The Logical Basis of Metaphisycs (Transl. from Eng. By V. Navorytskyi): Kyiv: IRIS, 2001, 359 p.

Michael Dummitt's book is a significantly expanded and revised version of his lectures on the philosophy of William James, delivered in 1976. Dummitt considered the construction of a satisfactory theory of meaning to be the most urgent task of contemporary analytic philosophy. He pointed out that the successful completion of this difficult task would lead to the solution of problems that philosophy had been stuck with, in some cases, for centuries. These problems concerned the correctness or incorrectness of the realist view of a particular sphere - the physical world, the mind, the past, mathematical reality, etc. Rejecting realism is tantamount to accepting a variant semantics, and often a variant logic, for statements in a particular sector of our language. Dammitt did not claim the correctness of any one logical system, but showed how the choice between different logics arises at the level of the theory of meaning and depends on the choice of a particular general form of the theory of meaning. In order to determine the correct form of a theory of meaning, we must achieve a clear idea of what we can expect from a theory of meaning.

Dmytro Shishkovskyi

Contents

Contents

Preface

Introduction. Metaphysical discussions of realism

Chapter 1. Semantic meanings

Chapter 2: Inference and truth

Chapter 3. Theories of truth

Chapter 4. Meaning, knowledge and understanding

Chapter 5. The ingredients of meaning

Chapter 6. Truth and theories of meaning

Chapter 7. The origin and role of the concept of truth

Chapter 8. Justification of deduction

Chapter 9: Cyclicity, consistency and harmony

Chapter 10. Holism

Chapter 11: Theoretical and evidential justifications of logical laws

Chapter 12. The fundamental assumption

Chapter 13. Stability

Chapter 14. Value theories based on truth conditions

Chapter 15. Realism and value theory

Index