McCawley supplements his earlier book—which covers such topics as presuppositional logic, the logic of mass terms and nonstandard quantifiers, and fuzzy ...

In his Farewell to Reason, Paul Feyerabend advocates radical pluralism in all intellectual endeavors and disputes the widely held belief that all issues can and should be resolved rationally. For Feyerabend, it is desirable that mutually incompatible approaches to scientific and scholarly research proliferate. Even an approach that one's favored school of thought dismisses as loony is likely to yield ideas and factual observations that its derogators will find of value and would otherwise have missed. To derive intellectual benefit from (...) an alternative tradition, one need not accept its premises and values; likewise, to ignore uncongenial ideas, one is not obliged to construct a refutation of than, which is just as well, since such a refutation usually can be constructed only by stacking the cards against adversaries about whom one is grossly ignorant. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Jerry A. Fodor’s critique of the logical structures proposed in Donald Davidson’s “The Logical Form of Action Sentences.” I will have nothing to say below about the parts of Fodor’s paper which deal with the proposals of Davidson’s “Truth and Meaning.” I am inclined to agree with Fodor’s conclusion that, a truth definition for a natural language need not reveal the logical structure of the sentences of the language, though my reasons are quite different from (...) those which Fodor gives. Fodor mentions only the fact that trivial truth definitions are possible; however, even disregarding trivial definitions, I would maintain that a wide range of putative ‘logical forms’ can be consistent with the same assignment of truth values and that the choice among alternative systems of ‘logical form’ must be made on the basis of whether they allow rules of inference and rules of grammar to be stated in full generality. (shrink)

It is unfortunate that Francis Y. Lin, in ‘Chomsky on the “ordinary language” view of language’ pays little attention to his own remark, ‘Chomsky’s criticisms make us realize that we should not be content with general and vague formulations of convention, ability, and so on. We must make such notions precise and provide details’ Lin speaks so imprecisely and provides so few details of notions on which he relies heavily, such as ‘general learning mechanism’ and ‘sentence frame’, that readers must (...) employ large amounts of guesswork to place even a halfway specific interpretation on his proposals and claims. (shrink)