Paul M. Pietroski's Books

Causing Actions

By: Paul M. Pietroski

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Paul Pietroski defends a dualist view of the mind-body problem. Central to his account is his proposed treatment of ceteris paribus laws, their role in explanation, and how such laws are related to singular causal claims.

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Page Count

292

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199252769

ISBN 13

9780199252763

Conjoining Meanings

Semantics Without Truth Values

By: Paul M. Pietroski

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Conjoining Meanings

Semantics Without Truth Values

By: Paul M. Pietroski

Humans naturally acquire languages that connect meanings with pronunciations. Paul M. Pietroski presents an account of these distinctive languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. Children acquire meaningful lexical items that can be combined, in certain ways, to form meaningful complex expressions. This raises questions about what meanings are, how they can be combined, and what kinds of meanings lexical items can have. According to Pietroski, meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions. He argues that meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort. More specifically, phrasal meanings are instructions for how to build monadic concepts (a.k.a. mental predicates) that are massively conjunctive, while lexical meanings are instructions for how to fetch concepts that are monadic or dyadic. This allows for polysemy, since a lexical item can be linked to an address that is shared by a family of fetchable concepts. But the posited combinatorial operations are limited and limiting. They impose severe restrictions on which concepts can be fetched for purposes of semantic composition. Correspondingly, Pietroski argues that in lexicalization, available representations are often used to introduce concepts that can be combined via the relevant operations.

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Page Count

336

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0192540890

ISBN 13

9780192540898

Events and Semantic Architecture

By: Paul M. Pietroski

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Events and Semantic Architecture

By: Paul M. Pietroski

This book explores how grammatical structure is related to meaning. The meaning of a phrase clearly depends on its constituent words and how they are combined. But how does structure contribute to meaning in natural language? Does combining adjectives with nouns (as in 'brown dog') differ semantically from combining verbs with adverbs (as in 'barked loudly')? What is the significance of combining verbs with names and quantificational expressions (as in 'Fido chased every cat')? Inaddressing such questions, Paul Pietroski develops a novel conception of linguistic meaning according to which the semantic contribution of combining expressions is simple and uniform across constructions.Drawing on work at the heart of contemporary debates in linguistics and philosophy, the author argues that Donald Davidson's treatment of action sentences as event descriptions should be viewed as an instructive special case of a more general semantic theory. The unified theory covers a wide range of examples, including sentences that involve quantification, plurality, descriptions of complex causal processes, and verbs that take sentential complements. Professor Pietroski also provides freshways of thinking about much discussed semantic generalizations that seem to reflect innately determined aspects of human languages.Designed to be accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of elementary logic, Events and Semantic Architecture will interest a wide range of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

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Page Count

276

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Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199244308

ISBN 13

9780199244300

Conjoining Meanings

Semantics Without Truth Values

By: Paul M. Pietroski

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Conjoining Meanings

Semantics Without Truth Values

By: Paul M. Pietroski

Paul M. Pietroski presents an ambitious new account of human languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. He argues that meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions; meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort.

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Page Count

404

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198812728

ISBN 13

9780198812722

Causing Actions

By: Paul M. Pietroski

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Causing Actions

By: Paul M. Pietroski

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Age

Page Count

292

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199252769

ISBN 13

9780199252763

Book's by Paul M. Pietroski

Causing Actions

Causing Actions

Conjoining Meanings

Conjoining Meanings

Events and Semantic Architecture

Events and Semantic Architecture

Conjoining Meanings

Conjoining Meanings

Causing Actions

Causing Actions

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