Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Meaning as an imprint of the mind In his On Interpretation, Aristotle famously claimed that "spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words".

What miraculous kind of use could make a word acquire a genuine meaning, such as those we experience when we talk?

However, this weakness of spaces delimited by human rules rather than by natural laws is at the same time their strength: we can build them ourselves, change them and develop them according to our experience and finally reach incredibly impressive edifices.

And it must be noted that I say of our reason, and not of our imagination or of our senses: thus, for example, although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth; for otherwise it could not be that God, who is wholly perfect and veracious, should have placed them in us. And because our reasonings are never so clear or so complete during sleep as when we are awake, although sometimes the acts of our imagination are then as lively and distinct, if not more so than in our waking moments, reason further dictates that, since all our thoughts cannot be true because of our partial imperfection, those possessing truth must infallibly be found in the experience of our waking moments rather than in that of our dreams.

As far as my experience goes, the majority of people practising DRT would answer to the effect that it depicts something like the (structure of the) mental content which is expressed by the expression analyzed, or that it somehow records what is going on with speakers' and/or hearers' mental representations.

But after the knowledge of God and of the soul has rendered us certain of this rule, we can easily understand that the truth of the thoughts we experience when awake, ought not in the slightest degree to be called in question on account of the illusions of our dreams.

For how do we know that the thoughts which occur in dreaming are false rather than those other which we experience when awake, since the former are often not less vivid and distinct than the latter?

The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.

Every meaningful statement is held to be translatable into a statement (true or false) about immediate experience.

Thus Locke and Hume held that every idea must either originate directly in sense experience or else be compounded of ideas thus originating; and taking a hint from Tooke7a we might rephrase this doctrine in semantical jargon by saying that a term, to be significant at all, must be either a name of a sense datum or a compound of such names or an abbreviation of such a compound.