more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
Syntactic form is not only related to the truth conditions of a sentence; it is also related to what focus an utterance of a sentence will have.
Gist of Idea
Syntactic form concerns the focus of the sentence, as well as the truth-conditions
Source
Thomas Hofweber (Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics [2016], 02.5.2)
Book Ref
Hofweber,Thomas: 'Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics' [OUP 2018], p.42
A Reaction
Hofweber has commendably studied some linguistics. The idea of mental and linguistic 'focus' increasingly strikes me as of importance in many areas of philosophy. E.g. in the scope of ethics, on whom should you focus?
| 18006 | Chomsky's 'interpretative semantics' says syntax comes first, and is then interpreted [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
| 18007 | Syntax is independent of semantics; sentences can be well formed but meaningless [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
| 3507 | Universal grammar doesn't help us explain anything [Searle] |
| 2581 | Intuition may say that a complex sentence is ungrammatical, but linguistics can show that it is not [Block] |
| 8073 | How do we parse 'time flies like an arrow' and 'fruit flies like an apple'? [Devlin] |
| 21638 | Syntactic form concerns the focus of the sentence, as well as the truth-conditions [Hofweber] |
| 15347 | A theory of syntax can be based on Peano arithmetic, thanks to the translation by Gödel coding [Horsten] |
| 18008 | Generative semantics says structure is determined by semantics as well as syntactic rules [Magidor] |
| 18010 | 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' have different deep structure [Magidor] |