Symbolism is a primary characteristic of mind, deployed and displayed in every aspect of thought and culture. In this impor- tant and broad-ranging book, Israel Scheffler explores the various ways in which the mind functions symbolically This involves considering not only the worlds of the sciences and the arts, but also such activities as religious ritual and child's play. The book offers an integrated treatment of ambiguity and metaphor, analy- ses of play and ritual, and an extended discussion of the relations between scientific symbol systems and reality. What emerges is a picture of the basic symbol-forming character of the mind. In addition to philosophers of art and science, likely readers of this book will include students of linguistics, semiotics, an- thropology, religion, and psychology.
[...]... up his mind7 rather than 'Hamlet-descriptions are man-who-couldn't-make-up-his-minddescriptions'."5 And when, during the course of a performance of "Hamlet/' a member of the audience says, "There's Hamlet, coming on stage now!" he is not to be understood as merely uttering a literal falsehood; he is saying something accurate I take his "Hamlet" utterance to be mention-selecting a Hamletrepresentation,... "tree" denotes trees, but it mention-selects, that is, serves as a caption for, tree-pictures, treedepictions, and tree-descriptions; and the word "unicorn" denotes nothing, but it mention-selects, that is, captions, unicornpictures, unicorn-descriptions, and unicorn-representations In this chapter, I offer a general account of the relations between denotation and mention-selection, outlining some of the... discussion in Beyond the Letter, pp 4 7-9 5 Catherine Z Elgin, With Reference to Reference (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1983), p 48 6 Israel Scheffler, "Four Questions of Fiction/' Poetics, 11 (1982), 27 9-8 4; reprinted in my Inquiries (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1986), pp 7 4-7 9 18 Open texture, analyticity, and mention-selection function not denotively, but mention-selectively In introducing such a... in play, using once more the notion of Introduction and background mention-selection Such understanding also extends to a creative aspect of art - the seeing of one thing as another Section IV thus incorporates discussions of both play and art, with Chapter 9 addressing relations among the three symbolic enterprises of art, science, and religion In particular, it asks why science and religion have... dangerous - the representation in this way mistakenly treated as one of its own denotata With the eventual dawning of the fundamental distinction between denotation and mention-selection, however, come various devices for fixing it in mind - including the use of explicit compounds of terms to denote their respective ranges of mention-selection "Picture of a tree," "tree-picture," and "tree-description,"... aspects of symbolic function in language, science, and art as well as ritual, play, and the forming of worldviews It restates fundamental themes in my earlier work, follows up prior lines of inquiry in the development of such themes, and deals with several new problems arising in the course of further inquiries A study of pragmatism long ago convinced me of the representative character of thought - its... givens of physics These several systems are 1 Israel Scheffler, Four Pragmatists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974) 2 Israel Scheffler, Of Human Potential (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) Introduction and background each underdetermined by physical fact, and there is no principle that guarantees perfect harmony and coordination among them By symbolic systems, we have in mind clusters of... Publishing Company, for "Ambiguity: An Inscriptional Approach" in Richard Rudner and Israel Scheffler, eds Logic and Art, Bobbs-Merrill 1972, now Ridgeview Publishing Company I am grateful to Catherine Elgin for permission to reprint our joint article "Mainsprings of Metaphor," in Journal of Philosophy, Vol 84 (1987), pp 33 1-5 I wish also to express my gratitude to Jo Anne Sorabella for her excellent and... certain affinities and contrasts in symbolic function that have not generally been acknowledged and by pointing up the role of authority in both science and religion Section V deals with the symbolic character of ritual Abstracting from the social and historical context of ritual in order to concentrate on its semantic functions, this section emphasizes the cognitive roles of ritual Following a consideration... not to denote, but to select horse-mentions Open texture may now be seen to depend not on the hypothetical expansion of a term's given domain or its putative reference to possible objects, but rather on the uncertainty with which its mention-denoting compounds apply to actual things That is, every descriptive term has some compound with "-picture" or "-description" or "-representation," which in each . Publication data Scheffler, Israel. Symbolic worlds : art, science, language, ritual / Israel Scheffler p. cm. ISBN o 521 56425 5 (hardback) 1. Philosophy of mind. 2. Symbolism. 3. Science - Philosophy. 4. . psychology.