Volume 2012, Issue 188

The increasing interest in pragmatics and the development of pragmatic issues in the philosophical-logical province of theoretical semiotics over the past five decades is reviewed against the backdrop of pragmatic themes in the philosophy of language.

Modern philosophy of science was characterized as an analysis of the language of science based on mathematical logic. The formalistic perspective regarding mathematics and logic (which were conceived as linguistic constructions “devoid of meaning”) had to be corrected when applied to empirical theories. These were presented as formal system to which their intended meaning is granted through an “interpretation” (reflecting the fact that the initial “syntactic” view had been integrated in mathematical logic by the elaboration of “semantics”). But what is the meaning of a linguistic expression? The semantics of mathematical logic (model theory) identifies meaning with the referents of the expression. However, Frege had recovered an ancient distinction specifying that sense and reference are two different constituents of meaning, and the identification of meaning with sense has become widespread in the philosophy of language. Both positions are one-sided and entail difficulties that have affected the analytical philosophy of science. The aim of this paper is to recover the importance of a “three level semantics” (sign-sense-reference) and discuss other related notions (such as intension-extension), by pointing out the operational and not just linguistic or mental nature of reference. This has also consequences regarding the ontological purport of the different sciences.

This paper examines relations between formal logic and semiotics. The latter is understood traditionally as consisting of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The view that is presented follows classical approaches offered by Tarski, Carnap, and Quine. In particular, formal methods are extensively used. The main argument is that any formal analysis of language must proceed in partly informal metalanguage. This fact decides that pragmatic aspects of language are distinguished. Otherwise speaking, the concept of meaning is pragmatic in its character. Several formal results support this view. In particular, decisions that models of languages are standard (intended) are pragmatically grounded.

Two concepts of truth as correspondence of ideas with facts are analyzed. One of them is the thought-external fact relation, and the other is the fact-proposition one. The two maps are then composed, and the resulting map is assumed to formalize the concept of truth as adequacy or correspondence of ideas to facts. Besides, some desiderata for a correspondence theory of partial truth are proposed. Finally, the truth criteria employed in science and technology are recalled.

In this paper, we propose a definition of the intention of lying as well as other communication intentions and finally we define what a lie is. We present these results in a set-theory terminology applied to the notions derived from Grice's (and partly formalized by Gazdar) analyses of conversational implicatures and Tokarz's ideas of formalizing performative utterances. We examine a few examples in order to differentiate between our proposals and the Chisholm and Feehan's definition of lie.

Impersonating someone and reasoning on his or her behalf are current practices in everyday life. It requires the ability to perform representation, simulation, and metarepresentation. An illuminating description of these cognitive and linguistic operations has been given recently in terms of projection, assumption, and retrojection. The present essay aims at supplementing that description with a formal treatment that shows how informal inferences involving reported beliefs can be validated. The last two sections of the paper show the logical links that tie together the inferences based on “believing that” or “knowing that” to the inferences based on “knowing what” and “knowing how.”

Among various accounts of mental content and linguistic meaning there is a family of inferentialist approaches, unified by the idea of elucidating content or meaning in terms of inference or inferential role. In the last decade, a very distinctive and original approach of this kind has been put forward by Robert B. Brandom (1994, 2000). There are many presuppositions and building blocks of Brandom's inferentialism. Here I shall discuss merely two of them, namely, his rationalist and semantic pragmatism, and the role of content- or meaning-conferring material inference. In the course of this discussion, various objections will be raised. Taken together, they seem to support the conclusion that weak inferentialism is a more defensible view than Brandom's strong inferentialism.

This paper aims towards a coherent account of the sort of common knowledge that is necessary for making felicitous utterances in a conversation. The hypothesis to that effect, originating from Lewis (1969) and Schiffer (1972) is presented in section 1 along with the standard definition of common knowledge. However, as Clark and Marshall (1981) observed, that definition leads to a paradox; in section 2, I discuss the possibilities of avoiding it. I argue (contra Clark) in favor of a fixed-point approach à la Barwise (1989), which relies on the notion of coordination devices. Since the argument about the common knowledge paradox resorts to the cognitive plausibility of the notion, in section 3 I try to clarify its empirical status by considering some relevant data. This being done, the outlook of this paper is sketched in section 4, being a genetic account of coordination devices in terms of some simple games. Its purpose is to supplement the fixed-point approach to common knowledge in parallel with Clark's (1996) psychological account. This concludes with an attempt at a cognitively plausible definition of common knowledge.

