This book is the outgrowth of years of work on propositional attitudes, the hardest problem in semantics.
M. J. Cresswell is a logician and philosopher of language who has been a major continuing influence on the growth and development of formal semantics over the past 15 years or more. This book is the outgrowth of years of work on propositional attitudes, the hardest problem in semantics. In it, he traces the problem to the foundations of semantics and solves it by distinguishing between the result of the composition of the simple parts of complex expressions and structure consisting of the uncomposed parts.Cresswell explains the basis of the great intuitive appeal of structured meanings, and why previous attempts, from Carnap's notion of intensional isomorphism on, to use them to solve the propositional attitudes problem have been unsuccessful. His own formalization is integrated into a model-theoretic framework which is capable of incorporating and extending all the insights obtained from Montague's semantics.
A Bradford Book.
- ISBN10 0262031086
- ISBN13 9780262031080
- Publish Date 21 March 1985
- Publish Status Transferred
- Publish Country US
- Publisher MIT Press Ltd
- Imprint MIT Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 216
- Language English
- URL http://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262031080