Meaning, Creativity, and the Partial Inscrutability of the Human Mind (Volume 79)

by Julius Moravcsik

In this book, Julius M. Moravcsik disputes that a natural language is not and should not be represented as a formal language. The book criticizes current philosophy of language as having an altered focus without adjusting the needed conceptual tools. It develops a new theory of lexical meaning, a new conception of cognition-humans not as information processing creatures but as primarily explanation and understanding seeking creatures-with information processing as a secondary, derivative activity. In conclusion, based on the theories of lexical meaning and cognition, this work sketches an argument showing that the human understanding of human understanding must always remain just partial.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1998

About the author

Julius Matthew Emil Moravcsik was an American philosopher who specialized in ancient Greek philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_...

Reviews

[Nat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book contains an enormous number of typos, which is surprising, given that it is published by Stanford's Center for Language and Information. You'd think they'd care about that kind of thing.

Moravcsik criticizes traditional truth-conditional semantic theories because they don't account for phenomena like meaning-change, polysemy, and various kinds of context-sensitivity. Unlike the radical Wittgensteinians, however, Moravcsik's criticism is purely empirical, and he proposes a replacement lexical semantic theory (which is only sketched in this book) that is supposed to accommodate those phenomena.

He uses a lot of the same kinds of examples as the Wittgensteinians, but there isn't (as far as I know) any acknowledgement on either side that the other is working on roughly the same kinds of questions.