We point out the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels of proofs and of mistakes in mathematics and the increasing difficulties in checking the correctness of a proof. We analyze the role of mistakes in mathematical creativity and we point out the frequency of mistakes (malign or benign) in works opening new ways in science. Significant examples are provided.

In this article, two possible standpoints concerning the nature of mathematical entities are discussed: object realism (according to which the identity of mathematical objects is determined by their intrinsic properties); and structuralism (according to which it is determined only by their relations to other mathematical objects). I discuss some motivations that underlie the structuralist view of mathematical entities, and indicate some philosophical drawbacks of this position. In particular, I argue, that these motivations and intuitions violate basic ontological intuitions concerning the notions of set and membership. I also claim that, from the point of view of mathematical structuralism, the main problem of object realism is the reference problem. On the other hand, from the point of view of object realism, mathematical structuralism has to accept very strong ontological assumptions (reifying classes of isomorphism). It is also not quite clear how the notion of identity is understood from the point of mathematical structuralism. Finally, I argue that the difference between mathematical structuralism and object realism is (at least partly) a matter of formulation.

The question of the meaning of indeterministic tense operators is discussed. Solutions based on the branching-time model presuppose conceiving of time as an attribute. Our solution — which we believe to be more intuitive — is based on the concept of time as a substance.

This paper addresses the issue of the applicability of David Lewis's possible world semantics of counterfactual conditionals to the explication of some quantum-mechanical phenomena. Three main reasons why counterfactual semantics may be useful for this task are given. It is further argued that two possible semantic approaches to counterfactuals should be taken into account involving spatiotemporal events that satisfy requirements of special relativity. The main problem considered in the article is how to expand both approaches into full semantic systems. The first of the approaches is known to be amenable to a generalization within the Lewis-style semantics. The second one, however, poses a greater challenge, as it has been proven (Bigaj 2004) that it cannot be incorporated into a similarity-based counterfactual semantics. In this article, an alternative method of generalization for the second counterfactual semantics is developed, which goes beyond Lewis's framework based on the rigid similarity relation between possible worlds. The proposed method of evaluating counterfactuals is then put to the test using an example from the quantum theory. As a result of this test, a small correction of the method turns out to be necessary.

New philosophical insights are suggested by our experience with computer simulation of human qualities. In an attempt to overcome the division between analytic and “continental” philosophy, both the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of dialogue are used to extend the Turing Test, a famous operational way of checking whether robots can pretend to be in some respects indistinguishable from human beings. A thought experiment, conceived as the ultimate strengthening of the Turing Test, is proposed: Can sufficiently developed robots without human help bring up a child so that the child can acquire all human qualities such as genuine personal subjectivity, the understanding of numbers, etc.?

I argue that influential purely syntactic views of computation, shared by such philosophers as John Searle and Hilary Putnam, are mistaken. First, I discuss common objections, and during the discussion I mention additional necessary conditions of implementation of computations in physical processes that are neglected in classical philosophical accounts of computation. Then I try to show why realism in regards of physical computations is more plausible, and more coherent with any realistic attitude towards natural science than the received view, and distinguish computational simulation, implementation, and re-engineering. I also point out the sources of confusion about what computation is that seem to stem from disregarding the use/mention distinction.

There are many kind of ontologies. But what does it really mean that we speak about ontology of a certain kind? Different philosophers understand the notion of ontological primacy in different ways. In this paper, we will consider what the possible meanings of the notion of ontological primacy are, and what assumptions should be fulfilled to assure the existence of a unique solution to the problem of ontological primacy (of entities of a certain kind). This will also solve the problem of the kind of ontology.

This paper concerns existential expressions (EE), especially the verb “be” and its equivalents in different languages of the world. EE are expressions that can refer to being or to existence. I sketch the lexicology, semantics, syntax (with Ajdukiewicz's tools), and pragmatics of EE and I point out the connections of EE with different alternative ontologies (“latent,” as Kahn says, in the natural language). I also indicate some ontological (existential) problems in formal logic. My conclusion is that the central function of Be is predicative (copulative) and Be means “to be so-and-so” or “to have a property.”

The text presents Ajdukiewicz's radical conventionalism and Kuhn's concept of scientific revolutions, especially in view of the question about progress in science and evolution of its language. It shows the similarity and complementarity of those concepts, as well as their later liberalization, which also developed similarly in many points.

