Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

If, for example, the game of chess is defined in terms of its rules, one cannot say the game changes if a rule for moving a piece were changed.

For example, a person who tries to trisect an angle is led to another difficulty, posed by the question "Can it be done?" Proof of the impossibility of a trisection takes the place of the first investigation; the investigation has changed.

Unlike baking a cake where the ingredients are changed by being mixed together, forming a sentence does not change the words and morphemes that are being mixed together; and you can have a sentence containing eight words or twelve words, but you cannot have a sentence containing nine and a half words.

Quite so. And here is how he replies to this objection: ‘It strikes me as wildly implausible that the structure of human cognition changed radically a few hundred years ago’ (p. 53).

Inductive inference systems must make fallible assumptions about the world, such as that surfaces are mostly cohesive, human languages conform to a universal grammar, and people who grow up with you are your biological siblings. If the world for which the system was designed has changed, those beliefs may be systematically false. Visual illusions are a prime example.

But as soon as I had finished the entire course of study, at the close of which it is customary to be admitted into the order of the learned, I completely changed my opinion.

Thus, as science has progressed, the word "mass" as a class of visual and auditory events has remained, but the rules according to which it is used in the language of science have changed several times, and, strictly speaking, it is a new symbol with each change in rules, though each new implicit definition (conformation rule) has had enough in common with earlier implicit definitions so that the use of the same symbol has not seemed inappropriate.

Parallelism between the effects of changed conditions of life and crossing.

What changed about Mary's epistemic situation, when she was shown the star, is that she was then a position to represent subjective information about this experience, just as Alice, at the scene of the impending explosion was in a position to represent, in her speech and her thought, the contextual information that that bomb is about to explode (that is, will explode soon after now).

But although they did not make their world, these living things changed it beyond all recognition and, indeed, remade the small corner of the universe into which they were born.