Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

For if it happened that an individual, even when asleep, had some very distinct idea, as, for example, if a geometer should discover some new demonstration, the circumstance of his being asleep would not militate against its truth; and as for the most ordinary error of our dreams, which consists in their representing to us various objects in the same way as our external senses, this is not prejudicial, since it leads us very properly to suspect the truth of the ideas of sense; for we are not infrequently deceived in the same manner when awake; as when persons in the jaundice see all objects yellow, or when the stars or bodies at a great distance appear to us much smaller than they are.

As for the thoughts of many other objects external to me, as of the sky, the earth, light, heat, and a thousand more, I was less at a loss to know whence these came; for since I remarked in them nothing which seemed to render them superior to myself, I could believe that, if these were true, they were dependencies on my own nature, in so far as it possessed a certain perfection, and, if they were false, that I held them from nothing, that is to say, that they were in me because of a certain imperfection of my nature.

My countersuggestion, issuing essentially from Carnap's doctrine of the physical world in the Aufbau, is that our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.

With regard to a proposition about the external world or to a proposition of mathematics it is frequently asked "How do you know it?" There is an ambiguity here between reasons and causes.

In most of the cases we considered the animals already have natural devices for the communication, but we can easily imagine that our hominids develop conventional devices for intentional states that have no natural external expression.

Notice that one wrong, but very common, answer, is to think that the deontic requirements are somehow external to the type of speech act. First we have statement making and then we have a rule that commits us to making only true ones; first we have promise making and then we have a rule that obligates us to keep the promises.

My third maxim was to endeavor always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world, and in general, accustom myself to the persuasion that, except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power; so that when we have done our best in things external to us, all wherein we fail of success is to be held, as regards us, absolutely impossible: and this single principle seemed to me sufficient to prevent me from desiring for the future anything which I could not obtain, and thus render me contented; for since our will naturally seeks those objects alone which the understanding represents as in some way possible of attainment, it is plain, that if we consider all external goods as equally beyond our power, we shall no more regret the absence of such goods as seem due to our birth, when deprived of them without any fault of ours, than our not possessing the kingdoms of China or Mexico, and thus making, so to speak, a virtue of necessity, we shall no more desire health in disease, or freedom in imprisonment, than we now do bodies incorruptible as diamonds, or the wings of birds to fly with.

Typically, one semantic value is associated with reference and ordinary truth-conditions, while the other is associated with the way that reference and truth-conditions depend on the external world.

Two-dimensional approaches to semantics start from the observation that the extension and even the intension of many of our expressions depend in some fashion on the external world.

As a result, Stalnaker characterizes his use of the two-dimensional framework as a "metasemantic" use: unlike Kaplan's character, diagonal propositions are not really part of the meaning of an utterance, but rather capture something about how meaning is determined by the external world.