Robert Stalnaker

Robert C. Stalnaker (* 1940) is the owner of Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His works deal mainly with the philosophical foundations of semantics and pragmatics of language, decision theory and game theory, with the Philosophical logic, the theory of conditionals, the epistemology and the philosophy of mind. These research areas are focused around the problem of intentionality: " what it means to represent the world, both in language and in remembrance ."

Life and career

His BA from Wesleyan University, he earned his Ph.D. he received in 1965 by Princeton University. Doctor father was Stuart Hampshire, when it should have been reported to be more of Carl Hempel, then a member of the faculty, affected. Stalnaker taught briefly at Yale University and the University of Illinois before many years to Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University initially worked until he finally came to MIT in the late 1980s. to his pupils was, inter alia, Jason Stanley. He has published four monographs and numerous articles in key journals. In 2007 he gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University under the title of Our Knowledge of the Internal World.

Work

In his previous work as a whole Stalnaker offers a naturalistic explanation of intentionality that explains the Repäresentation using causal and Modalbegriffen.

In addition to Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and Alvin Plantinga is Stalnaker one of the most influential representative of a philosophical interpretation of the formal semantics of possible worlds. According to his position the actual world could have taken other courses, so that possible worlds determine the characteristics and conditions that would have the aktuale may take. In this he distances himself from David Lewis' modal realism, according to which possible worlds are independent in their way of the world aktualen and may not be presented without further addition of these as concrete objects.

In addition, used Stalnaker possible worlds, to investigate the semantics of natural language, in particular counterfactual conditionals, presuppositions and indikativische conditionals. His view that the necessary common conditions of communication ( the Common Ground ) for statements precisely the cases in which the statement is false excludes content, was an important impetus for recent debates semantics and pragmatics, in particular for the so-called dynamic turn.

Publications (selection)

  • Inquiry, MIT Press, 1987. ISBN 0-262-69113-2.
  • Context and Content: Essays on Intentionality in Speech and Thought Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-823707-3 1999. .
  • Robert Stalnaker Ways a world might also be: metaphysical and anti- metaphysical essays. Clarendon, Oxford 2003, ISBN 0-19-925149-5.
  • Our Knowledge of the Internal World, Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 0-19-954599-5.
Grounding in communication WorldCat Integrated Authority File
688323
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