David Kaplan (philosopher)

David Benjamin Kaplan (* 1933 ) is an American philosopher . His work has significantly advanced the development of logic and the philosophy of language . His work on the indexicality of demonstrative pronouns is best known .

life and work

Kaplan received his Ph.D. in 1964. in Philosophy from the University of California at Los Angeles ( UCLA ). He was the last doctoral student of Rudolf Carnap , a main proponent of logical empiricism . Kaplan's work was entitled "Foundations of Intentional Logic". His teachers also include Alonzo Church and Richard Montague , who is considered a co-founder of the formal semantics of natural languages. Kaplan is a professor at UCLA. Kaplan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1983) and the British Academy (since 2007).

The thinker is primarily concerned with questions of logic and the philosophy of language. Kaplan developed among others in Demonstrative a landmark discrimination between content (propositional content) and character (linguistic meaning) in the analysis of demonstrative and related linguistic expressions. The approach solves, among other things, problems raised by Frege's theory of proper names. To this end, he combined a truth-value analysis basis with pragmatic arguments in order to be able to better consider normal language aspects in the context of formal language theory. A decade later, Kaplan optimized his indexicality logic again in afterthoughts , taking into account the criticism of his proposal, reformulating central concepts from demonstratives .

Works

• "Quantifying In," Synthesis , XIX 1968.
• "On the Logic of Demonstratives," Journal of Philosophical Logic , VIII 1978: 81-98; and reprinted in French et al. (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979): 401-412.
• "Dthat," Syntax and Semantics , vol. 9, ed. P. Cole (New York: Academic Press, 1978); and reprinted in The Philosophy of Language , ed.AP Martinich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
• "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice," in Approaches to Natural Language (J. Hintikka et al., Eds.), Reidel, 1973.
• "How to Russell a Frege-Church," The Journal of Philosophy , LXXII 1975.
• "Opacity," in WVO Quine (L. Hahn, ed.) Open Court, 1986.
• "Demonstratives" and "Afterthoughts" in Themes From Kaplan (Almog, et al., Eds.), Oxford 1989.
• "Words," The Aristotelian Society , Supplementary Volume, LXIV 1990
• "A Problem in Possible World Semantics," in Modality, Morality, and Belief (W. Sinnott-Armstrong et al., Eds.) Cambridge, 1995.
• "Reading 'On Denoting' on its Centenary", Mind , 114 2005: 934-1003.

literature

• Joseph Almog & Paolo Leonardi [eds.]: The Philosophy of David Kaplan. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-536788-1

Web links

• Kaplan's homepage at UCLA
• David Braun:  Indexicals. In: Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .