The nature of the information content of declarative sentences is a central topic in the philosophy of language. The natural view that a sentence like "John loves Mary" contains information in which two individuals occur as constituents is termed the naive theory, and is one that has been abandoned by most contemporary scholars. This theory was refuted originally by philosopher Gottlob Frege. His argument that the naive theory did not work is termed Frege's puzzle, and his rival account of information content is termed the orthodox theory.
Author(s): Nathan Salmon
Publisher: Ridgeview Publishing Company
Year: 1991
Language: English
Pages: 194
City: California
Preface
Errata and Alterations
Introduction
CH. 1 Frege's Puzzle and the Naive Theory 1.1 Frege's Puzzle and Information Content 1.2 The Naive Theory
CH. 2 Frege's Puzzle and the Modified Naive Theory 2.1 The Singly Modified Naive Theory 2.2 The Doubly Modified Naive Theory
CH. 3 The Theories of Russell and Frege 3.1 Russell 3.2 Frege
CH. 4 The Structure of Frege's Puzzle 4.1 Compositionality 4.2 Frege's Law 4.3 Challenging Questions
CH. 5 A Budget of Nonsolutions to Frege's Puzzle 5.1 Conceptual Theories 5.2 Contextual Theories 5.3 Verbal Theories 5.4 Frege's Strategy Generalized
CH. 6 The Crux of Frege's Puzzle 6.1 The Minor Premise 6.2 Substitutivity
CH.7 More Puzzles 7.1 The New Frege Puzzle 7.2 Elmer's Befuddlement
CH. 8 Resolution of the Puzzles 8.1 Attitudes and Recognition Failure 8.2 Propositional Attitudes and Recognition Failure 8.3 Resolution 8.4 Why We Speak the Way We Do
CH. 9 The Orthodox Theory versus the Modified Naive Theory 9.1 Semantics and Elmer's Befuddlement 9.2 Quantifying In 9.3 Propositional-Attitude Attributions 9.4 Concluding Remarks
Appendix A Kripke's Puzzle
Appendix B Analyticity and A Priority
Appendix C Propositional Semantics
Notes; Bibliography; Index of Theses; Subject Index.
