Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

This idea was clearly articulated by Davidson (1989, 11): Just as in measuring weight we need a collection of entities which have a structure{ XE "structure" } in which we can reflect the relations between weighty objects, so in attributing states of belief{ XE "belief" } (and other propositional attitude{ XE "attitude: propositional" }s) we need a collection of entities related in ways that will allow us to keep track of the relevant properties of the various psychological states.

Similarly in thinking and talking about the beliefs of people we needn’t suppose there are such entities as beliefs.

For the entities we mention to help specify a state of mind{ XE "mind" } do not have to play any psychological or epistemological role at all, just as numbers play no physical role.

Carnapian formal models of semantics: [Carnap’s formalization of semantic theory in terms of a primitive relation of designation which holds between words and extralinguistic entities] commits one to the idea that if a language is meaningful, there exists a domain of entities (the designata of its names and predicates) which exist independently of any human concept formation.

Nevertheless, if we inspect the way Frege really analyzed the concept of concept, we can see that it was not a matter of a contemplation of concepts qua ideal entities, but rather of an analysis of the behavior of the expressions of concepts, viz. predicates.

It apparently augured the reconcilation of the intuition of the platonistic character of meanings with the modern mistrust of any 'ghostly entities' like ideas: we only have to presuppose the existence of the ordinary things and the possibility to group entities together - set theory has taught us that this alone is enough to yield us a platonistic heaven.

And others felt the necessity to work with still other entities of diverse natures, like, e.

On the general level we can say that it is tricky in that it fosters dangerous vicious circularities: linguists explicate some phenomena by relying on certain philosophical entities or doctrines, whose explanation, however, has in turn come to rest on the linguistic phenomena being explicated.

It might seem that in this case we may be able to pick up some relevant 'content of consciousness' independently of any linguistic articulation; however, it is hard to see how we could identify contentful mental entities save by way of language; we cannot describe the mental entity 'beyond' the sentence 'Every farmer owns a donkey' save by saying that it is the thought (or idea, or whatever) that every farmer owns a donkey, or the thought that for every x, if x is a farmer, then x owns a donkey etc. What is worse, even if we could give an independent 8 9 See Chomsky (1967).

There is also no help in recourse to talking of 'neural events' or the like: it is true that these, unlike mental entities, are specifiable independently of the sentences whose usage they may accompany (at least in principle); however they are quite like thoughts in that if they are specified in this way, they cannot really provide us with meanings.