Projects per year
Abstract
In recent years, speech-act theory has mooted the possibility that one utterance can signify a number of different things. This pluralist conception of signification lies at the heart of Thomas Bradwardine's solution to the insolubles, logical puzzles such as the semantic paradoxes, presented in Oxford in the early 1320s. His leading assumption was that signification is closed under consequence, that is, that a proposition signifies everything which follows from what it signifies. Then any proposition signifying its own falsity, he showed, also signifies its own truth and so, since it signifies things which cannot both obtain, it is simply false. Bradwardine himself, and his contemporaries, did not elaborate this pluralist theory, or say much in its defence. It can be shown to accord closely, however, with the prevailing conception of logical consequence in England in the fourteenth century. Recent pluralist theories of signification, such as Grice's, also endorse Bradwardine's closure postulate as a plausible constraint on signification, and so his analysis of the semantic paradoxes is seen to be both well-grounded and plausible.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 363-375 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Philosophical Studies |
Volume | 145 |
Issue number | 3 |
Early online date | 10 May 2008 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Sept 2009 |
Keywords
- Bradwardine
- Grice
- Insolubles
- Paradox
- Logical consequence
- Theory of signification
- Meaning
- Pluralism
- EDITION
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Dive into the research topics of 'Plural signification and the Liar paradox'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 2 Finished
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FOUNDATIONS OF LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE: Foundations of Logical Consequence
Read, S. (PI), Priest, G. G. (CoI), Shapiro, S. (CoI) & Celani, L. (Student)
Arts and Humanities Research Council
1/01/09 → 30/06/12
Project: Standard
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THE SEMANTIC PARADOXES: The Semantic Paradoxes: critical edition and translation of Bradwardine's "Insolubilia"
Read, S. (PI)
Arts and Humanities Research Council
25/09/06 → 24/01/07
Project: Standard