This is the first detailed study to explore the little-understood notions of "knowing who someone is," "knowing a person's identity," and related locutions. It locates these notions within the context of a general theory of believing and a semantical theory of belief- and knowledge-ascriptions. The books's main contention is that what one knows, when one knows who someone is, is not normally an identity in the numerical sense of "a = b," but rather a certain sort of predication to know who someone is is just to know that that person is F, where "F" is a predicate that is "important," in a technical sense defined by the authors, for the purposes determined by context. Their book offers a rigorous formal semantics for ascriptions of knowing and of knowing-who in particular, solving such well-known problems and paradoxes as Kripke's Puzzle, and Quines difficulties with de re belief, along the way. The authors apply their analysis to each of several important issues in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and ethical theory in which the previously unexamined notion of "knowing who" has loomed large-the mechanics of linguistic referring, the foundations of epistemic logic, problems of self-knowledge and self-regarding belief, universalizability and "Golden Rule" arguments in ethics, and moral "personalism" versus "impartialism." A Bradford Book.

Knowing Who

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Boër, Steven E.

Psychology & Counseling

Bradford Books

This book provides a formal ontology of senses and the belief-relation that grounds the distinction between de dicto, de re, and de se beliefs as well as the opacity of belief reports. According to this ontology, the relata of the belief-relation are an agent and a special sort of object-dependent sense (a "thought-content"), the latter being an "abstract" property encoding various syntactic and semantic constraints on sentences of a language of thought.

Thought-Contents: On the Ontology of Belief and the Semantics of Belief Attribution (Philosophical Studies Series, 104)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Springer

This book provides a formal ontology of senses and the belief-relation that grounds the distinction between de dicto, de re, and de se beliefs as well as the opacity of belief reports. According to this ontology, the relata of the belief-relation are an agent and a special sort of object-dependent sense (a "thought-content"), the latter being an "abstract" property encoding various syntactic and semantic constraints on sentences of a language of thought.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Boër, Steven E.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Boër, Steven E.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Boër, Steven E.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Knowing Who

Thought-Contents: On the Ontology of Belief and the Semantics of Belief Attribution (Philosophical Studies Series, 104)

Thought-Contents: On the Ontology of Belief and the Semantics of Belief Attribution (Philosophical Studies Series, 104)