Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures. D. E. Buckner. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: D. E. Buckner
Издательство: Ingram
Серия: Philosophy of Language: Connections and Perspectives
Жанр произведения: Философия
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isbn: 9781498587426
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there are systematic rules or heuristics that determine sameness of reference. Otherwise there could be no “natural” reading of the scriptures.

      The existence of such rules is crucial to determining the truth conditions for reference statements, which I shall discuss in the next chapter. I shall argue that a reference statement is true if and only if the term that is mentioned in the statement co-refers with the term that is used, hence if co-reference is an objective property of the text, the truth of a reference statement depends on properties of the text, rather than some extralinguistic relation between language and reality.

      NOTES

      1. Readers interested in the more general question of scriptural interpretation should consult Gracia 1995 and 2001, although Gracia’s work is reliant on an outmoded theory of reference derived from Searle.

      2. Chastain 1975, 205. Sommers (1982) also proposed the idea that proper names and indeed all definitely referring expressions are anaphors, but the idea precedes both writers. A similar idea was mooted by Prior, “Oratio Obliqua,” originally published 1963, and Geach discusses something similar in Mental Acts. Strawson introduced the closely connected idea of story-relative reference in 1959, which he may have borrowed from W. E. Johnson (Logic, 1921), who distinguishes between what he calls the “Alternative indefinite” article, as in “A man must have been in this room,” which should really be interpreted as “Some or other man must have been in this room” from what he calls the “Introductory indefinite,” which occurs at the beginning of a narrative, for example, “Once upon a time there was a boy who bought a beanstalk.” Johnson then supposes the narrative to continue: “This boy was very lazy,” where the phrase “this boy” means “the boy just mentioned,” that is, “the same boy as was introduced to us by means of the indefinite article.” The affinity with Strawson’s idea should be obvious. Johnson’s work includes an early use of the term “reference” that is close to its contemporary sense. For example, he says “Here the article ‘this,’ or the analogous article ‘the,’ is used in what may be called its referential sense” (my emphasis). Johnson, Logic, I. vi. §4 (p. 85).

      3. Chastain (“Reference and context,” 216) rightly observes that “the ability to comprehend a novel, a biography, or even a single paragraph presupposes the ability to keep track of who’s who by assigning a given singular expression to the right anaphoric chain, where the latter will normally be a mixture of proper names and other singular expressions. This means, for example, knowing when an occurrence of ‘she’ in Lolita belongs with the occurrences of ‘Lolita’ and when it belongs with the occurrences of the names of the other female characters in the book. The ability to identify anaphoric chains of this sort is obviously very complex: we employ our knowledge of the syntax and semantics of the language, plus our knowledge of how discourses are constructed, plus our knowledge of whatever special literary or scholarly or other conventions pertain to the genre in question, plus our knowledge of what the writer is likely to have meant, and so on.”

      4. From a presentation by Christopher Manning, https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs224n/cs224n.1162/handouts/cs224n-lecture10-coreference.pdf.

      5. Wiktionary.

      6. Hobbs, “Resolving pronoun references.”

      7. Dominance is a primitive of syntactic analysis, which interprets sentence structure in terms of “trees,” with dominant nodes higher up in the structure than dominated ones.

      8. Lappin and Leass, “An algorithm for pronominal anaphora resolution.”

      9. I checked the first two of these examples with a user of Stanford CoreNLP tagger, a state of the art neural system, who told me it got them both wrong. However, the Hobb algorithm gets the “Seth” one right.

      10. For example, Latin sibi, Greek ἑαυτοῦ. Hebrew uses a different way of expressing the reflexive.

      11. I have used a translation consistent with the Hebrew, which uses pronouns only. Some translations resolve the difficulty of interpretation by use of the proper name, for example, NIV “At a lodging place on the way, the LORD met Moses and was about to kill him.”

      12. Silverman, From Abraham to America: A History of Jewish Circumcision, 86.

      13. Other than Mary Magdalene, of course, since there were only two Marys at the tomb. Mary, mother of Jesus, was not present at that point, although confusingly she also had sons called James and Joseph, common names in first-century Galilee.

      14. John of Damascus, De Haeresibus, 766, Niketas of Byzantium, Confutatio dogmatum Mahomedis, 790.

      15. Exodus 15:20. If the “Imran” mentioned in Surah 3 is not the father of Moses, how did Muhammad discover the name? The father of Mary is not named in the New Testament, although Christian tradition knows him as “Joachim.” If the author was using a name familiar to his readers, they would associate it with Imran the father of Moses. Otherwise it would be meaningless, unless there was a tradition in the Near East about Mary’s father, but history is so far silent about that.

      16. The Quran (3:7) says that some of its verses are specific, others ambiguous, whose meaning is known only to God. “Those whose hearts are infected with disbelief observe the ambiguous part.”

      17. Hughes, Dictionary of Islam, 206.

      18. See also Esposito, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, 136, on the tradition that Mary’s father was also called Imran.

      19. Sahih Muslim (transl. Siddiqi) Book 25, Hadith 5326 “When I came to Najran, they (the Christians of Najran) asked me: You read ‘Sister of Harun’, (i.e. Mary), in the Qur’an, whereas Moses was born well before Jesus. When I came back to Allah’s Messenger I asked him about that, and he said: ‘The (people of the old age) used to give names (to their persons) after the names of Apostle and pious persons who had gone before them.’”

      20. Ibn Kathir, Tafsir Ibn Kathir, Vol. 2, 29–30, “Allah also chose the household of Imran, the father of Maryam bint Imran, the mother of `Isa [Jesus], peace be upon them. So `Isa [Jesus] is from the offspring of Ibrahim, as we will mention in the Tafsir of Surah Al-An`am, Allah willing, and our trust is in Him.”

      21. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (trans. Michael Silverthorne, Jonathan Israel), 7, 136.

      22. A further difficulty is that in 19:28, Mary is called the sister of Aaron, who was the brother of Moses. Dawood says “sister” here means a virtuous woman. According to Hughes (Dictionary of Islam, 328), Al-Baidawi says she was called “sister of Aaron” because she was of Levitical race; but Husain says that the Aaron mentioned in the verse is not the same person as the brother of Moses.

      23. Sale, The Koran, Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mohammed, 56.

      24. Strictly speaking, the author or authors, or editors.

      25. This basic assumption is occasionally violated. Moses is supposed to be the author of the whole of the Pentateuch. But as Spinoza points out (Theological-Political Treatise, 8.3, trans. Michael Silverthorne, Jonathan Israel, 119), the words of Deuteronomy 31.9 “and Moses wrote the Law” cannot be the words of Moses, but rather of another writer who has temporarily forgotten that he is writing as if he were Moses. The author of Genesis 12.6 says “the Canaanite at that time was in the land,” forgetting that if he had been writing at that time, rather than later, the Canaanite would still be in the land.

      26. An exception being the phenomenon of “bridging”: I saw a house. The roof had a hole in it.

      27. Basset, “Apollonius between Homeric and Hellenistic Greek: The case of the ‘Pre-positive Article’” in Matthaios, ed., 260. A cold opening (or: in medias res) is a literary device that deliberately flouts this rule. For example, “It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp” (William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 1948); “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad” (Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche, 1921); “She might have been waiting for her lover” (Graham Greene,