Theories of meaning according to various schools of Indic philosophy.

This Book Is The Result Of Intensive And Critical Study Of The Different Aspects Of Indian Epistemology Viz. The Nyaya Theory Of Perception, Some Problems Of Meaning In Purva-Mimamsa And Vedanta, Problem Of Vyapti According To Jaina-Logicians And Vallabhacarya Etc.

Current textbooks in formal semantics are all versions of, or introductions to, the same paradigm in semantic theory: Montague Grammar. Knowledge of Meaning is based on different assumptions and a different history. It provides the only introduction to truth- theoretic semantics for natural languages, fully integrating semantic theory into the modern Chomskyan program in linguistic theory and connecting linguistic semantics to research elsewhere in cognitive psychology and philosophy. As such, it better fits into a modern graduate or undergraduate program in linguistics, cognitive science, or philosophy. Furthermore, since the technical tools it employs are much simpler to teach and to master, Knowledge of Meaning can be taught by someone who is not primarily a semanticist. Linguistic semantics cannot be studied as a stand-alone subject but only as part of cognitive psychology, the authors assert. It is the study of a particular human cognitive competence governing the meanings of words and phrases. Larson and Segal argue that speakers have unconscious knowledge of the semantic rules of their language, and they present concrete, empirically motivated proposals about a formal theory of this competence based on the work of Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson. The theory is extended to a wide range of constructions occurring in natural language, including predicates, proper nouns, pronouns and demonstratives, quantifiers, definite descriptions, anaphoric expressions, clausal complements, and adverbs. Knowledge of Meaning gives equal weight to philosophical, empirical, and formal discussions. It addresses not only the empirical issues of linguistic semantics but also its fundamental conceptual questions, including the relation of truth to meaning and the methodology of semantic theorizing. Numerous exercises are included in the book.

First published in 2001. The five volumes of this series collect together some of the most significant modern contributions to the study of Indian philosophy. Volume 2: Logic and Philosophy of Language is concerned with those parts of Indian pramd-a theory that Western philosophers would count as logic and philosophy of language. Indian philosophers and linguists were much concerned with philosophical issues to do with language, especially with theories of meaning, while the Indian logicians developed both a formalised canonical inference schema and a theory of fallacies. The logic of the standard Indian inferential model is deductive, but the premises are arrived at inductively. The later Navya-Nyaya logicians went on to develop too a powerful technical language, an intentional logic of cognitions, which became the language of all serious discourse in India. The selections in this volume discuss Indian treatments of topics in logic and the philosophy of language like the nature of inference, negation, necessity, counterfactual reasoning, many-valued logics, theory of meaning, reference and existence, compositionality and contextualism, the sense-reference distinction, and the nature of the signification relation.