Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

While the traditional view was that in order to understand language and our linguistic practices we must explain meaning, the 'pragmatic turn' emerging within the writings of various philosohpers of the second half of the twentieth century caused a basic change of the perspective: the tendency is to concentrate directly on explaining the linguistic practices and leave the need for explaining meaning to emerge (or, as the case may be, not to emerge) subsequently.

However, this weakness of spaces delimited by human rules rather than by natural laws is at the same time their strength: we can build them ourselves, change them and develop them according to our experience and finally reach incredibly impressive edifices.

A natural suggestion, deserving close examination, is that the synonymy of two linguistic forms consists simply in their interchangeability in all contexts without change of truth value; interchangeability, in Leibniz's phrase, salva veritate.

Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.

Only when we are speaking of the history of the game can we talk of change.

Of course a river can change its direction of flow, but one has a feeling of giddiness when one talks of time being reversed.

Isn't it thinkable that I change my body and that I would have a feeling correlated with someone's else's raising his arm?

Acceptance of such a change is tempting] because the description of a sensation does not contain a reference to either a person or a sense organ.

Let us change the topic to a discussion of good.

So, for example, when you change a sentence around, the words (and morphemes) do not lose their identity.