Language and Reasoning

Abstract

1.1 Interrelatedness of words—The pronoun “I”: its systematicity—Personal identity and otherness as proto-beliefs. 1.2 Affirmative and negative sentences—The infinity that is abstractly excluded when we affirm something—Impossibility of a representational vacuum—What context allows us to conceive as meaningful—Generalization of descriptions: our multilevel interpretative schemes. 1.3 The prepositions of place, with their cross-referentiality, as illustrative of what the logic of thought consents and rules out—Lewis’ “rules of accommodation”: what is permissible and comparatively near-permissible. 1.4 Definites and indefinites: how the latter have a representative dependence on the former—Kripke on “indefinite” definite descriptions—We do not always need to deictically specify the characteristics of objects. 1.5 Kinds of beings: natural and technical—The presuppositions that our picture of the world requires—Dretske’s “relevant alternatives” theory—Cohen on defeasibility: intersubjective and subjective evidence and opacity—Integration of beliefs—Acknowledging context-sensitivity in our knowledge attributions should not mean rejecting an unambiguous conception of knowledge—Ontological stratifications and the role of contextualization. 1.6 Language as opposed to langue—The priority of linguistic rules over word coining—Discourse as involving language and reason—Why there cannot be non-conceptual thoughts: the linguistic basis of sensation-thoughts—Davidson’s emphasis on the correlation between language and thinking—Our awareness of reality as primordially contextual—Rejection of Baumann’s view according to which there can be “non-linguistic attributions of knowledge”.