Book Information

Semantic Relationism

By: Kit Fine (New York University)

Series: The Blackwell / Brown Lectures in Philosophy

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Description

Introducing a new and ambitious position in the field, Kit Fine's Semantic Relationism is a major contribution to the philosophy of language.

• Written by one of today's most respected philosophers
• Argues for a fundamentally new approach to the study of representation in language and thought
• Proposes that there may be representational relationships between expressions or elements of thought that are not grounded in the intrinsic representational features of the expressions or elements themselves
• Forms part of the prestigious new Blackwell/Brown Lectures in Philosophy series, based on an ongoing series of lectures by today's leading philosophers

TopTable of Contents

Preface
Introduction
1. Coordination among Variables
A. The Desiderata
B. The Problem
C. The Contextualist Response
D. The Dismissive Response
E. The Instantial Approach
F. The Algebraic Approach
G. Relational Semantics for First-order Logic
2. Coordination within Language
A. Frege's Puzzle
B. Rejecting Compositionality
C. Semantic Fact
D. Closure
E. Referentialism Reconsidered
F. A Relational Semantics for Names
G. Transparency
3. Coordination within Thought
A. Intentional Coordination
B. Strict Co-representation
C. The Content of Thought
D. The Cognitive Puzzle
4. Coordination between Speakers
A. Kripke's Puzzle
B. Some Related Puzzles
C. A Response
D. A Solution
E. A Deeper Puzzle
F. A Deeper Solution
G. The Role of Variables in Belief Reports
H. Some Semantical Morals
Postscript: Further Work
Index

TopAbout the Author

Kit Fine is Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at New York University, and specializes in Metaphysics, Logic, and Philosophy of Language. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies and is a former editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic. He is the author of Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers (2005), and the co-author of Worlds, Times and Selves and Reasoning with Arbitrary Objects (Blackwell, 1985). He has also written papers in ancient philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and economic theory, in addition to the papers in his central fields of interest.