Meaning Holism and De Re Ascription

Meaning Holism and De Re Ascription

1 Introduction According to inferential role semantics (IRS), for an expression to have a particular meaning or express a certain concept is for subjects to be disposed to make, or to treat as proper, certain inferential transitions involving that expression. 1 Such a theory of meaning is holistic, since according to it the meaning or concept any given expression possesses or expresses depends ...

Minimal Meaning Holism

1. Fears, worries and hopes Holism is a multifarious doctrine, which pertains to language, thought, action, confirmation or hypothesis testing, and the nature of reality. Meaning holism is also a multifarious doctrine, which pertains to expressions, sentences, kinds of sentences, languages, meanings, and possibly all the rest of the various things just mentioned. Meaning holism is intricate, "i...

De re and De dicto Modality in Islamic Traditional Logic

Literal Meaning and re

Based on psychological studies which show that metaphors and other nonliteral constructions are comprehended in the same amount of time as comparable literal constructions, some researchers have concluded that literal meaning is not computed during metaphor comprehension. In this paper, we suggest that the empirical evidence does not rule out the possibility that literal meaning is constructed....

De Re and De Se

1. De re thought and token-reflexivity There is an intuitive contrast between descriptive thoughts about an object (e.g. the thought that the strongest man in the world can lift 150 kilos) and 'nondescriptive' or 'de re' thoughts about an object (e.g. the thought that that man is drunk). But it is not easy to make the contrast explicit without going stipulative. The distinction between de re th...