Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality. In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences.
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted.
In the philosophy of language and linguistics, speech act is something expressed by an individual that not only presents information but performs an action as well. For example, the phrase "I would like the kimchi, could you please pass it to me?" is considered a speech act as it expresses the speaker's desire to acquire the kimchi, as well as presenting a request that someone pass the kimchi to them. According to Kent Bach, "almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience". The contemporary use of the term goes back to J. L. Austin's development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts serve their function once they are said or communicated. These are commonly taken to include acts such as apologizing, promising, ordering, answering, requesting, complaining, warning, inviting, refusing, and congratulating.
Rudolf Carnap was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. He is considered "one of the giants among twentieth-century philosophers."
John Henry McDowell is a South African philosopher, formerly a Fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work has been in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. McDowell was one of three recipients of the 2010 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award, and is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the British Academy.
John Langshaw Austin was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps best known for developing the theory of speech acts.
The denotation of a word is its central sense and the entire set of objects that can be contained in the word's meaning. Denotation is sometimes contrasted to connotation, which includes associated meanings and pragmatic inferences, because the denotational meaning of a word is perceived through visible concepts, whereas connotational meaning evokes sensible attitudes towards the phenomena. This concept is relevant in several fields, including linguistics, philosophy, and computer science. From a philosophical standpoint, exploration of meaning as it relates to denotation is important in the study of the philosophy of language.
Ian MacDougall Hacking is a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he has won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and been a member of many prestigious groups, including the Order of Canada, the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy.
Herbert Paul Grice, usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language. He is best known for his theory of implicature and the cooperative principle, which became foundational concepts in the linguistic field of pragmatics. His work on meaning has also influenced the philosophical study of semantics.
An implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly saying everything we want to communicate. This phenomenon is part of pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics. The philosopher H. P. Grice coined the term in 1975. Grice distinguished conversational implicatures, which arise because speakers are expected to respect general rules of conversation, and conventional ones, which are tied to certain words such as "but" or "therefore". Take for example the following exchange:
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.
In social science generally and linguistics specifically, the cooperative principle describes how people achieve effective conversational communication in common social situations—that is, how listeners and speakers act cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way.
Stephen Roy Albert Neale is a British philosopher and specialist in the philosophy of language who has written extensively about meaning, information, interpretation, and communication, and more generally about issues at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. Neale is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).
In semantics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metasemantics, meaning "is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they intend, express, or signify".
In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language, the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought.
The propensity theory of probability is one interpretation of the concept of probability. Theorists who adopt this interpretation think of probability as a physical propensity, or disposition, or tendency of a given type of physical situation to yield an outcome of a certain kind, or to yield a long run relative frequency of such an outcome.
1979 in philosophy
Ian Rumfitt is a British philosopher currently serving as a senior research fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Jennifer Mather Saul is a philosopher working in philosophy of language and philosophy of feminism. Saul is a professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield and the University of Waterloo.
Logic is an interdisciplinary field which studies truth and reasoning. Informal logic seeks to characterize valid arguments informally, for instance by listing varieties of fallacies. Formal logic represents statements and argument patterns symbolically, using formal systems such as first order logic. Within formal logic, mathematical logic studies the mathematical characteristics of formal logical systems, while philosophical logic applies them to philosophical problems such as the nature of meaning, knowledge, and existence. Systems of formal logic are also applied in other fields including linguistics, cognitive science, and computer science.