An Inscriptional Meta-Language
In this chapter a formalisation of Scheffler’s inscriptionalist approach will be attempted. As noted at the end of the previous chapter, the aforementioned formalisation will rely heavily on the work of Goodman , Quine , Martin and Woodger . Martin’s work
- PDF / 236,254 Bytes
- 24 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 60 Downloads / 158 Views
An Inscriptional Meta-Language
In this chapter a formalisation of Scheffler’s inscriptionalist approach will be attempted. As noted at the end of the previous chapter, the aforementioned formalisation will rely heavily on the work of Goodman, Quine, Martin and Woodger. Martin’s work is of particular importance. He perhaps did the most to develop meta-languages whereby the expressions of the relevant object-languages were to be understood as concrete inscriptions. Thus, Martin’s work seems to be an appropriate starting point for the systematisation of Scheffler’s theory. To be sure, certain modifications and extensions will be required to achieve the aforementioned systematisation; for the resulting system must of course be appropriate to dealing with all the problems of intensionality. How it is thought that this should be achieved is shown below. In this chapter Sect. 13.1 will provide certain informal explanations and comments regarding the development of inscriptional meta-languages generally, as well as the one developed particularly in this chapter; Sect. 13.2 gives the inscriptional syntactical meta-language IM; the inscriptional semantical meta-language ISM LD , of which IM is a part, is given in Sect. 13.3; Sect. 13.4 shows how predicates can be defined for ISM LD which are required to account for modal discourse; in Sect. 13.5 it is shown how further alterations can be made to ISM LD so as to accommodate Scheffler’s analysis of attitude reports; Sect. 13.6 shows how the resulting system, ISM LD *, can be used to account for the problems of intensionality; and a chapter summary is provided in Sect. 13.7.
13.1
Some Preliminary Comments
It is clear that the sententialist responses to the problems of intensionality are meta-linguistic in some sense or other. Sententialist accounts will be weakly meta-linguistic if intensional contexts are treated in a manner such that reference is © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2016 D. Parsons, Theories of Intensionality, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2484-9_13
185
186
13
An Inscriptional Meta-Language
made to the expressions of a language, but in so doing no object-language/meta-language distinction is employed. As noted in Sect. 12.3 of the previous chapter, Scheffler’s analysis was originally intended to be meta-linguistic only in this weak sense. However, Scheffler also recognised that a more robust meta-linguistic approach would be required if his inscriptional analysis was to account for statements involving syntactic and semantical predicates. This more robust approach would involve employing inscriptional meta-languages whereby reference can be made to the expressions of the given object-language, where these expressions are taken as concrete entities (i.e., inscriptions). The development of a formalised inscriptional meta-language was first attempted by Goodman and Quine in ‘Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism’ (1947). Here, Goodman and Quine intended to show how the syntax of an object-language could be provided by nominalistic means alone. (That is, without
Data Loading...
