Anaphora and Definite Descriptions

I n order to appreciate properly what we are doing in this book it is necessary to realize that our approach to linguistic theorizing differs from the prevailing views. Our approach can be described by indicating what distinguishes it from the methodological ideas current in theoretical linguistics, which I consider seriously misguided. Linguists typically construe their task in these days as that of making exceptionless generalizations from particular examples. This explanatory strategy is wrong in several different ways. It presupposes that we can have "intuitions" about particular examples, usually examples invented by the linguist himself or herself, reliable and sharp enough to serve as a basis of sharp generalizations. It also presupposes that we cannot have equally reliable direct access to general linguistic regularities. Both assumptions appear to me extremely dubious, and the first of them has in effect been challenged by linguists like Dwight Bol inger. There is also some evidence that the degree of unanimity among linguists is fairly low when it comes to less clear cases, even in connection with such relatively simple questions as grammaticality (acceptability). For this reason we have tried to rely more on quotations from contemporary fiction, newspapers and magazines than on linguists' and philosophers' ad hoc examples. I also find it strange that some of the same linguists as believe that we all possess innate ideas about general characteristics of humanly possible grammars assume that we can have access to them only via their particular consequences.

Autorentext

Jaakko Hintikka is the author or co-author of thirty volumes and of some 300 scholarly articles in mathematical and philosophical logic, epistemology, language theory, philosophy of science, history of ideas and history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Peirce, The Bloomsbury Group, Husserl and Wittgenstein. He has also been active in international scholarly organizations, most recently as the First Vice-President of FISP, Vice-President of IIP and Co-Chair of the American Organizing Committee of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal Synthese and the Managing Editor of Synthese Library since 1965.

Inhalt
I: Introduction to Game-Theoretical Semantics.- 1. General.- 2. Formal first-order languages.- 3. Equivalence with Tarski-type truth-definitions.- 4. Translation to higher-order languages.- 5. Partially ordered quantifiers.- 6. Subgames and functional interpretations.- 7. Extension to natural languages.- 8. Similarities and differences between formal and natural languages.- 9. Competing ordering principles.- 10. Atomic sentences.- 11. Further rules for natural languages.- 12. Explanatory strategies.- Notes to Part I.- II: Definite Descriptions.- 1. Russell on definite descriptions.- 2. Prima facie difficulties with Russell's theory.- 3. Can we localize Russell's theory?.- 4. Game-theoretical solution to the localization problem.- 5. Anaphoric the in formal languages.- 6. Applications.- 7. Epithetic and counterepithetic the-phrases.- 8. Vagaries of the alleged head-anaphor relation.- 9. The anaphoric use of definite descriptions as a semantical phenomenon.- 10. The quantifier-exclusion phenomenon in natural languages.- 11. Inductive choice sets.- 12. Other uses of the.- 13. The Russellian use.- 14. The generic use motivated.- 15. Conclusions from the pragmatic deduction.- Notes to Part II.- III: Towards a Semantical Theory of Pronominal Anaphora.- I: Different Approaches to Anaphora.- II: A Game-Theoretical Approach to Anaphora.- III: The Exclusion Principle.- IV: General Theoretical Issues.- V: GTS expalains Coreference Restrictions.- VI: Comparisons with Other Treatments.- Notes to Part III.- Name Index.