Aesthetics has typically been regarded as an arena where claims about truth cannot be made as questions about art seem to involve more matters of taste than knowledge. In _Real Beauty_, however, Eddy Zemach maintains that beauty, ugliness, gracefulness, gaudiness, and similar aesthetic properties are real features of public things and argues that whether these features are present is a matter of fact that can be empirically investigated. By examining the opposing nonrealistic views of Subjectivism, Noncognitivism, and Relativism, (...) Zemach attempts to show how antirealistic interpretations of art generate absurd results and leave the realistic reading as the only cogent semantic interpretation of aesthetic statements. By discussing what inclines most people to hold nonrealistic views in aesthetics, such as the fluctuations of taste in fashion, Zemach argues that Realism can account for these fluctuations. He proposes that the aesthetic value of some things is due to their relations to other things and that relation may be temporal, resulting in the need for a temporal point for the correct temporal angle from which to view things. Zemach concludes that great art reveals significant truths about reality and that significantly true statements are aesthetically valuable, hence truth is an aesthetic merit. (shrink)

This book is based on two new nominalistic theses: first, that material things (houses, cats, people, symphonies, and also hair, milk, red, and love) are ...

The author argues that what wittgenstein says in the "tractatus" about "the mystical" depends heavily upon what he says about facts, Objects, Logic, And language, And that any interpretation which introduces alien mystical doctrines to clarify his intentions misses the mark. To establish his thesis, He first examines wittgenstein's concepts of the world and the I as godheads. Within this metaphysical framework, He then discusses wittgenstein's ethical theory, Centering on his notions of happiness and the will, And considers the identity (...) of the ethical and the aesthetic in wittgenstein's early thought. (staff). (shrink)

I defend a slightly modified version of geach's rule r, I.E., That although both a and b are g, It is possible for a to be the same f as b and a different h than b, Provided that the question whether a and b are the same g is undecidable. Answering those who object to relative identity I claim that they tacitly adhere to a false fregean view, I.E., That one cannot use a singular term to denote an entity (...) x if it is not true that for every y, X=y or not x=y. I show, However, That such terms are, And must be, Used by every empirically oriented language with finite or infinite predicative arsenal, And hence relative identity is more handy than absolute identity. Finally I give a version of leibniz's law for relative identity. (shrink)

IT IS POSSIBLE to discern three main types of answers commonly given to the question about the nature of sensations. The first is the classical "private access" theory, according to which I can sense my own pain, while the pains of others can never be subject to direct inspection by me. The presence of overt pain behavior may inductively confirm the hypothesis that the body thus behaving is besouled [[sic]] and subject to a sensation of pain, but I can never (...) be sure that such pain really exists. I can feel only my own pain, and every pain I feel is necessarily my own. One token of this view is Cartesian dualism, but it is also adopted by most kinds of interactionism, epiphenomenalism, and their ilk. One of the notorious consequences of this theory is, that it makes the problem of Other Minds practically insoluble. Do the other humanoids have minds like my own, do they experience raw feelings similar to mine? The question remains logically unanswerable. The argument from analogy was often shown to be very tenuous, and one is therefore driven to accept the conclusion that sensation words must mean one thing in the context of egocentric sentences and quite another thing when the subject of the sentence is other than I. But if this is the case, mentalistic attributes proper are only I-ascriptive: that is, it would be a logical howler to apply them to anything other than myself; grammar thus forces me to adopt a position similar to that of the solipsist. (shrink)

Like frege, I claim that any singular term (a name, A definite description, Or an indexical) has a sense, And it refers to what satisfies that sense. Unlike frege, I say that this referent is the real world entity that satisfies the said sense in some belief world, Usually, The utterer's. Reference is a function from senses to transworld heirlines. Thus, My token of 'plato' may have a different sense than your token of 'plato', Yet both may refer to plato. (...) My token of 'the f' may have the same sense as your token of 'the f', Yet they may have different referents. My semantics constitutes, I believe, A new argument for the tenability of metaphysical realism. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers held that expressions are meaningful which have a mental entity and sentences are true when their meaning corresponds to reality. Wittgenstein is most often read by contemporary philosophers to reject both theses: meanings cannot constrain use of language, and reference to external reality is inconceivable. Zemach is influenced by Wittgenstein as well, but demonstrates the error of a relativistic interpretation of his work, especially when Wittgenstein's later work on the philosophy of psychology is fully considered. Combining his (...) interpretation of Wittgenstein as a mentalist with the use of Substance Logic, and the idea that meanings and their referents are tokens of the same type, Zemach restores the traditional view. The Reality of Meaning presents a clear survey of the major issues in contemporary philosophy of language. A lively, good-humored philosophical argument that is informative, topical, and well seasoned with common sense, it is a book for all readers of philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

CAN ONE SEE THE GIRL ONE LOVES, or one's deceased mother, in one's dreams? When one presses one's finger against one's eyeball, or when one has consumed large quantities of alcohol, does saying that one is seeing double correctly describe the experience? Then again, can one really see an approaching vessel on the radar screen, or hear Maria Callas on a record, or see the President on T.V.?

Wittgenstein’s first account of meaning was that sentences are pictures: the meaning of a sentence is a state of affairs it portrays. States of affairs are arrangements of some basic entities, the Objects. Sentences consist of names of Objects; an arrangement of such names, i.e., a sentence, shows how the named Objects are arranged. A sentence says that the state of affairs it thus pictures exists, hence it is true or false. That theory of meaning as picturing is based on (...) a primitive relation of naming, but what it is for an item to name another the Tractatus does not say. (shrink)