Chapter Summaries
Words still mystify us. They do because our common-sense beliefs about words have been brought about by thousands of years of misguided philosophical speculation about human speech. That speculation has, in turn, been incorporated into our speech about our speech. The most pernicious of these speculations about words and language, when viewed under the non-semantic microscope, offer no explanations whatsoever.
It is wildly speculative metaphysical musing that has come to be accepted as unquestioned fact. Because of this entirely misguided philosophy of language, the puzzles and the enigmas remain. They remain not only in philosophy of language, but in the philosophies of mind, mathematics, epistemology and science. It is high time to dispense with that misguided semantic premise and eliminate the mind/body dualism necessary for its success. Theorists must begin to view human speech as the S-R-R conditioned behavior that it is.
In the chapters listed below I have attempted to point the way to a new non-semantic perspective on the human use of word sounds which eliminates the age-old conundrums about language. There is every reason to pursue this course of action and abandon the semantic paradigm, as difficult as that may be. Properly analyzed from a non-semantic perspective, humankind may finally obtain an accurate framework from which to successfully analyze the human use of word sounds and resolve the puzzles and enigmas in all areas of intellectual inquiry that result from our mistaken beliefs about ourselves, our verbal behavior and the world we live in.
Chapter One
Chapter One gives readers a brief history of semantics: the who and when of contributions to the contemporary theories of language, particularly semantics. As we sound out semantics the readers are provided with the necessary information to understand the current debates amongst linguists and the theoretical foundations of those debates. It also gives readers the necessary background information for the understanding of future chapters.
Chapter Two
Chapter Two gives readers an in-depth analysis of how linguists and laymen alike currently talk and think about language and what the ramifications of that talking and thinking are. This analysis introduces readers to a view of semantics that challenges the traditional philosophical explanations for the acquisition and use of language. That new perspective on semantics, in turn, has consequences in other branches of philosophy: mind/body dualism, mathematics, science, and epistemology. They are analyzed in subsequent chapters.
Chapter Three
Chapter Three presents a brief history of mind/body dualism in its various forms. The stubborn problem of consciousness is looked at in detail before a new and unique explanation of consciousness is proposed. By looking at the uses of some words in our mentalistic vocabulary readers get a glimpse of the inherent dualism in the English language and the impact that it has on our views of consciousness and artificial intelligence.
Chapter Four
Chapter Four investigates some of the major puzzles generated by semantics and offers a different perspective on language along with the solutions to these puzzles: The Origin of Language, Child Language Acquisition, Naming and Descriptions, Deixis, Morphology, Metaphor, Translation, Synonymy and Substitution, Vagueness and Ambiguity. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the problems in syntax theory and how they relate to the semantic fallacies introduced in chapter two.
Chapter 5
In Chapter 5 we explore the impact that the semantic fallacies have on the philosophy of mathematics. Starting with the historical background of mathematics, this chapter provides the reader with a comprehensive behavioral view of mathematics, including decimal, duo-decimal and binary math.
Chapter VI
Chapter VI, Epistemology, examines theories of knowledge. After presenting the historical context for these theories, a new proposal is made in which the traditional theories are debunked and a new behaviorist theory is developed and explained.
Chapter 00000111
Chapter 00000111 affords readers an historic context for the philosophy of science and science itself. What effects this context has on current thinking and speech in the scientific community is exposed and analyzed. The limits of language in science are brought front and center. These limits are demonstrated to be limits on our understanding of the universe we live in.