Page 542 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Key Figures
that one experience can confirm or falsify another, and that perception and thought, rationality and objectivity are so much as even possible. The most basic structure of meaning he calls the 'noema' of an experience. He explicitly acknowledges, however, that 'the noema is nothing but a generalization of the idea of [linguistic] sense to the field of all acts.'
4. The Lebenswelt
In his last, unfinished work, The Crisis (1936), Husserl continued his investigations into the nature and origin of meaning. However, like Wittgenstein, who had sim- ultaneously reached strikingly similar conclusions, Husserl came to see that many of the conditions and structures on which meaning depends are not dis- coverable within an individual consciousness. Rather, they comprise the inherited background of practices, criteria, assumptions, and customs that must be in place if such things as individual thoughts, judgments, perceptions, inferences, and expectations are to make sense. The holistic vision that finally emerges in HusserFs writings is this: not only the expressions of language, but also our intentional mental acts depend for their significance on the vast and hugely complex set of tacitly agreed practices and customs that characterize a given community, that is, on the
Lebenswelt as a whole. The smallest unit of indepen- dent significance, one might say, is an entire form of life; it is with such a whole that any philosophical analysis of meaning must begin.
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The American philosopher and logician Saul Aaron Kripke (b. 1940) is considered to be one of the most influential figures in logic and philosophy of language since the 1960s. On a wide range of topics his pub- lications have deeply influenced contemporary think- ing in these areas.
Kripke's first contributions were to modal logic, especially to the semantics of modal systems ('Sem- antical Analysis of Modal Logic' 1963, reprinted in Linsky 1971). Along with that of Rudolf Carnap, Stig Kanger, and Jaakko Hintikka, Kripke's work forms the beginning of so-called 'possible worlds semantics.' The method of possible worlds semantics is one of the most important and fruitful developments in logic and philosophy, and in semantics. In logic, possible worlds semantics provided the necessary tool for a systematic semantic study of the confusing multitude of syntactic systems of modal logic that were developed since the pioneering work of C. S. Lewis in the 1920s. It also turned out to be a useful tool in the philosophy of
mathematics (for example in the semantics of intuitionistic logic, and in the study of the notion of provability). Eventually, a whole new branch of logic; called 'intensional logic,' grew out of it, which studies the logical behavior of all kinds of intensional notions, not just modality, but also temporal, deontic, epis- temic, and doxastic notions. In the study of the logical structure of these concepts also lies the basis of the philosophical applications of the method: it has been used in the philosophical study of time, existence, knowledge, and so on.
Another important area of research in which poss- ible worlds semantics has been applied very fruitfully is that of semantics of natural language. Possible worlds semantics has been the primary tool of the enterprise of logical grammar since its inception in the work of Max Cresswell, David Lewis, and Richard Montague in the beginning of the 1970s. It forms the heart of the semantical pan of Montague Grammar, and still is the most widely applied method in the
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J. A. G. Groenendijk and M. J. B. Stokhof