Talking About Nothing

Numbers, Hallucinations, and Fictions

Jody Azzouni (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

288 Seiten

2010
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-973894-6 (ISBN)

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Ordinary language and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a singular way (using demonstratives and names), what we recognize not to exist: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized but nonexistent objects that our scientific theories are often couched in terms of. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items-especially in the case of the application of mathematics to the sciences-are indispensable. We cannot avoid talking about such things. Scientific and ordinary languages thus enable us to say things about Pegasus or about hallucinated objects that are true (or false), such as ¨Pegasus was believed by the ancient Greeks to be a flying horse,¨ or ¨That elf I'm now hallucinating over there is wearing blue shoes.¨ Standard contemporary metaphysical views and semantic analyses of singular idioms on offer in contemporary philosophy of language have not successfully accommodated these routine practices of saying true and false things about the nonexistent while simultaneously honoring the insight that such things do not exist in any way at all (and have no properties). That is, philosophers often feel driven to claim that such objects do exist, or they claim that all our talk isn't genuine truth-apt talk, but only pretence. This book reconfigures metaphysics (and the role of metaphysics in semantics) in radical ways that allow the accommodation of our ordinary ways of speaking of what does not exist while retaining the absolutely crucial presupposition that such objects exist in no way at all, have no properties, and so are not the truth-makers for the truths and falsities that are about them.

Jody Azzouni is Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University, and author of Deflating Existential Consequence (OUP 2003, ) and Tracking Reason (OUP 2005)

GENERAL INTRODUCTION; PART I. NUMBERS, HALLUCINATIONS AND FICTIONS; CONCLUSION TO PART I; PART II. LANGUAGES WITH AND WITHOUT ONTOLOGY; INTRODUCTION TO PART II; GENERAL CONCLUSION

Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	241 x 165 mm
Gewicht	553 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Logik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Metaphysik / Ontologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Sprachphilosophie
	Naturwissenschaften
ISBN-10	0-19-973894-7 / 0199738947
ISBN-13	978-0-19-973894-6 / 9780199738946
Zustand	Neuware