Epistemic Meaning

This volume is a revised and extended edition of Epistemische Bedeutung (Doherty 1985). The German and the English versions dif­ fer in a number of aspects, only two of which can be attributed to the difference between German and English: A number of com­ binatorial options of epistemic particles discussed in Epistemische Bedeutung have not been included in the English version, as the English-speaking reader may be expected to be more interested in the general aspects of the topic than in the specific properties of a class of linguistic entities which does not exist in English at all. The second difference between the German and English editions concerns a ter­ minological change: "Evaluative Einstellungen" has been translated not as "evaluative;' but as "emotional attitudes;' This has become necessary, as "Bewertung" ("evaluation") has been introduced to replace "Urtei/" ("judgement;' "assessment"), which was a mor­ phologically less transparent term, lacking a full-fledged paradigm of derivations to cope with the various applications of this central no­ tion. The terminological change yielded labels for the complex com­ ponents of epistemic meaning (namely "evaluated" and "semi­ evaluated propositional meaning") which had remained without names in the German edition. Though the change from "judgement" to "evaluation" is mainly one of terminology and has not introduced any new content, it was connected with a revision in the way the logical nature of the basic epistemic elements is represented.

Text: English, German (translation)