Questions tagged [semantics]
Semantics, in philosophy, often refers to "relation between signs and the things to which they refer and is seen, often, within the school of rhetoric.
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Is Anselm's argument supposed to be understood in terms of hyperintensionality?
Hyperintensionality is something to do with e.g. the difference between, "I believe that Dean is Dean," vs., "I believe that Dean is Ackles." Generally, an operation X on A and B ...
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Is the meaning of a sign the effect it has on your mind?
Is the meaning of something identifiable or reducible to the motion or effect it causes on the mind that interprets it?
For example, the meaning of a photograph could be said to be the nostalgic ...
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Why is "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" considered meaningless?
I initially posted this in Linguistics, but wanted to get philosophers' opinions on this as well. (And someone over there is complaining that it's a philosophical rather than a linguistic question... ...
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If a proposition is necessarily true, does it follow that it's a tautology?
If □P, does it follow that P is a tautology?
I know in K modal logic, the law of NEC states
⊢ P; therefore □P.
The corresponding conditional of the previous argument is
If ⊢ P then □P.
Now ⊢P iff P is ...
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On the difference between a meta-variable and a propositional atom
In all of the established propositional logics that I’m aware of, a propositional atom is treated as a meta-variable. In certain first-order proof systems, this does not hold for those same logics ...
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What are some logically equivalent formulations of “uniqueness”?
A monoid is a mathematical structure with an associative law of composition and an identity element. It can be proven that if an element of a monoid has an inverse, then the inverse is unique:
Assume ...
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Wittgenstein on sense
What's sense according to Wittgenstein?
I think I might have missed the definition in TLP, but I can't find it anywhere.
From the context it's obvious that Wittgenstein's sense isn't that of Frege. ...
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Wittgenstein and the primary elements
What does it mean to say that we can attribute neither being nor non-being to the elements? One might say: if everything that we call “being” and “non-being” consists in the obtaining and non-...
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Wittgenstein and tautology
What does it mean to say that we can attribute neither being nor
non-being to the elements? One might say: if everything that we call
“being” and “non-being” consists in the obtaining and non-...
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Wittgenstein's chess example
When one shows someone the king in chess and says “This is the king”, one does not thereby explain to him the use of this piece a unless he already knows the rules of the game except for this last ...
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Russell's acquittance and description
One interesting result of the above theory of denoting is this: when there is anything with which we do not have immediate acquaintance, but only definition by denoting phrases, then the ...
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Is belief nothing but a feeling of certainty about what something means?
Or to rephrase, can beliefs also be shaped by doubts and intuitions?
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Semantic externalism and transitivity of causal chains (using Putnam's brain-in-a-vat thought experiment)
TL;DR: I'm looking for information on semantic externalist views on transitivity of causal chains. Is it an objection anyone has invoked? Does it hold? What are potential pro-Putnam responses to it?
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Does or could ChatGPT understand text? [closed]
The following argument concludes that the common understanding of ChatGPT (trained on text, receives online users' text questions, etc.) is not supported by the science. What criticisms are there of ...
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The problem of philosophy?
“The problem of philosophy is a linguistic problem, and every disagreement can be traced back to a difference in interpretation.”
“No wonder we know that the deepest problems are not really problems ...
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