Jaroslav Peregrin

Davidson’s anomalous monism is based on the assumption that a human being can be described or accounted for in two very different ways, using two very different and indeed incommensurable conceptual frameworks, namely the physicalistic vocabulary of science and the mentalistic vocabulary employed by the ‘theories’ we make about each other when we interact and communicate. Also Sellars maintains that we have two alternative pictures of the world and especially of us humans as its parts, namely the scientific image and the manifest image. At first sight, the views of the two philosophers may seem quite similar; however, the true extent of this apparent similarity is worth exploring. To that end, in this paper we tackle the following questions: Are Sellars’ reasons for claiming the irreducibility of his manifest image to the scientific image the same or similar to those that Davidson has for asserting the irreducibility of his mentalistic idiom to the scientific one? Is the normativity informing Sellars’ manifest image of the same kind as that informing Davidson’s mentalistic idiom? Do the notions of rationality considered by Sellars and Davidson coincide?

The proof of correctness and completeness of a logical calculus w.r.t. a given semantics can be read as telling us that the tautologies (or, more gen erally, the relation of consequence) specified in a model theoretic way can be equally well specified in a proof theoretic way, by means of the calculus (as the theorems, resp. the relation of inferability of the calculus). Thus we know that both for the classical propositional calculus and for the clas sical predicate calculus theorems and tautologies represent two sides of the same coin. We also know that the relation of inference as instituted by any of the common axiom systems of the classical propositional calculus coin cides with the relation of consequence defined in terms of the truth tables; whereas the situation is a little bit more complicated w.r.t. the classical predicate calculus (the coincidence occurs if we restrict ourselves to closed ∀xFx is inferable from Fx without being its conse formulas; otherwise..

The “dynamic turn” in semantic theory of natural language, which has been taking place roughly during the last decade, has resulted into seeing the meaning of a sentence as a “context-change-potential”, as a function which maps the set of possible contexts on itself. The development of theories of this kind has been stimulated especially by the effort to semantically cope with the anaphoric items of natural language . The most significant species of dynamic semantic theories are represented by Kamp´s “discourse representations theory” and Groenendijk and Stokhof´s “dynamic logic”. The former sees sentences as means of building and rebuilding “discourse representations structures”; the latter, which tries to be an expressly logical objects to “discourse markers” into the same set. The paper presents basic principles of theories of both of these kinds and indicates how they can help us analyse natural language locutions involving anaphora

In Meaning and Structure, Peregrin argues that recent and contemporary (post)analytic philosophy, as developed by Quine, Davidson, Sellars and their followers, is largely structuralistic in the very sense in which structuralism was originally tabled by Ferdinand de Saussure. The author reconstructs de Saussure's view of language, linking it to modern formal logic and mathematics, and reveals close analogies between its constitutive principles and the principles informing the holistic and neopragmatistic view of language put forward by Quine and his followers. Peregrin also indicates how this view of language can be made compatible with what is usually called 'formal semantics'. Drawing on both the Saussurean tradition and recent developments in analytic philosophy of language, this book offers a unique study of the ways in which the concept of meaning can be seen as consisting in the concept of structure.

Abstrakt. Když se řekne Ludwig Wittgenstein, vybaví se člověku, který to jméno už někdy slyšel, nejspíše termín jazyková hra. Tento termín si Wittgenstein vybral, aby se v rámci své pozdní filosofie distancoval od určitého druhu názorů na jazyk (druhu, kterého byly i jeho vlastní ranější filosofické názory). Chtěl jeho pomocí zdůraznit různorodost lidských aktivit, které se opírají o jazyk. Avšak ač to Wittgenstein úplně explicitně neříká, zdá se mi že je tu něco podstatného, co je podle něj pro jazykové hry charakteristické, a to je role pravidel v rámci jejich konstituce. Tomu napovídá rozsah pozornosti, kterou Wittgenstein věnuje fenoménu pravidla ve Filosofických zkoumáních. Podle mne tedy můžeme říci, že jazyková hra je v typickém případě hrou - více či méně - 'řízenou' pravidly. Způsob, jakým se jazyková hra 'řídí' pravidly, se však v některých zásadních ohledech liší od způsobu, jakým se pravidly řídí hry, ke kterým občas naše jazykové hry přirovnáváme (šachy, fotbal ap.) Pravidla jazykových her jsou implicitní, vágní a do jisté míry otevřená. Přitom pravidla hry nám obvykle otevírají nějaký nový prostor - a v případě jazykových her je to prostor, kterému se dá říkat prostor smysluplnosti. Myslím ovšem, že skutečnou roli pravidel v rámci jazykových her Wittgenstein v rámci Filosofických zkoumání trochu zamlžuje; a cílem tohoto textu bude ji vyjasnit.

After putting forward his celebrated deflationary theory of truth (Horwich, 1998a), Paul Horwich added a compatible theory of meaning (Horwich, 1998b). I am calling also this latter theory deflationism (although it may be a slightly misleading name in that, as Paul himself notes, his theory of meaning is deflationary more in the sense of being forced by the deflationary theory of truth than of being particularly deflationary in itself). In contrast, what I call inferentialism is the theory of meaning which I am going to advocate here – the view, in a nutshell, that meaning is a matter of inferential role. Various versions of this theory have been defended by Wilfried Sellars, Robert Brandom and a couple of other philosophers including myself. And the thesis I wish to present in this paper – to put it as a provocation right off – is that Paul is an inferentialist led astray. Both deflationism and inferentialism can be seen as elaborations of what can be called the use theory of meaning; for both seem to agree that.

Není tomu tak dávno, co se ti, kdo vzývali termín "analytická filosofie", v naší zemi jevili jako příslušníci nějaké divné sekty, kteří smysl termínu "filosofie" jakýmsi úchylným způsobem překrucují. Není-li však člověk zrovna Valihrachem, nemůže o tom, co slova znamenají, svévolně rozhodovat; a faktem je, analytická filosofie tvoří podstatnou část toho, co se ve světě pod hlavičkou "filosofie" učí a provozuje. (Já bych řekl, že dokonce většinu, ale statistické údaje samozřejmě k dispozici žádné nemám.) Během posledních zhruba deseti let se ovšem situace podstatně změnila a analytický způsob filosofování se u nás začíná široce etablovat. Existují již překlady celé řady klasických děl (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Popper, ...) i těch novějších (Quine, Davidson, ...), a vznikla i celá řade původních prací. Co dosud scházelo bylo nějaké systematické historické pojednání o tom, jak tento filosofický směr vznikl, jak se vyvíjel a jak dospěl k tomu druhu otázek, který si předsevzal řešit. Tuto mezeru se nyní pokouší zaplnit kniha docenta filosofické fakulty olomoucké univerzity Lubomíra Valenty Problémy analytické filosofie