Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Confronted with an alien language, I hear mere sounds and I must amass vast quantities of data to infer from them what these sounds mean.

Realism (in the spirit of Katz and Postal), on the other hand, seems to claim not only that linguistic data, to be construable as such, must display some regularities and appear as instances of a realistic "form"; they seem to claim also that these realistic entities are accessible in a direct way. Katz and Postal write about "sentential structure" which can be examined to see if it is "at some grammatical level logically significant" (ibid.

So stated, the doctrine remains ambiguous as between sense data as sensory events and sense data as sensory qualities; and it remains vague as to the admissible ways of compounding.

I think this is a good schematization (deliberately oversimplified, to be sure) of what science really does; but it provides no indication, not even the sketchiest, of how a statement of the form 'Quality q is at x; y; z; t' could ever be translated into Carnap's initial language of sense data and logic.

The latter statements may be thought of as relatively centrally located within the total network, meaning merely that little preferential connection with any particular sense data obtrudes itself.

Objects at the atomic level and beyond are posited to make the laws of macroscopic objects, and ultimately the laws of experience, simpler and more manageable; and we need not expect or demand full definition of atomic and subatomic entities in terms of macroscopic ones, any more than definition of macroscopic things in terms of sense data.

Pains have a space to move in, as do auditory experiences and visual data.

The account of belief ascriptions given above does not entail that names will behave like rigidified descriptions in belief contexts, and handles the relevant data straightforwardly.

Behavioural science has been much preoccupied with data and organisation of data, and it has even seen itself as a kind of technology of control of behaviour.

What is more, the study of language is, for the moment, unique in the combination it affords of richness of data and susceptibility to sharp formulation of basic issues.