VOLUME 8 • 2009
ON THE COMPOSITIONALITY OF MEANING
ABSTRACT. Horwich claims that the compositionality of meaning imposes no constraint at all on how the meaning properties of words are constituted. Pagin and Westerståhl maintain that compositionality is the property that the meaning of any complex expression is determined by the meanings of its part..
MENTAL STATES, LANGUAGE, AND COMPOSITIONALITY
ABSTRACT. Barker and Jacobson examine the hypothesis of "direct compositionality", which requires that semantic interpretation proceed in tandem with syntactic combination. Braisby notes that the nature of complex concepts has important implications for the computational modelling of the mind, as we..
MUSIC AS A RICH AND COMPLEX PRODUCT OF CULTURE
ABSTRACT. Bribitzer-Stull seeks to define the dual function of the cadenza. Schonberg argues that today the conductor, more than any one musical figure, shapes our musical life and thought. As Zangwill puts it, it is essential to music to be somehow related to real emotion. Vickhoff holds that we ca..
MUSIC AS A MANIFESTATION OF HUMAN COGNITIVE CAPACITIES
ABSTRACT. Hamilton says that recording has transformed the nature of music as an art by reconfiguring the opposition between the aesthetics of perfection and imperfection. Parker notes that there are many systems of improvisation/composition: each system has a medium through which it is introduced i..
MUSIC AS THE OBJECT OF METAPHORICAL PERCEPTION
ABSTRACT. According to Zbikowski, metaphor seems to be an inescapable part of musical descriptions. What makes music special is its relationship to language. Hamilton observes that music is a human activity grounded in the body and bodily movement and interfused with human life. Vickhoff claims that..
IN WHAT DOES MUSICAL UNDERSTANDING CONSIST?
ABSTRACT. Collins Judd contends that the oxymoron “aural image” highlights the special nature of musical exemplarity and notational representation. According to Hamilton, there is a non-musical soundart which involves hearing sounds as sounds in some distinct non-musical sense. Posner maintains that..
INDIVIDUALISM AND NARROW CONTENT
ABSTRACT. The view that psychological explanations cannot but be individualistic (i.e., shared by duplicates) and the view of semantic externalism (i.e., that mental contents are not determined by individualistic features) seem to jeopardize the idea of intentional psychology. Introducing the notion..
FROM CAUSALITY TO RIGIDITY
ABSTRACT. Kripke has argued that names are rigid designators, and that a name's reference is determined by a causal chain of a certain kind that connects an object with the name's use, thus making the name this object's name. He has not shown that there is a logical connection between these two thes..
CONCEPTUAL IDEALISM
ABSTRACT. I describe a prevalent approach to philosophical theorising as being a form of idealism. Conceptual idealism is the philosophical approach that maintains that for something to be possible is for it to fall under a possible concept. Conceptual realism denies this, maintaining that reality m..
SENSES OF COMPOSITIONALITY AND COMPOSITIONALITY OF SENSES
ABSTRACT. In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, Dummett argues at length that Geach has been wrong in taking the sense of a predicate to be a function that sends the sense of a proper name to that of a sentence, and claims that it should instead be a means to determine the referent of the predicate, ..
PREDICTIVISM
ABSTRACT. Normally, whether evidence of observation e confirms hypothesis h relative to background evidence k is a matter of the logical relations between e, h, and k, and independent of whether h was formulated before or after the discovery of e. This is supported by intuitions about various exampl..
CARNAP'S “ELIMINATION OF METAPHYSICS THROUGH LOGICAL ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE”
ABSTRACT. Carnap's article "Elimination of Metaphysics", which is directed against Heidegger, not only conducts a fundamental critique of metaphysics based on logic, but also marks in an exemplary way "a parting of the ways" (M. Friedman) between analytic and Continental philosophy. With regard to p..