Categorial grammar, developed by Ajdukiewicz, was the first formal account of the general syntax of language. It was based on profound insights of Frege and Husserl as to the nature of sense and reference of linguistic expressions. Dichotomies of operator versus argument, basic category versus functor category, and names versus sentences alongside with parallelisms such as syntax-semantics are counted as essential. Further development of categorial grammar was influenced by comparisons with generative grammar and by adopting Chomsky's criterion of empirical adequacy as the main tool for assessing theories of grammar. That lead to a substantial formal enrichment and “flexibilization” of categorial grammar on the one hand, but on the other hand it resulted in abandoning original central ideas. Eventually, categorial grammar ceased to be a uniform theory and became leveled with countless hybrid theories stemming from considerations about particular linguistic phenomena, which seriously undermined the task of understanding syntax. In this paper, I propose to return to original rudiments in search for a cure for the said dispersion of explanatory power. The theory of syntax should be divided into a one simple, categorial core of grammar, in Ajdukiewicz' style, and multiple interfaces joining the core with idiosyncrasies of particular languages, to be developed by linguists.

In this paper, a formal theory is presented that describes syntactic and semantic mechanisms of philosophical discourses. They are treated as peculiar language systems possessing deep derivational structures called architectonic forms of philosophical systems, encoded in philosophical mind. Architectonic forms are constituents of more complex structures called architectonic spaces of philosophy. They are understood as formal and algorithmic representations of various philosophical traditions. The formal derivational machinery of a given space determines its class of all possible architectonic forms. Some of them stand under factual historical philosophical systems and they organize processes of doing philosophy within these systems. Many architectonic forms have never been realized in the history of philosophy. The presented theory may be interpreted as falling under Hegel's paradigm of comprehending cultural texts. This paradigm is enriched and inspired with Propp's formal, morphological view on texts. The peculiarity of this modification of the Hegel-Propp paradigm consists of the use of algebraic and algorithmic tools of modeling processes of cultural development. To speak metaphorically, the theory is an attempt at the mathematical and logical history of philosophy inspired by the Internet metaphor. And that is why it belongs to the tradition of doing metaphilosophy in The Lvov-Warsaw School, which is continued today mainly by Woleński, Pelc, Perzanowski, and Jadacki.

We consider the notion of everyday language. We claim that everyday language is semantically bounded by the properties expressible in the existential fragment of second-order logic. Two arguments for this thesis are formulated. First, we show that Barwise's so-called test of negation normality works properly only when assuming our main thesis. Second, we discuss the argument from practical computability for finite universes. Everyday language sentences are directly or indirectly verifiable. We show that in both cases they are bounded by second-order existential properties. Moreover, there are known examples of everyday language sentences that are the most difficult in this class (NPTIME-complete).

In our paper, we develop a proposal in which the predicational material in a demonstrative description is conventionally implicated and not part of the semantics proper. It is argued that existing approaches to demonstrative descriptions are inadequate because they do not correctly account for the full range of facts covering the properties of demonstrative descriptions. According to Richard's (1993) view, the descriptive element of a demonstrative description contributes to the truth-conditional content of the relevant utterance: “That F is G” entails (implies logically) “That (it) is F.” On Braun (1994) and Borg's (2000) view, the descriptive element contributes to the Kaplanian character of the relevant utterance: “That F is G” presupposes (in the Strawsonian sense) “That (it) is F.” We also argue that demonstrative descriptions should not be identified with Gödelian descriptions: “[The x: x = a and x is F]” (Lepore and Ludwig 2000). We think that a very promising alternative would be to regard the predicational content not as material that is part of the semantics of sentences but rather as material that is conventionally implicated: “That F is G” implicates conventionally “That (it) is F.”

In this paper I show that the first part of Putnam's Twin Earth argument rests on equivocation. If we distinguish different senses of the word “means” we will see that Putnam presupposes in this part of his argument that the meaning of “water” on Earth is different from the meaning of “water” on Twin Earth. Once the equivocation is removed, it becomes apparent that the argument cannot be used in the proof that natural kind terms are nondescriptive. I also argue that — contrary to what Putnam is claiming — his account does not preserve the traditional assumption that intension determines extension. It is true that in his conception meaning determines extension, but his notion of meaning is very different from the traditional one.