Meaning, Truth, and the Limits of Analysis: Ten Studies

208 Pages·2022·10.646 MB·English

by  David Wiggins

Meaning, Truth,
and the Limits
of Analysis
David Wiggins

MEANING, TRUTH, AND THE
LIMITS OF ANALYSIS

MEANING,
TRUTH, AND
THE LIMITS
OF ANALYSIS
TEN STUDIES
DAVID WIGGINS
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949449
ISBN 978—0—19—872617—3
DOI: 10.1093/0s0/9780198726173.001.0001
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Contents
Sources Vil
Introduction
Meaning and Truth-Conditions: From Frege’s Grand
Design to Davidson’s
Concept and Copula
. Donald Davidson’s Account of Semantic Interpretation.
How Comprehensive is it? ‘All’, ‘Some’, and ‘Most’
Names, Existence, and Contingency
Modes of Grammatical Combination, Adverbs,
and the Case of Action-sentences
Three Moments in the Theory of Definition or Analysis:
Its Possibility, Its Aim or Aims, and Its Limit or Terminus
Locke: ‘The Great Conduit’
. Languages as Things in their Own Right I18
Peirce: Reflections on Inquiry and Truth arising from his
Method for the Fixation of Belief 129
An Indefinibilist-cum-Substantivist Account of Truth
I10.
and the Marks of Truth 164
Bibliography 177
Index 189

Sources
Chapter 1 was first published in B. Hale and C. Wright eds Blackwell
Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Chapter 2 draws on ‘The Sense and Reference of Predicates: A Running
Repair to Frege’s Doctrine and a Plea for the Copula’, Philosophical Quarterly
34 (1984), 311—28.
Chapter 3 is based on ‘“Most” and “All”: Some Comments on a Familiar
Programme, and on the Logical Form of Quantified Sentences’ in M. Platts
ed. Reference, Truth and Reality, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Chapter 4 draws upon material from ‘Contingency, Identity, and de re and de
dicto Necessity’ in Jonathan Dancy ed. Papers on Language and Logic: Proceedings
of the 1979 Keele Conference on Language and Logic (Keele: Keele University
Library, 1980); ‘“The Sense and Reference of Predicates: A Running Repair
to Frege’s Doctrine and a Plea for the Copula’, Philosophical Quarterly 34
(1984), 311—28; The Kant—Frege—RussellView of Existence: A Rehabilitation
of the Second Level View’ in W. S. Armstrong, D. Raffman, and N. Asher
eds Modality, Morality and Belief: Essays for Ruth Barcan Marcus, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994; and ‘Names, Fictional Names and
“Really” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl.Vol. 73 (1999), 271-86.
Chapter 6 draws upon material from ‘Three Moments in the Theory of
Definition or Analysis: its Possibility, its Aim or Aims and its Limit or
Terminus’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 107 (2006/7), 73—109.
Chapter 7 is based upon ‘Language: The Great Conduit’, Times Literary
Supplement, 12 April 1996, 15.
Chapter 8 is based upon ‘Languages as Social Objects’, Philosophy 72 (1997),
499—524.
Chapter 9 1s based upon ‘Reflections on Enquiry and Truth arising from
Peirce’s Method for the Fixation of Belief’ in Cheryl Misak ed. The
Viii SOURCES
Cambridge Companion to Peirce, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
Chapter 10 draws upon Chapter IV of Needs, Values, Truth (amended third
edition Oxford University Press, 2002) and ‘An Indefinibilist-cum-
Normative View of Truth and the Marks of Truth’in R. Schantz ed. What
is Truth?, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002.
Permission from the original publishers to draw upon these publications is
gratefully acknowledged.