Language and Imaginability

Unabridged ed
ISBN: 978-1-4438-5545-7
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 270 Seiten, Format (B × H): 151 mm x 212 mm, Gewicht: 530 g

Language and Imaginability pursues the hypothesis that natural language is fundamentally heterosemiotic, combining as it does the symbolicity of word sounds with the iconicity of motivated signifieds conceived as socially organized mental events. Viewed phenomenologically, language is regarded as an ontically heteronomous construct performed by speakers within the boundaries of sufficient semiosis under the control of the speech community. From both angles, a commitment to some form of intersubjective mentalism appears unavoidable. This, the author argues, forces us to conclude that imaginability plays a central role in the constitution of linguistic meanings as indirectly public phenomena.

The book argues this case by comparing two main avenues along which the theorization of language has been pursued in the Western tradition since Aristotle, via resemblance relations and propositional accounts. Locke, Kant, Peirce, Husserl and cognitive linguistics are invoked on the side of resemblance and iconicity; Frege, Wittgenstein, Davidson and other analytical philosophers up to intensional semantics are interpreted in terms of their relation to imaginability. The book also addresses the ambivalence vis-à-vis iconicity which we find in much of linguistics, in brain research and evolutionary accounts, as well as in pragmatics. The study ends on a series of redefinitions of concepts at the heart of the theorization of language.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ruthrof, Horst

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sprachphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Sprachphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik

Über Autor(innen)

Ruthrof, Horst
Horst Ruthrof, FICI FAHA, is Emeritus Professor in English and Philosophy at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia, where he has taught since 1974. He is the author of papers in philosophical, literary, linguistic, and semiotic journals, as well as of The Reader’s Construction of Narrative (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), Pandora and Occam: On the Limits of Language and Literature (Indiana UP, 1992), Semantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege to the Postmodern (Toronto UP, 1997; Melbourne UP, 1998), and The Body in Language (Cassell, 2000). His current research includes the search for an ontology suitable for the description of complex constructs, such as natural language, and a continuing concern with the literary exploration of language, as well as Quentin Meillassoux’s recent challenge to Kantian perspectivism.