Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Concentrating on this issue led Quine to develop his much discussed thought experiments with "radical translation" – the situation where a linguist faces an utterly unknown language and must learn what its words mean by studying the behavior of its speakers.

What is the nature of our linguistic practices?; and then we have concluded that the distinctiveness of the way in which our words are meaningful can be traced back to the specific character of our linguistic practices – namely to the fact that they are rule-governed in the specific sense discussed above.

I have indicated why I think this conception of a theory of language is futile: I have indicated why the mentalistic conception of meaning is problematic (only hinting at all the complexities discussed at length by Wittgenstein and his direct and indirect followers - in the American context especially by Sellars, Quine and Davidson); and I have also indicated that any theory worth its name must concern itself with public universals rather than with private particulars, and must envisage an intersubjectively understandable "form" or "structure".

We can say indeed that a statement is analytic-for-L0 if and only if it is true according to such and such specifically appended "semantical rules," but then we find ourselves back at essentially the same case which was originally discussed: 'S is analytic-for-L0 if and only if.

In the case we have discussed, the symbol in question has a conventional meaning: it is raining, and when the speaker makes an utterance with this symbol he expresses a speaker meaning, a speech act meaning: it is raining.

For example, word strings such as Dr Ruth discussed sex with Dick Cavett are ambiguous because their words can be grouped into phrases in two different ways).

But the tasks given to monkeys are not comparable to the feats of human speech perception, and most of Liberman’s evidence for the Speech-is-Special hypothesis, and more recent experimental demonstrations of human–monkey differences in speech perception, are not discussed.

Syntax: Case, agreement, pronouns, predicate-argument structure, topic, focus, auxiliaries, question markers, and so on, are not discussed by HCF.

But consider exocentric compounds (discussed in Jackendoff, 1997).

The two-dimensional approaches discussed above all introduce "first-dimensional" semantic values or modal notions that are more strongly connected to apriority and to cognitive significance than are the more familiar "second-dimensional" semantic values and modal notions.