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Thesis (M.A. (Philosophy))--University of Pretoria, 2002. / Summary in English and Afrikaans. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2005. Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 452-455). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNR11593

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This thesis concerns the view, shared by Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein, that there are entities that cannot be named. Chapter 1 clarifies the particular form this commitment takes in the work of these three authors. The chapter also details a distinctive cluster of philosophical difficulties attending the view certain entities are unnameable, and explores the relation between unnameability and inexpressibility. The remaining chapters are devoted to investigating what grounds there are for countenancing the unnameable. The particular focus throughout is Frege's thesis that concepts cannot be named. Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to giving a detailed hearing to two arguments for Frege's thesis distinguishable in the locus classicus, 'On Concept and Object'. The first argument concerns the relationship between co-reference and intersubstitutability; the second concerns the unity of thought. It is contended that these arguments fail to substantiate Frege's thesis. Chapters 4 and 5 examine two further arguments for Frege's rejection of singular reference to concepts. The first is based upon the alleged impossibility of expressing identities between objects and concepts; the second draws on upon considerations pertaining to diagonalization and Russell's paradox. It is contended that each of these arguments can be resisted in defence of singular reference to concepts.

That the eighteenth century was a period of changing ideas is a proposition as true when applied to questions of language as it is when applied to other fields of intellectual endeavour. Grammatical studies were still closely related to philosophy, as they had been for some centuries. The rationalism of the seventeenth century had resulted in the strictly logical exposition of grammatical theories whose aim was to produce a normative means of teaching the 'art de bien parler'. With this rationalist approach arose the theory of a grammaire générale and its attempts to reduce the grammatical facts of all languages to logical terms. Although the eighteenth century aimed rather at teaching the 'art de bien penser', the idea of a rationally-based grammaire générale persisted as the foundation for most grammatical description, and actually reached its highest point of development in the siècle des lumières. Empiricism and the sensationalist philosophy of Condillac were slow to affect the techniques of grammatical enquiry and description. After outlining these trends in grammatical description, our study continues by examining the eighteenth-century grammarians' concepts of the word, attempting to relate them to the philosophical and scientific shift from rationalism to empiricism. The Encyclopédie, in which may be found the grammatical doctrines of Dumarsais and Beauzée, is shown to contain two distinct approaches to this subject, both of which treat the word as the smallest meaningful unit of language and as the basic element of grammatical description. Whereas Dumarsais looked upon the word as essentially a logical element dependent on semantic and rational criteria, Beauzée is shown to have based his concept on empirical linguistic facts, and to have considered the word as a sign (exhibiting the dichotomy of expression and content) whose meaning is both semantic and functional. Like de Saussure at the turn of this century, Beauzée posited paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations dependent on the existence of relative and negative oppositions within the word as a passive element of the lexicon and as a functional unit of language. In the process of his development of these relationships, Beauzée also came very near to establishing the modern concept of the morpheme. The theories of Dumarsais and Beauzée are compared and contrasted and the conclusion drawn that Beauzée's empirical approach resulted in his being far more modern in his concept of the word and in his understanding of general language problems than Dumarsais. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

A central task of contemporary analytic philosophy is to develop an understanding of how our minds are connected to the external (or mind-independent) world. Arising from this task is the need to explain how thoughts represent things in the world. Giving such an explanation is the central endeavor of this dissertation—the aim being to contribute to our understanding of what it is for a subject to be thinking of a particular object. The structure of the dissertation is set, in part, by responding to the commonly held view that a satisfactory explanation of what it is to think of a particular object can be drawn out of, or extended from, an explanation of what it is to be referring to that particular object. Typically, in investigating these matters, it is accepted that there is an explanatory priority of language over thought. This is the Priority Thesis. Some take the Priority Thesis to reflect an appropriate methodological strategy. In this form, it implies the methodological point that the best way to describe thoughts is by describing them as they are expressed in language. Most, however, seem to take the Priority Thesis to be symptomatic of a substantive, metaphysical truth. This, to put it one way, is that the content of a thought is paralleled by the content of the associated linguistic expression. I call this the Assumption of Parallelism. This characterizes what we call Linguistic Turn philosophy (i.e., analytic philosophy). The body of the dissertation arises out of questioning the extent of the application ofthe Priority Thesis in developing theories of reference and thought. I call the move of the partial overturning ofthe Priority Thesis the Linguistic U-Turn. The overall conclusion is that we cannot explain what it is to think of a particular object by extending explanations of what it is to be referring to that particular object. In particular, I reject what I call the Causal Theory of Thought—the view that the representational properties of a thought are explained by the referential properties of the appropriate singular term. My aim, then, is to show that a popular conviction concerning the representational properties of thoughts about things in the world is not warranted. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

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