Toward a Holistic Theory of Predication
Journal
國立臺灣大學哲學研究所碩士論文
Date Issued
2006
Date
2006
Author(s)
Deng, Duen-Min
DOI
en-US
Abstract
In this thesis I present what I believe to be a new approach to the problem of predication. I shall reformulate the problem of predication as the following two questions: (1) What justifies our univocal use of one and the same predicate expression to predicate of several different things? (2) What unifies the parts of a sentence, usually a name with a predicate, to make a single predication rather than a mere list of words? Let us call what the first question concerns “the unity of classification,” and the second “the unity of the proposition”; a theory of predication, then, is a systematic account to answer such two questions.
In the first three chapters, I provide a critical review of three traditional approaches to predication in turn: the realist, the nominalist, and the conceptualist approach. The realist approaches predication by positing abstract entities as the semantic values of predicates, attempting to show that predication is nothing but a relationship between an individual and an abstract entity. Special attention will be paid to the Trope theory, especially J. Bacon’s (1995) new formulation and discussion. In Chapter Two, I characterize the nominalist approach as one that explains predication by some way of translation or reformulation of the language in use into a “nominalistically acceptable language” as the linguistic foundation for predication. I discuss the possibility of applying Carnap’s (1928) project of constructing quality classes from sense-data, and H. Field’s (1980) nominalist program of nominalizing the scientific theory, to an account of predication. As for the conceptualist approach, I trace this tradition back to Kant’s transcendental analysis of concepts and Brentano’s intentionality thesis, but my focus will be on the Meinongian theory of object and the pretense theory. I shall argue that the three aforementioned approaches are all doomed to fail.
I analyze the failure of the traditional approaches as the cleavage problem: all of them attempt to lay some foundation for predication by making cleavages, and endeavor to reduce the nature of predication to such a foundation. They therefore fail to recognize that in a theory of predication, three factors are indispensable: the world with the arrangement of things in it, the logical structure of our language, and the mental faculty of the making judgments. Based on such an analysis, I propose a new approach to predication—the holistic approach, one which intends to combine the three important factors to yield a unified theory of predication. I notice that Quine and Davidson’s holistic programs happen to provide such a background sufficient for a full-scale theory of predication, which I shall work out in Chapter Four. I conclude that the holistic approach I advocate is the only possible approach that satisfactorily explains predication.
Subjects
表述
實在論
惟名論
概念論
整體論
共相
殊質
費爾德
假裝理論
蒯因
戴維森
predication
realism
nominalism
conceptualism
holism
universal
trope
H. Field
Meinong
pretense theory
Quine
Davidson
Type
thesis
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