Plato's Healing Poison, Zeno's Motionless Flight, Shakespeare's Tricky Lies and Schroedinger's Cat's Ghost

Abstract

The paper problematizes traditionally accepted ideas about language and the world from the perspective of Derrida’s deconstruction and Lewis and Kripke’s theories of possible worlds to show that the pluralistic approach to construing the world is related to the contextual analysis of literary polysemy. The importance of this approach is illustrated with a critical consideration of wordplay in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138 and discussed against the background of Chalmers’s two-dimensional semantics, Shrödinger’s thought experiment with a cat, and several recent findings in the field of neuroscience.