Ivan Mikirtumov

In the article, I discuss some ideas of the type theoretical grammar of Aarne Ranta and the analysis of the problem of Quine (Ralph and Ortcutt), which Oleg Domanov implemented by means of this theory. There are more similarities than differences in TT grammar with well-known ideas, including “fine grinding” of meanings, counterparts, procedural understanding of – intensions. The main problem, which, in my opinion, exists in the TT grammar, consists in understanding how another agent’s epistemic attitudes can be justified for me. Ranta proceeds from the metaphor of the agent as a calculator, which for the general case is unacceptable. I believe that the interpretation of the epistemic attitudes of another agent must be externalistic, that is, referring not to the agent’s worlds, but to his actions in the actual world: “agent X believes that A” is true when the interpreter sees the behavior of the agent in situations that the interpreter would consider adequate for himself if he believed A and would be “in place” of X. To formalize here, it would take complicated tools which are used for describing actions. I’ve come to the conclusion that an understanding of the type in TT grammar makes it intensional in some extended sense, since the working with the naming relation is already an element of a specific pragmatics.

In this article, I want to show that the concept “rationality”, which is important for the French school of epistemology of science, has a dual content and is not very successful. This is the main point of my polemic with Tatyana Sokolova. On the one hand, there seems to be general rationality in it, understood as a preference (in the broad sense) for benefits over costs. Benefits include true knowledge. On the other hand, there is a historical socio-cultural context in which scientific knowledge arises and in which the parameters of practice are determined, which serves as the final instance for testing knowledge. At the same time, there are many such contexts in society, which I call human interfaces. The world, for its part, offers many of its interfaces as collections of interaction tools. When some interface of a person and some interface of the world assimilate each other, knowledge arises, that is confirmed by practice. It can be considered rational. But with a change in the sociocultural context, the human interface also changes, so that a search for new assimilation takes place. It is carried out by science. I agree with Tatyana Sokolova’s characterization of the progress of science, but I suggest at least differentiating the levels of rationality. One operates in the historical sociocultural locus, the other ensures the change of such loci and the adaptation of knowledge to them. I consider the progress of science to be an evaluative characteristic; no objectively recorded phenomenon corresponds to it. The disciplinary distinction of science is derived from the concepts of “object” and “method”, which have a performative content.

In this paper, we would like to argue in support of the productiveness of epistemological investigations at the interface of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language and the analysis of perception. We begin with a short overview the history of convergence of these two areas of research. Leibniz is the center of this historical discussion. We identify the general problems that arise when language meets perception and discuss some recent research in the semantics of pictures. We arrive at the following conclusions. First, the reference of a singular term and the perception of its denotation involve the same relation between the conceptual and what is immediately given in perception. The specifics of perception make up a part of a singular term’s pragmatics determining the conditions of a semantic interpretation. Secondly, phenomena with minimal conceptual content arise whenever the update of the conceptual content of linguistic expressions is faster than the update of the sensory material of perception. In the realm of language, these phenomena are related to the appearance of singular terms that become the result of acts of naming singular objects. The semantic and the pragmatic analysis of language identifies the relevant phenomena by revealing the universal formal structures and mechanism within language and its use. The result is an isolation of sensory data from conceptual schemes. Their place is taken by the empirical conditions of perception.