Reference and Existence : The John Locke Lectures

UGX 64,000

  • Paperback | 186 pages
  • 143 x 210 x 12mm | 218g
  • 08 Mar 2018
  • Oxford University Press Inc
  • New York, United States
  • English
  • 0190660619
  • 9780190660611
  • 588,107

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Reference and Existence, Saul Kripke’s John Locke Lectures for 1973, can be read as a sequel to his classic Naming and Necessity. It confronts important issues left open in that work – among them, the semantics of proper names and natural kind terms as they occur in fiction and in myth; negative existential statements; the ontology of fiction and myth (whether it is true that fictional characters like Hamlet, or mythical kinds like bandersnatches,
might have existed). In treating these questions, he makes a number of methodological observations that go beyond the framework of his earlier book – including the striking claim that fiction cannot provide a test for theories of reference and naming. In addition, these lectures provide a glimpse into the transition
to the pragmatics of singular reference that dominated his influential paper, “Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference” – a paper that helped reorient linguistic and philosophical semantics. Some of the themes have been worked out in later writings by other philosophers – many influenced by typescripts of the lectures in circulation – but none have approached the careful, systematic treatment provided here. The virtuosity of Naming and Necessity – the colloquial ease of the
tone, the dazzling, on-the-spot formulations, the logical structure of the overall view gradually emerging over the course of the lectures – is on display here as well.

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