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Semantics, in philosophy, often refers to "relation between signs and the things to which they refer and is seen, often, within the school of rhetoric.

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I am someone who believes that meaning happens only in consciousness. In my view, words would have no meaning in a philosophical zombie world. But my view raises an interesting dilemma. Suppose, at ...
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So, I asked a similar question in maths, but from the answers I got, I figured it maybe is too philosophically loaded (I hope this is ok). But still my main interest lies in the actual application of ...
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In beginning I must confess that I am a Formalist when it comes to mathematics and philosophy. Formalism is defined as the following per Wikipedia: Formalism is the view that holds that statements of ...
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My first claim is an observation that there are some subsystems in the mind where humans show perfect competency with typed elements, and there are some subsystems in the mind where humans struggle ...
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Perhaps this is a semantics question, but what I would like is to be able to substitute the question "What is the meaning of life?" to "What is life equal to?" and I want to know ...
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In formal systems, recursive definitions must be fully specified to ensure the reliability of conclusions. However, in natural human thinking, we often rely on context-dependent partial recursion to ...
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I've seen in the book "Logic for everyone" by Jason Decker that he writes the Propositions on the header of the tables as meta-Propositions. E.g. for the formula A→C 𝒜 𝒞 𝒜→𝒞 T T T T F F ...
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I'm learning the nuance between using and mentioning. Maybe what I'm going to write is a result of misunderstanding. The object language (OL) contains names of objects from a domain, a assumed real ...
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In traditional logical and semantic systems, contradiction is often seen as something to be eliminated — a signal that the reasoning process has gone wrong. But what if contradiction is a structural ...
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My question is about the following perplexing passage of Plato's “Sophist,” in which young Theaetetus and the Stranger of Elea, a disciple of Eleatic philosophy, debate about certain problems of the ...
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A sentence is true if and only if what the sentence describes is the case. My main doubt started when I realised that we are comparing sentence, a collection of words, to reality, the case. Something ...
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While discussing the question Is Machine our new God?!, I found myself explaining a distinction I hadn't consciously articulated before: the difference between Ordinary Meaning, Profound Meaning, and ...
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Think of a description of an object, having qualities Q(a),Q(b). Q(a) can also have a description of it's own which one might try to describe to another person using a common language, and while ...
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Is the phrase “infinitely divisible” describing just one property or two properties by condensation? I ask because the phrase “infinitely divisible” can be interpreted as the conjunction of two ...
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Peter Smith in chapter 8 of "An Introduction to Formal Logic" introduces three sentential/logical connectives: 'And', 'Or' and 'Not'. He gives a brief exposition on such natural language ...
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Metaethics typically investigates two broad domains: (a) The semantics of moral discourse: (i) Are moral utterances truth-apt? (ii) Do they have truth-makers? (b) The metaphysics of morality: (i) Do ...
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For that they have shorn absolute infinity of its mystical significance, have set theorists since Cantor ended up meaning something sufficiently different by the phrase "absolute infinity" ...
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The SEP entry on situations in natural-language semantics reads: Situation semantics was developed as an alternative to possible worlds semantics. In situation semantics, linguistic expressions are ...
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In language , we can employ usual meanings of language-tokens and unusual meaning of language-tokens without the notion of "usual meaning" of language-tokens, communication would be a ...
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Good evening, everyone. Since Frege the meaning of sentences has been conditioned to its truth-condition (be it as a truth-value being the referent of a sentence or truth being a property of a true ...
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In the paper Trans Feminism: Recent Philosophical Developments, Bettcher discusses the idea that it is hard to define the word "woman" and be inclusive of everyone that should be included (...
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The issue of the following reasoning is to learn completeness of propositional calculus. I am learning the book "An introduction to Logic and its philosophy", Peter Schotch 2006. The aim of ...
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In his mereology, Husserl defines moments as inseparable parts and cites examples such as the relationship between intensity and quality or the relationship between color and extension: I never see a ...
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All reasonings may be divided into two kinds, namely, demonstrative reasoning, or that concerning relations of ideas, and moral reasoning, or that concerning matter of fact and existence. Why does ...
