Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind

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OUP Oxford, Jul 1, 1999 - Philosophy - 302 pages
Gilbert Harman presents a selection of fifteen interconnected essays on fundamental issues at the centre of analytic philosophy. The book opens with a group of four essays discussing basic principles of reasoning and rationality. The next three essays argue against the idea that certain claims are true by virtue of meaning and knowable by virtue of meaning. In the third group of essays Harman sets out his own view of meaning, arguing that it depends upon the functioning of concepts in reasoning, perception, and action, by which these concepts are related to the world. He also examines the relation between language and thought. The final three essays investigate the nature of mind, developing further the themes already set out. Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind offers an integrated presentation of this rich and influential body of work.

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Contents

Introduction
1
what Hypotheses to Take Seriously
75
Pragmatism and Reasons for Belief
93
The Death of Meaning
119
Doubts about Conceptual Analysis
138
Analyticity Regained?
144
Three Levels of Meaning
155
Language Thought and Communication
166
Meaning and Semantics
192
Nonsolipsistic Conceptual Role Semantics
206
Wide Functionalism
235
The Intrinsic Quality of Experience
244
Immanent and Transcendent Approaches
262
Bibliography
277
Index of Names
287
Copyright

Language Learning
183

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Page 12 - Linda is more likely to be a feminist bank teller than a bank teller, they may be using 'more likely' to mean something like 'more representative'.
Page 194 - Semantic markers are symbols: items in the vocabulary of an artificial language we may call Semantic Markerese. Semantic interpretation by means of them amounts merely to a translation algorithm from the object language to the auxiliary language Markerese. But we can know the Markerese translation of an English sentence without knowing the first thing about the meaning of the English sentence: namely, the conditions under which it would be true. Semantics with no treatment of truth conditions is...
Page 194 - Semantic interpretation by means of them amounts merely to a translation algorithm from the object language to the auxiliary language Markerese. But we can know the Markerese translation of an English sentence without knowing the first thing about the meaning of the English sentence: namely, the conditions under which it would be true. Semantics with no treatment of truth conditions is not semantics. Translation into Markerese is at best a substitute for real semantics, relying either on our tacit...
Page 238 - This assumption is the assumption that no psychological state, properly so called, presupposes the existence of any individual other than the subject to whom that state is ascribed.
Page 97 - I am as impressed as anyone with the vastness of what language contributes to science and to one's whole view of the world; and in particular I grant that one's hypothesis as to what there is, eg, as to there being universals, is at bottom just as arbitrary or pragmatic a matter as one's adoption of a new brand of set theory or even a new system of bookkeeping. Carnap in turn recognizes that such decisions, however conventional, "will nevertheless usually be influenced by theoretical knowledge.
Page 180 - Moreover, it appears incorrect to regard many so-called "selectional violations" as not corresponding to possible messages, since many of them can turn up in reports of dreams: (2) I dreamed that my toothbrush was pregnant. (3) I dreamed that I poured my mother into an inkwell. (4) I dreamed that I was a proton and fell in love with a shapely greenand-orange-striped electron. or in reports of the beliefs of other persons: 4 (5) John thinks that electrons are green with orange stripes.
Page 164 - Many contemporary linguists, however, see iccommunication and other social uses of language" as of secondary importance, and an "adequate theory" as needing to show only "how the meaning of a sentence is determined by its grammatical structure and the meaning of its lexical items".
Page 222 - ... Perhaps misunderstanding on this matter is partly responsible for the fact that both sides of the inverted spectrum argument tend to see nothing at all in the other side. To quote Harman on the inverted spectrum from an earlier paper, "I speak of an 'argument

About the author (1999)

Gilbert Harman is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.

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