Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

As the traditional conception of mind slowly gave way to the overwhelming campaign of natural sciences, so the idea that the concept of mind was something beyond the natural, causal order began to appear inherently problematic, and definitely incapable of serving as an 'unexplained explainer'.

Although some philosophers still wanted to account for meaning in terms of an apparently unexplainable faculty of human mind, many others strived either to discard the concept of meaning completely, or at least to explain it in an utterly non-mentalist way. Does this mean that meanings are destined to end up in the naturalist mill constructed to produce a unified scientific theory of the whole universe?

In this way, Quine's original idea that in order to understand what meaning is we should study linguistic behavior (especially within the setting of radical translation) slowly mutates into the idea that the truly important thing is the behavior itself – if studying it brings us also the understanding of the concept of meaning, 7 very well; if not, the worse for the concept of meaning and we should simply throw it by the board.

We have already indicated that those who embrace mentalism may want to invoke some specific, irreducibly mentalistic concepts, such as the concept of intension recommended by Searle.

Central among these concepts, according to Davidson (1999), is the concept of truth.

Thus, in my view, the concept of rule, far from being 'supernatural' itself, enables us to account for the specificity of human language, meaning, and reason, without invoking any 'supernatural' concepts.

Wittgenstein (1969, 184-5) poses the question "Why don't I call cookery rules arbitrary, and why am I tempted to call the rules of grammar arbitrary?"; he answers as follows: Because I think of the concept "cookery" as defined by the end of cookery, and I don't think of the concept "language" as defined by the end of language.

And it turns out that it is such a role which can be taken as a plausible explicatum of the intuitive concept of meaning.

Take, for example, the Fregean explication of the concept of concept.

A concept, Frege (1892b) argued, is, as a rule, something under which a given object may or may not fall; hence it is a way of classifying objects into two groups (those falling under it and those not falling under it); and so it can be identified with a function mapping objects on the two truth values – truth and falsity.