Background
Jerrold Jacob Katz was born on July 14, 1932, in Washington, D.C., United States.
2121 I St NW, Washington, DC 20052, United States
In 1954, Jerrold got his bachelor's degree from George Washington University.
Princeton, NJ 08544, United States
Jerrold earned his Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton University in 1960.
(There is a rather ironic turn of events in store for phil...)
There is a rather ironic turn of events in store for philosophy in this and the next few decades if the conception of the philosophy of language presented in this monograph correctly represents the recent linguistic turn in philosophy.
https://www.amazon.com/underlying-reality-language-philosophical-philosophy/dp/0061316334/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Katz+The+Underlying+Reality+of+Language+and+Its+Philosophical+Import&qid=1598886600&sr=8-1
1971
Jerrold Jacob Katz was born on July 14, 1932, in Washington, D.C., United States.
In 1954, Jerrold got his bachelor's degree from George Washington University. After serving in the Army Counterintelligence Corps from 1954 to 1956, he earned his Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton University in 1960.
Jerrold Jacob Katz was a professor of philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1963 to 1975. He then became a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University in 1975. He served there until 2002.
Katz's works include "The Philosophy of Language" (1966), "The Underlying Reality of Language and It's Philosophical Import" (1971), "Language and other Abstract Objects" (1971), "The Metaphysics of Meaning" (1990) where he offers a radical reappraisal of the "linguistic turn" in twentieth-century philosophy, "Realistic Rationalism" (2000). In this work, he develops a new philosophical position integrating realism and rationalism.
His final book, ''Sense, Reference and Philosophy,'' was published posthumously by the Oxford University Press. In the book, Katz proceeds to examine some of those problems in this new light, including the problem of names, natural kind terms, the Liar Paradox, the distinction between logical and extra-logical vocabulary, and the Raven paradox. He signed the contract with the publisher the day before his death.
(There is a rather ironic turn of events in store for phil...)
1971(Jerrold J. Katz offers a radical reappraisal of the "ling...)
1990Katz is associated especially with Platonism linguistics. This stance is best-understood against the background of his earlier work on language was concerned to develop a semantic theory that explained the meaning of terms by the device of semantic markers which exhibited the salient semantic features of those terms. Subsequently, he endeavored to build on this theory a further account embracing the speech-act theory originating with John Austin and later developed by John Searle.
He intended to show how the Propositional content of sentences is the information which determines the particular speech-acts Performed by such sentences in a standard context. Critics questioned how such a theory could do justice to the essentially pragmatic features of speech-acts, i.e. those involving context and particular aims and effects. More than anything else, however, it was his concern with the issue of analyticity and necessary truth which led him to principled disagreement with both behaviorism and cognitivism in linguistics.
In respect of the latter view, it is Chomsky who provides Katz with his main target for attack. Katz contends that, if there are necessary truths, they cannot be dependent on even the most abstract features of a language speaker's psychology, since these latter are contingent. Additionally, since the number of Possible grammars far outstrips those which are compatible with what we know of human capacities, it would again be illegitimate to make necessary truth 'relative' to just those languages which fall into that more restricted range.
In response to the charge that this makes linguistics unscientific, and consequently of little relevance to the main concerns of linguistic theories, Katz maintains that it is an empirical matter to determine which language is the language a speaker knows and understands. The implications of this for linguistics are uncompromising and direct: linguistics thus characterized is independent of other disciplines, especially those claiming to be empirical, like psychology and sociology, and is therefore not reducible to them. Inevitably, Katz has come into conflict with a number of prominent philosophers of mind and language.
Jerrold was married twice. He had two children from first marriage: Seth and Jesse. His second wife was Virginia Valian, a professor of psychology and linguistics at Hunter College and the Graduate Center.