Dummett Philosophy of Language

by Green, Karen

• ISBN13: 9780745622958
• ISBN10: 074562295X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-10-08
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

Michael Dummett stands out among his generation as the only British philosopher of language to rival in stature the Americans, Davidson and Quine. In conjunction with them he has been responsible for much of the framework within which questions concerning meaning and understanding are raised and answered in the late twentieth-century Anglo-American tradition. Dummett's output has been prolific and highly influential, but not always as accessible as it deserves to be. This book sets out to rectify this situation.Karen Green offers the first comprehensive introduction to Dummett's philosophy of language, providing an overview and summary of his most important arguments. She argues that Dummett should not be understood as a determined advocate of anti-realism, but that his greatest contribution to the philosophy of language is to have set out the strengths and weaknesses of the three most influential positions within contemporary theory of meaning - realism, as epitomized by Frege, the holism to be found in Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson and the constructivism which can be extracted from Brouwer. It demonstrates that analytic philosophy as Dummett practices it, is by no means an outmoded approach to thinking about language, but that it is relevant both to cognitive science and to phenomenology.

Author Biography

Karen Green is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Monash University, Australia.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Introduction	1	(11)
Fregean Foundations	12	(41)
Sense and Reference in Frege and Dummett	13	(11)
Truth, Assertion and the Central Argument against Bivalence	24	(6)
Frege's Platonism	30	(6)
Frege's Kantian Connections	36	(4)
The Context Principle	40	(13)
Wittgenstein and Quine	53	(34)
The Manifestability Constraint and Rejection of Mentalism	56	(7)
Dummett and Quine	63	(2)
Two Challenges: Holism and Strict Finitism	65	(4)
The Manifestability Constraint and the Priority of Language	69	(4)
How do Anti-Mentalism and Anti-Psychologism Stand to Each Other?	73	(14)
The Influence of Intuitionism	87	(46)
Brouwer's Intuitionism	89	(6)
The Intuitionist's Case against Bivalence	95	(10)
Metaphysical Debates and the Theory of Meaning	105	(3)
The Traditional Case for Nominalism and Subjective Idealism	108	(9)
Moderate Idealism and the Denial of Bivalence	117	(7)
The Case against Strict Finitism	124	(4)
Pure vs Mediated Constructivism, Truth Theories and Semantics	128	(2)
A Common-Sense Realist Appropriation of the Argument against Bivalence	130	(3)
The Reality of the Past	133	(16)
Anti-Realism with Respect to the Past	134	(11)
Anti-Realism with Respect to the Future	145	(4)
What do we Know when we Know a Language?	149	(27)
Languages and Idiolects	150	(13)
Davidson on Malapropism and the Social Character of Meaning	163	(13)
Psychologism, Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind	176	(25)
On the Relationship of Phenomenology to Analytic Philosophy	179	(4)
How Close are Frege and Husserl on Sense and Reference?	183	(11)
Wittgenstein and Intentionality	194	(7)
Conclusion	201	(5)
Notes	206	(11)
Reference and Bibliography	217	(14)
Index	231