Enriched Minimal Expressivism and Higher-Order Concepts

ended

One (unum), True (verum), and Good (bonum), the Medieval transcendentals, are concepts that philosophers have always kept at the centre of their concern, as has occurred with logical notions such as therefore, epistemic notions such as knowledge and belief, and deontic notions such as ought. And for good reasons. The meaning of these concepts is complex, and language sciences have needed a sophisticated degree of development to be able to cope with this issue. All these notions encode what we now call “higher-order concepts”. The defining characteristic of higher-order concepts is that they are predicative notions that have other predicables (including 0-adic predicables, i.e. propositions) as arguments. Logical constants, quantifiers, and alethic, epistemic, and deontic modalities belong to the general class of high-order concepts. EMEHOC aims at developing a unified and comprehensive treatment of higher-order concepts, Enriched Minimal Expressivism, which benefits from the several insights that philosophers have put forward related to some particular sets of them, and also of the latest linguistic proposals on procedural and non-truth-conditional meaning. EMEHOC will develop the first-ever general theory of higher-order concepts. To date, philosophers and linguists have given some useful insights on them but EMEHOC will be the first to examine their functioning from an interdisciplinary perspective. EMEHOC’S impact will reach any areas of knowledge in which accurate discourse and precise argumentation are essential. This includes ethics and political theory, and in general public and scientific uses of language. EMEHOC will use a collaborative methodology that will contribute to the emergence of new, promising interdisciplinary areas, according to the objectives of the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (Horizon 2020), avoiding duplications and maximizing resources.