Questions tagged [semantics]
Semantics, in philosophy, often refers to "relation between signs and the things to which they refer and is seen, often, within the school of rhetoric.
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Is the lack of rigorous definition (or demonstration) of something, a clue of it being fundamental, rather than the opposite as it is usually though?
If you can't properly and unambiguously define something (being it a thing or a concept), yet
a) you clearly experience it, or
b) constantly find yourself using it in your models/interpretations/...
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Would the word "dog" mean anything if, at some time, it was not being read or thought of?
I am someone who believes that meaning happens only in consciousness. In my view, words would have no meaning in a philosophical zombie world. But my view raises an interesting dilemma. Suppose, at ...
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Does Tarskis conception require a difference between truth predicate and truth value in formal logic
So, I asked a similar question in maths, but from the answers I got, I figured it maybe is too philosophically loaded (I hope this is ok).
But still my main interest lies in the actual application of ...
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On Buridan's Formula
In beginning I must confess that I am a Formalist when it comes to mathematics and philosophy. Formalism is defined as the following per Wikipedia: Formalism is the view that holds that statements of ...
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How could prototype theory give rise to logical semantics? [closed]
My first claim is an observation that there are some subsystems in the mind where humans show perfect competency with typed elements, and there are some subsystems in the mind where humans struggle ...
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Is "equal to" a good substitute for "meaning of"?
Perhaps this is a semantics question, but what I would like is to be able to substitute the question "What is the meaning of life?" to "What is life equal to?" and I want to know ...
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How much recursion is needed in the set in order to make a reliable conclusion? [closed]
In formal systems, recursive definitions must be fully specified to ensure the reliability of conclusions.
However, in natural human thinking, we often rely on context-dependent partial recursion to ...
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Truth Tables vs Metalanguage
I've seen in the book "Logic for everyone" by Jason Decker that he writes the Propositions on the header of the tables as meta-Propositions.
E.g. for the formula
A→C
𝒜
𝒞
𝒜→𝒞
T
T
T
T
F
F
...
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Do variables belong to metalanguage
I'm learning the nuance between using and mentioning. Maybe what I'm going to write is a result of misunderstanding.
The object language (OL) contains names of objects from a domain, a assumed real ...
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Can contradiction be treated as a structural feature of meaning, rather than a failure of logic? [closed]
In traditional logical and semantic systems, contradiction is often seen as something to be eliminated — a signal that the reasoning process has gone wrong.
But what if contradiction is a structural ...
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Identifying a name with the designated thing (in the context of Being)
My question is about the following perplexing passage of Plato's “Sophist,” in which young Theaetetus and the Stranger of Elea, a disciple of Eleatic philosophy, debate about certain problems of the ...
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Can Tarski's statement about "true statement" be improved?
A sentence is true if and only if what the sentence describes is the case.
My main doubt started when I realised that we are comparing sentence, a collection of words, to reality, the case. Something ...
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What is the difference between Ordinary Meaning, Profound Meaning, and True Meaning? [closed]
While discussing the question Is Machine our new God?!, I found myself explaining a distinction I hadn't consciously articulated before: the difference between Ordinary Meaning, Profound Meaning, and ...
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A question about structure of descriptions of objects ,can they be broken down into non divisible pieces?
Think of a description of an object, having qualities Q(a),Q(b).
Q(a) can also have a description of it's own which one might try to describe to another person using a common language, and while ...
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Is the phrase “infinitely divisible” describing just one property or two properties by condensation? [closed]
Is the phrase “infinitely divisible” describing just one property or two properties by condensation? I ask because the phrase “infinitely divisible” can be interpreted as the conjunction of two ...
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