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Descriptive-causal Theory Of Reference
A causal theory of reference or historical chain theory of reference is a theory of how terms acquire specific referents based on evidence. Such theories have been used to describe many referring terms, particularly logical terms, proper names, and natural kind terms. In the case of names, for example, a causal theory of reference typically involves the following claims: * a name's referent is fixed by an original act of naming (also called a "dubbing" or, by Saul Kripke, an "initial baptism"), whereupon the name becomes a rigid designator of that object. * later uses of the name succeed in referring to the referent by being linked to that original act via a causal chain. Weaker versions of the position (perhaps not properly called "causal theories") claim merely that, in many cases, events in the causal history of a speaker's use of the term, including when the term was first acquired, must be considered to correctly assign references to the speaker's words. Causal theories of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reference
A reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to ''refer to'' the second object. It is called a ''name'' for the second object. The next object, the one to which the first object refers, is called the '' referent'' of the first object. A name is usually a phrase or expression, or some other symbolic representation. Its referent may be anything – a material object, a person, an event, an activity, or an abstract concept. References can take on many forms, including: a thought, a sensory perception that is audible ( onomatopoeia), visual (text), olfactory, or tactile, emotional state, relationship with other, spacetime coordinates, symbolic or alpha-numeric, a physical object, or an energy projection. In some cases, methods are used that intentionally hide the reference from some observers, as in cryptography. References feature ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gottlob Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, concentrating on the philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, logic, and Philosophy of mathematics, mathematics. Though he was largely ignored during his lifetime, Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), and, to some extent, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) introduced his work to later generations of philosophers. Frege is widely considered to be the greatest logician since Aristotle, and one of the most profound philosophers of mathematics ever. His contributions include the History of logic#Rise of modern logic, development of modern logic in the ''Begriffsschrift'' and work in the foundations of mathematics. His book the ''Foundations of Arithmetic'' is the seminal text of the logicist project, and is ci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mark Sainsbury (philosopher)
Richard Mark Sainsbury (; born 7 February 1943) is a British people, British philosopher who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. He is known for his work in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and on the philosophies of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. Education and career Sainsbury earned his D.Phil. at Oxford University and taught for many years at King's College London where he was Susan Stebbing Professor of Philosophy. He became professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. He was editor of the leading philosophy journal ''Mind (journal), Mind'' from 1990 to 2000. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998. Books *''Bertrand Russell'' (Routledge, 1979) ("Arguments of the Philosophers" series). *''Paradoxes'' (Cambridge University Press, 1988). *''Reference Without Referents'' (Oxford University Press, 2005). *''Fiction and Fictionalism'' (Routledge, 2009). *''Seven Puzzles of Thought and How to S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Searle
John Rogers Searle (; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959 and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School until June 2019, when his status as professor emeritus was revoked because he was found to have violated the university's sexual harassment policies. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Searle was secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy". He received all his university degrees, BA, MA, and DPhil, from the University of Oxford, where he held his first faculty positions. Later, at UC Berkeley, he became the first tenured professor to join the 1964–1965 Free Speech Movement. In the late 1980s, Searle challenged the restrictions of Berkeley's 1980 rent stabilization ordinance. Following what came to be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aardvark
Aardvarks ( ; ''Orycteropus afer'') are medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammals native to Africa. Aardvarks are the only living species of the family Orycteropodidae and the order Tubulidentata. They have a long proboscis, similar to a pig's snout, which is used to sniff out food. They are afrotheres, a clade that also includes elephants, manatees, and hyraxes. They are found over much of the southern two-thirds of the African continent, avoiding areas that are mainly rocky. Nocturnal feeders, aardvarks subsist on ants and termites by using their sharp claws and powerful legs to dig the insects out of their hills. Aardvarks also dig to create burrows in which to live and rear their young. Name and taxonomy Name The aardvark is sometimes colloquially called the "African ant bear", "anteater" (not to be confused with the South American anteaters), or the "Cape anteater" after the Cape of Good Hope. The name "aardvark" is Afrikaans () and comes from earlier Afrikaa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Photograph
