Project A-12

A Theory of Evaluative and Inductive Content of Concepts

Project Abstract

In the tradition of modern logic, the content of concepts is defined in terms of the contribution they make to determining whether an object of thought such as the proposition denoted by a sentence is true or false. Concepts may be concrete, e.g. that of a table, but philosophers have also treated as concepts the denotations of function words such as 'and'. The project explores formally and in detail how contents of concepts may or sometimes must be given (i) by relations of inductive evidential relevance which may be far short of conclusive, and (ii) in terms of evaluative relations of utility or affect. It explores consequences for the compositional formal ontology of meanings, relations to truth conditions, and implications for philosophical anthropology. The principal project framework is Decision-Theoretic Semantics (DTS), an originary development which takes as its point of departure for all three aspects of meaning the mathematical notion of expectation, also known as expected value.

Publications