Abstract
It is often assumed that the fundamental question about definition concerns how different kinds of definition — ostensive definition, stipulative definition, dictionary definition, etc. — should be structured. But, unless we first determine how definitions should be expected to function, we cannot hope to arrive at a satisfactory account of how they should be structured. We need to know how a mechanism is intended to behave before we can work usefully on its design. This paper will therefore be concerned with one important aspect of the prior issue. Specifically, when a particular set of lexical definitions, in a particular syntactic framework, is supposed to compose the meaning of a given sentence, should those definitions be supposed to operate independently of one another or not?
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Notes
L. Jonathan Cohen, ‘How is conceptual innovation possible?’, Erkenntnis 25, 1986, pp. 223ff. The distinction has been fruitfully taken up by E. F. Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure,Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, esp. p. 110ff.
F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics,ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, trans. W. Baskin, New York: Philosophical Library, 1959, 88–89. See L. J. Cohen, ‘Chess as a Model for Language’, Philosophy 11, 1982, 51–87.
See, for example, A. Garnham, Psycholinguistics: Central Topics, London: Methuen, 1985, 190–195.
J. D. Atlas, Philosophy Without Ambiguity: A Logico-Linguistic Essay, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
A. N. Whitehead and B. Russell, Principia Mathematica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
See G. Frege, ‘On Sense and Reference’, in P. Geach and M. Black (eds.), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Oxford: Blackwell, 1952, 5678.
A. Church, ‘A formulation of the logic of sense and denotation’, in P. Henle, H. M. Kallen, and S. K. Langer (eds.), Structure, Method and Meaning: Essays in Honour of Henry M. Sheffer, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1951, pp. 3–24.
Plato, Republic 597b, and Aristotle, Categories ad irait
The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, is somewhat inconsistent in its practice. For example: it lists representational senses for ‘lion’ and ‘tiger’ but not for ‘giraffe’ and ‘zebra’.
C.L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944, and R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.
D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, 245–264.
J. L. Austin, How to Do Thing with Words,Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962, 101ff.
See.I.R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 92 123.
.1. R. Searle, ‘Metaphor’, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 92–123.
Ibid., 100.
no longer think it possible to give a distinctive-feature account of metaphorical meaning as proposed in L. J. Cohen, ‘The Semantics of Metaphor’, in A. Ortony (ed.), op. cit., 64–77. What inescapably block it are examples like (25), where indisputably factual, rather than linguistic, knowledge is invoked.
See L. J. Cohen, ‘The Individuation of Proper Names’ in Z. van Straaten (ed.), Philosophical Subjects, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 140–163.
R. Montague, Formal Philosophy,1974, New Haven: Yale University Press, 188.
L. J. Cohen, ‘A Problem about Ambiguity in Truth-functional Semantics’, Analysis 45, 1985, 129–134.
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Cohen, L.J. (2002). Should Natural-Language Definitions be Insulated from, or Interactive with, One Another in Sentence Composition?. In: Knowledge and Language. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 227. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2020-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2020-5_8
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