The purpose of my thesis is to explore and assess recent efforts by Direct Reference Theorists to explain the phenomenon of empty names. Direct Reference theory is, roughly, the theory that the meaning of a singular term (proper name, demonstrative, etc.) is simply its referent. Certain sentences, such as negative existentials ("Santa does not exist"), and sentences in contexts of fiction ("Holmes lived on Baker Street"), present the following challenge to DR Theory: Given that the semantic value of a name is simply its referent, how are we to explain the significance and truth-evaluability of such sentences? There have been various approaches DR Theorists have taken to address this problem, including the Pragmatic Strategy, Pretense Theory, Abstract Object Theory, and the Metalinguistic Strategy. All of these views are analyzed and assessed according to their various strengths and weaknesses. It is concluded that, overall, a Metalinguistic Strategy, supplemented by the notion of pretense, best deals with negative existentials and normal-subject predicate occurrences of empty names, Abstract Object Theory best deals with empty names in meta-fictional contexts, and Pretense Theory best deals with empty names in object-fictional contexts.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T20:57:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Marina M Machado.pdf: 4344752 bytes, checksum: 0af0b3bd3d0740b23ddcb49b5401d351 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-04-27 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The thesis seeks to examine the adult-child relationship according to the precepts the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty expounded in his Sorbonne lectures on child psychology and pedagogy. The thesis s author discusses in detail the concepts of otherness, corporeality, linguisticity, temporality, spaciality, mundaneity, and culpability in childhood and presents a register of the process of production of meaning in early childhood (from birth to six years of age). The author offers a drawn image which she calls The flower of life, in which the existentials appear as petals and mundaneity as the stem. The purpose is to show a conception of childhood in which the child s manner of being in the world is always holistic and understood as the child s coexistence with her body, with other people, with the time and space in which she lives, with her mother tongue, and with culpability. The author proposes a hermeneutics of childhood based on her work with children as theater teacher and psychotherapist. She concludes that the existencials ought to be carefully cultivated by adults, so that young children may acquire self-knowledge, knowledge of the other and of human culture. In this manner, under the guiding light of linguisticity, children from the earliest age on may acquire the capacity to express the meaning of their life experiences / Esta tese procura perscrutar as relações adulto-criança do modo como proposto pelo filósofo Maurice Merleau-Ponty em seus cursos na Sorbonne sobre pedagogia e psicologia da criança. Discute minuciosamente os existenciais outridade, corporalidade, lingüisticidade, temporalidade, espacialidade, mundaneidade e culpabilidade na infância e registra o processo da autora de produção de sentidos para a pequena infância (a criança de zero a seis anos de idade), na forma de relato de experiência. A autora cria uma imagem em desenho que denomina A flor da vida : imagem onde os existenciais aparecem como pétalas, e a mundandeidade como cabo da flor; seu objetivo é mostrar uma visão da infância onde o modo de ser e estar no mundo da criança pequena é sempre totalizado e compreendido na coexistência com seu corpo, com os outros, com o tempo e com o espaço vividos, com sua língua mãe e a culpabilidade. A autora propõe uma hermenêutica da infância a partir de seu trabalho junto a crianças como professora de teatro, psicoterapeuta e estudiosa de Fenomenologia, e conclui que os existenciais podem ser cuidadosamente cultivados pelos adultos, de modo a propiciar às crianças pequenas o conhecimento de si, do Outro e da Cultura humana. Nessa chave, à luz da lingüisticidade, as crianças estarão, desde a mais tenra idade, livres para expressar o sentido de suas experiências de vida