Thought and World: An Austere Portrayal of Truth, Reference, and Semantic Correspondence

by Christopher S. Hill

Overview

There is an important family of semantic notions that are applied to thoughts and to the conceptual constituents of thoughts—as when one says that the thought that the Universe is expanding is true. Christopher Hill presents a theory of the content of such notions. That theory is largely deflationary in spirit. It represents a broad range of semantic notions free from substantive metaphysical and empirical presuppositions. He also explains the relationship of mirroring or semantic correspondence linking thoughts to reality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521814843
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/11/2002
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Philosophy
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.51(d)
Lexile:	1510L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; 2. Truth in the realm of thoughts; 3. The marriage of heaven and hell: reconciling deflationary semantics with correspondence intuitions; 4. Indexical representation and deflationary semantics; 5. Why meaning matters; 6. Into the wild blue yonder: non-designating concepts, vagueness, semantic paradox, and logical paradox.

Editorial Reviews

'Hill's excellent Thought and World is a highly readable and important defence of a form of deflationism … it deserves, and will no dout receive, careful study.' The Philosophical Quarterly

From the Publisher

Hill (philosophy, U. of Arkansas) advocates for a deflationary theory of philosophical truth that argues that truth is philosophically and empirically neutral. In other words, all truth is characterized solely by the propositional form that states that "the thought that

is true if and only if

." The implication of this is that particular philosophical theories are not necessary for the acquirement of the concept of truth. Differing from other deflationist theorists, Hill does believe its possible to incorporate correspondence theorist ideas of the relation of semantic correspondence between thoughts and the world without abandoning the core commitments of deflationism. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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