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I look at Zero and Infinity, Quantitatively, one is Nothing vs other Everything. For some reason I find Zero more intuitive than Infinity. Just wanted to know if there is some difference between ...
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Delong (A profile of Mathematical Logic §16 p. 170 in the Kindle edition) wrote that we can denying the antecedent by having an obviously false consequence follow from it. A similar device is ...
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In the book A Profile of Mathematical Logic from Howard DeLong in § 16, Primary logic, the Propositional calculus, I noticed two teachings quoted below: To each valid argument there corresponds a ...
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Explaining "Implementing a specification" I'm currently looking into the notion of "implementing according to a specification" in engineering, and in particular in software ...
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The Context Principle says to "never ... ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition", which I take to mean that we should not look to words in ...
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Full disclosure: I’m a linguistics student and not a philosophy one, my only formal experience in philosophy is one epistemology and one applied ethics class 
When I was in my epistemology class, one ...
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In general, I am interested in a paradigm something like this: When we have premises, there are rules that can allow us to derive consequences of those premises. Sometimes, going in the reverse ...
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When an observer looks at a dog, and uses that information to comment on the color of the dog's coat, there is a chain of causation leading directly from the dog to the observer's statement about the ...
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I am not sure where to draw the line between semantics and pragmatics. It appears that philosophers often attempt to solve a problem with regards to the use of language and suggest a theory that they ...
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I know that there is some research in philosophy on the difference between (A) "S believes that p" and (B) "S believes in x" (e.g. H. H. Price and Gendler Szabó). But I cannot find ...
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When a person says "this is morally good" or "this is morally bad," something caused them to make this statement. Typical causes may include: They were told by their parents that ...
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Lambda Calculus semantics are defined over a formal structure of values that are partially ordered with respect a sort of "more defined" relation. The least element is the completely ...
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It's uncontroversial that most declarative sentences have propositional content, and can therefore be true or false. However they are just one way of conveying information. If 'There exists a red wall'...
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I'm from a programming background, so please forgive me for asking programming-related logic questions. My question is this: Many things have a truth value, including true and false themselves. ...
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Definition 1. An idiom is a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words. Definition 2. An idiom is a phrase or expression that has a ...
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I can understand that some self-referential sentences can be sensible and have truth/false values (e.g. "This sentence is written in English." is true, "This sentence has 1,000 words.&...
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Let T be a stripped-down version of propositional logic, whose only connectives are ¬ and ➝, and suppose T can prove all the usual theorems that can be formed from only these two connectives. Let T’ ...
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Hyperintensionality is something to do with e.g. the difference between, "I believe that Dean is Dean," vs., "I believe that Dean is Ackles." Generally, an operation X on A and B ...
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Is the meaning of something identifiable or reducible to the motion or effect it causes on the mind that interprets it? For example, the meaning of a photograph could be said to be the nostalgic ...
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I initially posted this in Linguistics, but wanted to get philosophers' opinions on this as well. (And someone over there is complaining that it's a philosophical rather than a linguistic question... ...
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If □P, does it follow that P is a tautology? I know in K modal logic, the law of NEC states ⊢ P; therefore □P. The corresponding conditional of the previous argument is If ⊢ P then □P. Now ⊢P iff P is ...
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In all of the established propositional logics that I’m aware of, a propositional atom is treated as a meta-variable. In certain first-order proof systems, this does not hold for those same logics ...
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A monoid is a mathematical structure with an associative law of composition and an identity element. It can be proven that if an element of a monoid has an inverse, then the inverse is unique: Assume ...
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What's sense according to Wittgenstein? I think I might have missed the definition in TLP, but I can't find it anywhere. From the context it's obvious that Wittgenstein's sense isn't that of Frege. ...
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What does it mean to say that we can attribute neither being nor non-being to the elements? One might say: if everything that we call “being” and “non-being” consists in the obtaining and non-...
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What does it mean to say that we can attribute neither being nor non-being to the elements? One might say: if everything that we call “being” and “non-being” consists in the obtaining and non-...
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