Reddit mentions: The best semantics books

Yes, it can make one better, but it need not.

Here is an example. Right now, the semantics for the word 'ought' is a hot topic in metaethics. The reason is that lots of philosophical debates about what people ought to do are based on certain assumptions, and these assumptions are sometimes inconsistent with the semantics for 'ought'. Anyway, if you don't know any modal logic and so don't know any deontic logic (the logic of 'ought'), then you will have a hard time following the debate about the semantics for 'ought'. And so you will have a hard time figuring out whether you are making unrealistic assumptions about what people ought to do. See Matthew Chrisman's book The Meaning of 'Ought' for a great introduction and sophisticated treatment.

Of course, not every issue in philosophy is related to logic in such a way.

I still think Whorf himself gets a pretty bad rap. After reading his stuff pretty carefully, I saw no indication that he was of the opinion that we couldn't break past the categorizations of reality that language necessitates, but just that the fact that language relies on categorizations and chunking (in the form of lexical items) can definitely lead our thoughts on a specific track.

I certainly don't think Whorf even for a second would doubt that google could become a verb, like your example in your essay.

> That being said, I am not trying to say that the structures of the languages we speak in no ways reflect our world views, I am merely saying that it goes both ways rather than just being a unidirectional highway to the human cognition.

I kind of think all the modern literature is at fault, for taking Whorf's "strong relativism" and pushing it into "invincible relativism". Whorf had a lot of good ideas, and it's a shame to see them tossed to the wayside because a few overzealous apostles got carried away in the journals :)

It sounds as though you're asking about rare features. The ones that you list aren't rare though. All languages have words that describe mental states, and Japanese isn't the only language with a lot of personal pronouns (c.f. Thai). Often, trying to say that a language is "extraordinary" in this kind of way requires some fundamental oversimplifications, e.g. glossing over the fact that Japanese pronouns function much more like nouns than English pronouns, making the comparison between them not straightforward.

English has its own rare features, like do-support. It also has a large number of basic color terms.

In any case, it's not really possible to answer this question in a reddit comment. There's just too much. I think Parkvall's Limits of Language is a pretty good book for people who are interested in this type of question.

Choosing Normative Concepts by Matti Eklund

https://www.amazon.com/Choosing-Normative-Concepts-Matti-Eklund/dp/0198717822

> The study of linguistic meaning is generally divided in practice into two main fields, semantics and pragmatics. Semantics deals with the literal meaning of words and the meaning of the way they are combined, which taken together form the core of meaning. Pragmatics deals with all the ways in which literal meaning must be refined, enriched, or extended to arrive at an understanding of what a speaker meant in uttering a particular expression.

Source. Example:

He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Semantic meaning: There exists some possible world in which X is male and part of the set of all knives and part of the set of all things within drawers and there exists at least one other entity in this possible world that is part of the set of all knives and part of the set of all things within drawers but is sharper than X.

Pragmatic meaning: You're not very clever.

I'll only add this: the early Wittgenstein (by which I mean first and foremost the author of the Tractatus) formulated an intricate and at times obscure theory about how mind and language represent reality. His theory is impossible to understand just from primary sources; you need to rely on interpreters to decrypt the Tractatus, if only to get a sense of whose ideas Wittgenstein's railing against.

But therein lies the rub. Nowadays we know that most of what Wittgenstein wrote during this period were attempts to mend what he saw as failings of Bertrand Russell's theory of judgement (as it was formulated in one of the manuscripts he happened to have access to). The thing is, Russell's manuscript was only posthumously published in 1984. Hence, most of the pre-1984 exegeses of the Tractatus are highly speculative and not really useful. I'd personally recommend this book as an introduction to Russell's manuscript, and this book as an introduction to the Tractatus.

Why is your default setting to be in polemical mode? I understand logical fallacies thank you, I have five books on the subject, and I've also written on the origin of logical theory in Western intellectual thought. But thanks for the lesson. Amateur atheists in the sense that the people I have in view are those who are 1) amateurs (not professional historians, and 2) atheists (why their ideology leads them into making this ludicrous claim.) Saying some atheists do not believe Jesus was a historical figure is not a straw man, I cannot even begin to understand how you think that could possible be a strawman! The quotes I lifted from your screed are accurate- you genuinely believe that no-one gives a sht about whether a non-magical Jesus existed. That is false, actually, quite frankly, embarrassingly false, and is a misunderstanding you even repeat that in this post. If you want to learn about logical fallacies please read https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mastering-Logical-Fallacies-Definitive-Bulletproof/dp/1623157102/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1492508825&sr=8-2&keywords=logical+fallacies

You keep wanting to talk about whether Jesus could do magic. The only people who want to talk about that are Christians. I am referring to what historians debate about. Are you wanting a list of books before you believe it? Begin with the Jesus Seminar and work out from there. If you continue to want to be obtuse and fail to appreciate this basic point we cannot proceed. You are refusing to let me accurately frame the debate and outline the position of educated atheist historians- Jesus was a historical, non-supernatural historical person. Either I am being inarticulate, or you are trying to close down conversation, for what reason I do not know (ignorance of the field, a general disposition to be unpleasant?). This is the third time I have attempt to unburden you of your mistaken perspective. Instead of saying "no-one gives a shit" if a non-magical Jesus exists when they evidently do(!!!!) why not just say that you* do not give a shit. Fair enough! Not everyone is.