Obszerna antologia Logika i język z analitycznej filozofii języka, do której J. Pelc wybrał i przełożył teksty, była przez wiele lat wykorzystywana w nauczaniu i badaniach w Polsce. W udany sposób przedstawia niektóre dyskusje toczone w ramach filozofii analitycznej. Jednakże obok tekstów kluczowych, które weszły do kanonu tej tradycji, zawiera także prace marginalne i mało znaczące. Zaskakujące jest pominięcie przez Pelca kilku bardzo ważnych filozofów i ich dorobku, a podane we wstępie do antologii uzasadnienie tych braków jest niekompletne i mało (...) przekonujące. (shrink)

Further to Herman Tennessen's recent methodological criticisms of Linguistic philosophy, the present paper seeks to offer some theoretical criticisms. Two main claims of Linguistic philosophy are examined: (1) that the concept of ?use? satisfactorily explains how words and expressions are meaningful; and (2), that the correspondence theory of meaning has been successfully repudiated. After a brief exposition, the explanation is further specified as being analogical (words are like tools). Six objections (semantical, logical and psychological) are suggested. It is concluded that (...) not only is the explanation not satisfactory, but that some of the same problems of the older theory may also be implicit in the ?use? theory. (shrink)

This is the introductory essay to a collection commemorating the 100th anniversary of the publication in Mind of Bertrand Russell’s paper ‘On Denoting’.

Despite the renown of ‘On Denoting’, much criticism has ignored or misconstrued Russell's treatment of scope, particularly in intensional, but also in extensional contexts. This has been rectified by more recent commentators, yet it remains largely unnoticed that the examples Russell gives of scope distinctions are questionable or inconsistent with his own philosophy. Nevertheless, Russell is right: scope does matter in intensional contexts. In Principia Mathematica, Russell proves a metatheorem to the effect that the scope of a single occurrence of (...) a description in an extensional context does not matter, provided existence and uniqueness conditions are satisfied. But attempts to eliminate descriptions in more complicated cases may produce an analysis with more occurrences of descriptions than featured in the analysand. Taking alternation and negation to be primitive (as in the first edition of Principia), this can be resolved, although the proof is non-trivial. Taking the Sheffer stroke to be primitive (as proposed by Russell in the second edition), with bad choices of scope the analysis fails to terminate. (shrink)

This note attempts first to broaden the investigation of ties expressed by ?my? and ?mine?, which was initiated in ?The Concept of ?Mine?; ? (Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 3). Socially accepted types of use ties (active and passive), worth ties and other sorts are distinguished from the previously noted ties of ownership, agency, etc. These further distinctions of ties, it is argued, also deserve the attention of philosophers and conceptually oriented social scientists. The analysis of ?mine? is then applied to (...) the much disputed concept of ?imagining?: some major clusters of divergent facts and phenomena called human imaginings are mapped and related to ?mine? (shrink)

I have proposed that the complementizerthat has a pragmatic property of demonstrativity, analogous to that ascribed by demonstrative analyses of the semantics of the complementizer but not impinging on the syntactic analysis of sentential embedding. My account explains a number of phenomena, including the illocutionary peculiarities of parentheticals, the pragmatics ofthat-omission, and consequently the distributional statistics ofthat-omission and related grammatical features of embeddings reported in the literature. By this means these phenomena are theoretically unified under a single hypothesis.Furthermore, this demonstrativity (...) is a matter of degree. There is a spectrum of distinct pragmatic manifestations of this demonstrativity, ranging from the purely paratactic-like interpretation that ascribes no illocutionary relation between the speaker and the complement, and is highly incompatible withthat-omission, to the purely parenthetical interpretation where illocutionary force attaches to the complement and is highly conducive tothat-omission.A more general moral appears when the minimally revisionist syntactic consequences of my proposal are compared to the radical syntactic consequences of Thompson and Mulac's. Even if we hold that the syntactic structure of a natural language cannot be grasped outside of its general communicative contexts, we need not connect syntax and pragmatics so immediately as Thompson and Mulac seem to think. By resisting the idea that the syntax of parentheticals isipso facto different from the syntax of compositional embeddings, we allow some “slack” between syntax and pragmatics, thereby enabling us to analyze such subtle syntax-pragmatics interactions as negative-raised parentheticals. The methodological moral is to avoid too facile a connection between syntactic and pragmatic analyses. (shrink)