creators_name: Horsey, Richard
type: confpaper
datestamp: 2003-10-29
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:23
metadata_visibility: show
title: “If Josef kills Leon, is Leon dead?”
ispublished: unpub
subjects: ling-sem
subjects: phil-mind
subjects: phil-logic
subjects: ling-prag
full_text_status: public
keywords: meaning postulates
abstract: Fodor (1975) proposed that word meanings were atomic, and that meaning relations between words could be captured by inference rules, or 'meaning postulates', linking atomic concepts. In his recent work, however, Fodor has rejected meaning postulates as a way of capturing meaning relations, because he sees no principled way of distinguishing meaning postulates from empirical knowledge. In this paper, I argue that Fodor is wrong to reject meaning postulates.
date: 2001
date_type: published
refereed: FALSE
referencetext: Chomsky, N. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Fodor, J. A. 1975. The Language of Thought. New York: Crowell.

Fodor, J. A. 1994. The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and its Semantics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Fodor, J. A. 1998. Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fodor, J. D., Fodor, J. A. & Garrett, M. F. (1975). The psychological unreality of semantic representations. Linguistic Inquiry, 4: 515–531.

Sperber, D. & D. Wilson 1995. Relevance, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
citation:   Horsey, Richard  (2001) “If Josef kills Leon, is Leon dead?”.  [Conference Paper]    (Unpublished)  
document_url: http://cogprints.org/3258/1/josef.pdf