Title: What is Truth, Representation, and Meaning?
Lecturer: Scott Soames (Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California)
Chairperson: HE Jing (Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University)
Date: 2 pm, December 7th, 2016 (Wednesday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
Although this question has been central to the analytic tradition in philosophy since its inception, the answers to them have always been problematic. From propositions, or thoughts, proposed by Frege and Russell, to sentences or uses of sentences proposed by Wittgenstein, Carnap, Strawson, and Austin, to sets of possible world-states by Montague, Lewis, and Stalnaker, to rejections of the questions themselves by Quine and Davidson, nothing has worked. Now we have new approach in which truth is accuracy of representation, the bearers of truth are cognitive acts of representing things as being certain ways, and the meaning of a sentence is a cognitive act that imposes both truth conditions on the world and cognitive conditions on any agent performing it.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Scott Soames (born August 11, 1946) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. He specializes in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy. He has enormous publications, including: Propositions and Attitudes (1989), Reference and Description: The Case against Two- Dimensionalism (2005). “Tacit Knowledge”, “What is a Theory of Truth?” and so on.