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Reference and Competence: Moravcsik's Thought and Language*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Mark Richard
Affiliation:
Tufts University

Extract

The book under review consists of a “Problems” section, with chapters entitled “Ontology,” “Thought” and “Language”; and a “Proposals” section, with like-titled chapters. The first section is a survey; as might be expected of one of 126 pages, compression is the watchword. The reviewer felt that it did not live up to dust jacket copy, heralding a book “easily accessible to undergraduates.”

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1993

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References

Notes

1 Most easily accessible in Volume 2 of Putnam's collected papers, Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. Other papers in this volume, especially 8, 11 and 13, further develop Putnam's view and are relevant to a comparison of it with Moravcsik's.

2 Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” p. 242.

3 This is actually a general description of the sciences of cognition proposed by Moravcsik.

4 This characterization is borrowed from Moravcsik's description of Frege's views in Moravcsik, J. M., “Frege and Chomsky on Thought and Language,” in The Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, edited by French, Peter A., Uehling, Theodore E. Jr. and Wettstein, Howard K., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, No. 6 (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1981), p. 118.Google Scholar

5 I have argued for this in Chapter 2 of Propositional Attitudes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

6 See, for example, Rips, Lance's interesting “Similarity, Typicality, and Categorization,” in Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, edited by Vosniadou, Stella and Ortony, Andrew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 2159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar