How to Think about Meaning

According to the dominant theory of meaning, truth-conditional semantics, to explain the meaning of a statement is to specify the conditions necessary and sufficient for its truth. Classical truth-conditional semantics is coming under increasing attack, however, from contextualists and inferentialists, who agree that meaning is located in the mind.

How to Think about Meaning develops an even more radical mentalist semantics, which it does by shifting the object of semantic inquiry. Whereas for classical semantics the object of analysis is an abstract sentence or utterance such as “Grass is green”, for attitudinal semantics the object of inquiry is a propositional attitude such as “Speaker so-and-so thinks grass is green”. Explicit relativization to some speaker S allows for semantic theory then to make contact with psychology, sociology, historical linguistics, and other empirical disciplines.

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“A remarkable new approach to semantic theory. With a refreshing emphasis on meaning as the expression of attitude, Paul Saka not only strikes a blow against vacuous truth-conditional theories, but demonstrates the power of his cognitive analysis in theory and in a surprising and satisfying selection of important linguistic applications. Technically exact, highly readable, and illustrated with valuable examples from many contexts of language use, here is a book to counterbalance decades of misdirected anti-psychologistic semantic dogma.” Prof. Dale Jacquette, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, USA

“How to Think about Meaning provides a novel mentalist approach to linguistic meaning, one that is informed by current research methods in cognitive science and the growing influence of cognitive linguistics. It also draws attention to, and provides an analysis of, important aspects of language (such as connotation) that have been neglected by contemporary philosophers of language. There is really nothing unoriginal about this work.” Prof. Marga Reimer, Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona, USA

• University of Houston, Houston, USA

  Paul Saka

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