Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Montague grammar, e.g., can be extremely perspicuous for some people (those educated in logic and model theory and familiar with the symbolism), while extremely obscure for others.

All other statements of the language are, Carnap assumes, built up of their component clauses by means of the familiar logical devices, in such a way that the truth value of any complex statement is fixed for each state-description by specifiable logical laws.

Philosophers and scientists frequently have occasions to "define" a recondite term by paraphrasing it into terms of a more familiar vocabulary.

Turning the tables and assuming analyticity, indeed, we could explain cognitive synonymy of terms as follows (keeping to the familiar example): to say that 'bachelor' and 'unmarried man' are cognitively synonymous is to say no more nor less than that the statement: (3) All and only bachelors are unmarried men is analytic.

That the statement "Only the present experience is real" seems to mean something is due to familiar images we associate with it, images of things passing us in space.

It seems to me that the accounts of society that I am familiar with, ranging all the way from Aristotle to the present, radically misconceive the role of language in that, in an important sense, they take the existence of language for granted and then ask: How does society work, how is it constructed?, and so on. When I say that they take language for granted, I mean that in accounting for the nature of society they do not ask: What is language?

This implies, at the very least, that the animals have beliefs, desires, intentions, and at least some form of memories, enough to enable them to recognize familiar objects and situations.

The truth conditional accounts that I am familiar with make a connection between truth and meaning.

All semantic relations conveyed by clausal or NP embedding in more familiar languages, such as conditionality, intention, relative clauses, reports of speech and mental states, and ˜ recursive possession (my father’s brother’s uncle), are conveyed in Piraha by means of monoclausal constructions connected paratactically (i.e. without embedding).

Whatever mechanism underlies inner speech—presumably the phonological loop that makes up a major component of working memory—it is not subject matter of any familiar theory of grammatical competence.