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Donald Davidson
(1917–2003).American philosopher who developed a widely admired and influential theory of mind and language. Davidson's deepest influence was Quine, with whom he shared a commitment to the ...

ethnology
(eth-nol-ŏji)the study of the different races of mankind, concerned mainly with cultural and social differences between groups and the problems that arise from their particular ways of life.—ethnic ...

inscrutability of reference
The doctrine due to Quine that no empirical evidence relevant to interpreting a speaker's utterances can decide among alternative and incompatible ways of assigning referents to the words used; hence ...

meaning
Whatever it is that makes what would otherwise be mere sounds and inscriptions into instruments of communication and understanding. The philosophical problem is to demystify this power, and to relate ...

metaphysics of presence
Term originally used by Heidegger to characterize the central mistake of western metaphysics. In his vision, metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche postulates a self-knowing and self-propelling ...

proposition
1 The meaning conveyed by a declarative sentence, a declarative sentence being one that asserts or denies something, or in other words one that is capable of being true or false. The proposition is ...

radical interpretation
The process of interpreting a foreign language without reliance on existing linguistic knowledge or help from bilinguals. The term is sometimes used as if it applied to any process of coming to ...

radical translation
The same process as radical interpretation, but the term even more notably implies that the process is entirely to be thought of in terms of translation; whereas in principle a language can come to ...

reader-response theory
A view of literary interpretation associated with the American critic Stanley Fish. It holds that meaning does not reside in the text, but in the mind of the reader. The text functions only as a ...

synonym
A word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language, for example shut is a synonym of close.

W. V. O. Quine
(1908–2000)US philosopher, logician, and radical critic of modern empiricism.Born at Akron, Ohio, Quine was educated at Oberlin and Harvard, where he completed his PhD under the supervision of A. N. ...
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