural language paraphrase is readily available in the language used by the speaker and the hearer. The speaker can intend this proposition and the hearer can recover it (and its logical form). Since they cannot, by hypothesis, …
Unembedded Definite Descriptions And Relevance, Robert J. Stainton
Unembedded Definite Descriptions And Relevance, Robert J. Stainton
Robert J. Stainton
Definite descriptions (e.g. 'The king of France in 1997', 'The teacher of Aristotle') do not stand for particulars. Or so I will assume. The semantic alternative has seemed to be that descriptions only have meaning within sentences: i.e., that their semantic contribution is given syncategorimatically. This doesn't seem right, however, because descriptions can be used and understood outside the context of any sentence. Nor is this use simply a matter of "ellipsis." Since descriptions do not denote particulars, but seem to have a meaning in isolation, I propose that they be assigned generalized quantifiers as denotations — i.e. a kind …