Philosophy of language and mind
pp. 189-201
in: Mario Alai, Marco Buzzoni, Gino Tarozzi (eds), Science between truth and ethical responsibility, Berlin, Springer, 2015Abstract
In this paper I will give some remarks on the intersection between Agazzi's work and some topics in philosophy of language and mind. In Sect. 1 I give an introduction to the approach to meaning in Agazzi's works, and to his recent idea of general semiotics. In describing Agazzi's treatment of meaning and understanding it appears that some of his papers antedate arguments later become fundamental in the philosophy of language and mind, mainly by Putnam and Searle . In Sect. 2 I describe his discussion of the limits of intensional logics, which antedates analogous criticism made by Putnam; in Sect. 3 I focus on the link between the operational aspects of meaning and the idea of three level semantics; eventually in Sect. 4 I present what can be considered a forerunner of Searle's argument of the Chinese room in a different setting.