This book is a major attempt to reconcile the empirical basis of linguistic science with the a priori nature of philosophical reasoning. Its purpose is to show how the methods and findings of linguistic science, especially of transformational grammar, can be used to cast light upon central problems of analytic philosophy. After dealing with recent objections to the use of linguistic techniques in philosophy, the author shows, with great force and clarity, how these techniques can be applied to such problems (...) as the analysis of singular terms, the concepts of fact, event, and causality, and the meaning of the word "good.". (shrink)

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as (...) we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism. (shrink)

I might summarize this section by saying that the English tenses, according to this analysis, form quite a motley group. PAST, PRES and FUT serve to relate reference time to speech time, while WOULD and USED-TO behave like Priorian operators, shifting the point of evaluation away from the reference time. HAVE also shifts the point of evaluation away from the reference time, but in a more complicated way. And FUT, in contrast to PRES and PAST, is a substitution operator, putting (...) the reference time of its clause in the plate of the speech time of subordinate clauses. (shrink)

0. Introductory remarks. I assume that every serious theory of language must give some explicit account of the relationship between expressions in the language described and expressions in some interpreted language which spells out the semantics of the language.1 Let's call this relationship the translation relation. Theories differ as to how this relation is specified. In the Aspects theory of syntax, taken together with a Katz-Postal view of "semantic rules", it was assumed that the relation was defined on deep structures. (...) Serious problems led to modifications of this view in several directions. Chomsky's latest papers assume that a modified 'intermediate structure' is transformed by rules of interpretation to a level of representation called 'logical form'. Common to all of these approaches is the assumption that the translation rules are defined initially on syntactic structures of one sort or another. Let us call this assumption the configurational hypothesis: the translation rules all have the form: [183]. (shrink)