Content, Cognition, and Communication: Philosophical Papers II

Nathan Salmon

Mar 2007 · Philosophical Papers Book 2 · Clarendon Press

About this ebook

Nathan Salmon presents a selection of his essays from the early 1980s to 2006, on a set of closely connected topics central to analytic philosophy. The book is divided into four thematic sections. The first contains six essays on the theme of direct reference, and associated issues regarding names and descriptions, demonstratives and reflexivity. The four essays in the second section, under the heading of apriority, concern particular consequences of Millianism with respect to the semantic-epistemological status of certain special kinds of sentences. The five essays in the third section develop Salmon's project of reconciling Millianism with a host of problems posed by locutions of propositional attitude, especially by attributions of belief. The volume concludes with four essays about the distinction between meaning and use, or more generally, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics.

Ratings and reviews

the author seems to be trying to carve a niche for himself within a kaplan- and kripke-friendly framework. problem is, try though he does, he utterly fails to deal with the major cracks in that system, and unnecessarily does them a disservice by accepting bullet-biting positions (e.g. "1+1=2" has the same cognitive value as "2+2") that he wrongly believes them to entail. an attempt on the part of an uncreative person to be creative. tortured.

this not a book. these are not real articles. if you took a drifter and force-fed him the usual russell-frege line of goods, and then let him sail off into the sunset, it would stabilize in his mind into something like what we're seeing here. this is mostly recycled, except for when the author goes rogue and does a face-plant. plus, the title is misleading. very little in here about content, cognition, or communication. just fourth generation papers on russell. yeah, no.

I bought this because I'm writing a dissertation on a semi-related topic. I was bitterly disappointed. Foundational questions relating to the nature of language are either ignored or mismanaged; and they author seems to be shadowing other people's opinions on these matters. He apes old and broken arguments. e.g. Frege's 'slingshot' (generalizations of which 'prove' that only thing exists) and tries to put his own signature on it, but always in a way that focuses on technicalities, never with substance, and the technicalities are very clumsily executed. As for issues relating to language-comprehension, these are totally ignored, which left me up a creek, my research-interests being what they are. And I see that his oddly chosen views about language seem to be tailored to suit his inability to deal with non-sterile topics, such as language-comprehension, as well as with sterile ones (but that is another matter). Which makes he inclusion of the word 'cognition' in the title rather inappropriate. And frankly, the other two words shouldn't really be there either. He's trying to be something he's not, and it's obvious from pretty much the first few sentences.