A photograph (also known as a photo, or more generically referred to as an ''image'' or ''picture'') is an image created by light falling on a photosensitivity, photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor. The process and practice of creating such images is called photography. Most photographs are now created using a smartphone or camera, which uses a photographic lens, lens to focus the scene's visible spectrum, visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the human eye would perceive. Etymology The word ''photograph'' was coined in 1839 by Sir John Herschel and is based on the Greek language, Greek φῶς ('':el:phos, phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light". History The first permanent photograph, a contact-exposed copy of an engraving, was made in 1822 using the Bitumen of Judea, bitumen-based "heliography" process developed by Nicéphore Niép ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Structuralism (philosophy Of Science)
In the philosophy of science, structuralism (also known as scientific structuralism or as the structuralistic theory-concept) asserts that all aspects of reality are best understood in terms of empirical scientific constructs of entities and their relations, rather than in terms of concrete entities in themselves. Overview Structuralism is an active research program in the philosophy of science, which was first developed in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s by several analytic philosophers. As an instance of structuralism, the concept of matter should be interpreted not as an absolute property of nature in itself, but instead of how scientifically-grounded mathematical relations describe how the concept of matter interacts with other properties, whether that be in a broad sense such as the gravitational fields that mass produces or more empirically as how matter interacts with sense systems of the body to produce sensations such as weight. Structuralism's aim is to compr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Lewis (philosopher)
David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941– October 14, 2001) was an American philosopher. 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. Lewis made significant contributions in philosophy of mind, philosophy of probability, epistemology, philosophical logic, aesthetics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of time and philosophy of science. In most of these fields he is considered among the most important figures of recent decades. Lewis is most famous for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language and semantics, in which his books ''On the Plurality of Worlds'' (1986) and ''Counterfactuals'' (1973) are considered classics. His works on the logic and semantics of counterfactual conditionals are broadly used by philosophers and linguists along with a competing account from Robert Stalnaker; together the Stal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stathis Psillos
Stathis Psillos (; ; born 22 June 1965) is a Greek philosopher of science. He is Professor of Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics at the University of Athens, Greece and a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy of the University of Western Ontario. In 2013–15, he held the Rotman Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Science at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. In 2015, he was classified among the 91 most cited living philosophers with public Google Scholar pages. Biography Efstathios Psillos was born in Athens, Greece. He studied physics at the University of Patras, Greece. Having obtained a state scholarship to study philosophy abroad, Psillos went on to King's College London to study for an MSc in History and Philosophy of Science. Under the supervision of David Papineau he obtained a PhD in Philosophy in 1994 from King's College London with a thesis titled ''Science and Realism: A Naturalistic Investigation into Scientific Enquiry''. The examiners were J ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thought Experiment
A thought experiment is an imaginary scenario that is meant to elucidate or test an argument or theory. It is often an experiment that would be hard, impossible, or unethical to actually perform. It can also be an abstract hypothetical that is meant to test our intuitions about morality or other fundamental philosophical questions. History The ancient Greek , "was the most ancient pattern of mathematical proof", and existed before Euclidean geometry, Euclidean mathematics, where the emphasis was on the conceptual, rather than on the experimental part of a thought experiment. Johann Witt-Hansen established that Hans Christian Ørsted was the first to use the equivalent German term . Ørsted was also the first to use the equivalent term in 1820. By 1883, Ernst Mach used in a different sense, to denote exclusively the conduct of a experiment that would be subsequently performed as a by his students. Physical and mental experimentation could then be contrasted: Mach asked hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swampman
Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and difficult writing style, as well as the systematic nature of his philosophy. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. While Davidson was an analytic philosopher, with most of his influence lying in that tradition, his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well, particularly in literary theory and related areas. Early life and education Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6, 1917 in Springfield, Massachusetts to Grace Cordelia (née Anthony) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semantic Externalism
In the philosophy of language, semantic externalism (the opposite of semantic internalism) is the view that the meaning of a term is determined, in whole or in part, by factors external to the speaker. According to an externalist position, one can claim without contradiction that two speakers could be in exactly the same brain state at the time of an utterance, and yet mean different things by that utterance -- that is, at the least, that their terms could pick out different referents. Overview The philosopher Hilary Putnam (1975/1985) proposed this position and summarized it with the statement "meanings just ain't in the head!" Although he did not use the term "externalism" at the time, Putnam is thought to have pioneered semantic externalism in his 1975 paper "The Meaning of 'Meaning. His Twin Earth thought experiment, from the aforementioned paper, is widely cited to illustrate his argument for externalism to this day. Alongside Putnam, credit also goes to Saul Kripke and Tyle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
