Introduction: Three Level Semantics and General Semiotics

Evandro Agazzi has devoted much attention to language, especially in the context of the treatment of scientific theories. Although he never deals with specific prob­lems in the philosophy of language we can say that he has been in deep harmony with many topics and theories in the field, sometimes forerunning some of the most relevant ideas, from the importance of intensional aspects of meaning to the role of intentionality as a criterion of understanding.

C. Penco (*)

Department of Philosophy, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy e-mail: penco@unige.it © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

M. Alai et al. (eds.), Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_14

The mingling of interests in logic and the philosophy of science has brought Agazzi to discuss a main problem which is at the boundary between philosophy of language and science: how is it possible to identify a scientific theory with a set of true sentences while science is intrinsically connected with an operative or pro­cedural dimension? This question is placed on the background of a discussion of general topics in the philosophy of logic, many papers of which are collected in an anthology On the reasons and limits of formalisms (2000), collecting paper from the sixties to 2012. One of the leading themes in this context is a constant refer­ence to Fregean views, connected with some Husserlian themes, which appears since his first books on symbolic logic (1961, 1964). The general background is a deep feeling with Aristotelian and Medieval tradition grounded on the distinction introduced by Aristotle between semantic logos and apophantic logos. The distinc­tion is a constant in his remarks on semantics and supports the claim that, in devel­oping formalisms, we cannot avoid any relation to a non formal (Frege would have said “contentful”) dimension in logics:

Meanings that are contextually defined in a formal system apply to possible systems of objects (referents) through appropriate interpretations.

Semantic logos is interpreted after the character of “noematic” meaning, or of Fregean senses, bypassing, for the generality of the topic, the specific dif­ferences between the concept of sense and the concept of noema (as discussed for instance by Dummett 1993). This peculiar mixture of the Fregean notion of sense and the Husserlian noema is present in all his writings since the begin­ning. However speaking of “meaning” in philosophy of language is not an easy task given that “meaning” is what require explanation with a theory of lan­guage. One of the last books in distinguishing different aspects of meaning is Gillian Russell’s book (2008), where she shows different ways in which we may speak of “true in virtue of meaning” and describes different meaning rela­tions we have to take into account on any discussion of meaning. Her interest­ing essay shows the difficulty of contemporary treatment of meaning, which still relies on traditional contrapositions, that at first seem very similar, but actu­ally illuminate from different viewpoint the complexity of meaning. Agazzi has always insisted on the importance of the history of philosophy, where many distinctions antedate contemporary worries in philosophy of language, and in particular the Aristotelian distinction between semantic logos and apophantic logos, the Stoic distinction between lekta e axiomata, the Medieval distinction between significatio e suppositio, and the Port Royal distinction, connected also with Leibniz, between comprehension and extension (or, in Mill’s terminology, between connotation and denotation).

sense and reference, that cannot properly be reduced to the previous ones, and to what appears to be the most fortunate distinction in contemporary philoso­phy of language, since Carnap (1947), that is the distinction between intension and extension. Recalling Leibniz’s possible world Carnap gives the founding ideas of alethic modal logic, which had do be developed by Kripke, Hintikka and Montague. Agazzi does not want to abandon the development of this line of thought, but realizes its shortcomings and tries to propose a repair, recalling the necessity of keeping distinctions inside the realm of meaning.

From a general point of view, while in Agazzi’s early writings the focus is against the reliance of mathematical and logical reasoning on mere formal and syntactic structures, in the later work the focus shifts on the conflict between con­ceptual role semantics and direct reference theories. In this context he starts with the different meanings given to the term ‘semantics’:

If one takes semantics to be a general theory of meaning, the anti-Fregeans recognise that according to Frege a theory of meaning is a theory of understanding, while for them it is a theory of reference based on the social ‘functioning’ of natural languages. Therefore, the two semantics have very little in common, and the many efforts made on the part of the anti-Fregeans to meet challenges related to their inability to account for the cognitive significance of certain linguistic expressions appear to have been, in a way, misdirected, since these problems are not of the sort as are relevant to their semantics (Agazzi 2012a: 6).

In contrast either with formalistic theories in philosophy of science or with direct reference theorists, Agazzi insists on the idea of a triadic semantics based on the distinction of sense and reference, leaving always a central role to concep­tual or cognitive aspects, that now begins to be recognized as important also in the environment of direct reference theory (see Kaplan 2012).

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