Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The following table, listing some features of chess side by side with the corresponding features of language, is designed to illustrate especially: (1) that a language is constituted by rules; (2) that the rules have the character of constraints and that hence they do not command us how to speak; (3) that meanings are utterly a matter of rules of language and hence of the normative attitudes which sustain the rules; 11 Variants of this objection surface in Fodor & LePore (1993; 2001), Engel (2000), Hinzen (2001) and elsewhere.

I am convinced that nobody, not even the most diehard mentalists and conceptualists, would claim that semantics is the matter of describing some mental (neural) particulars within the head of an individual speaker - for this would be no theory of English (nor of any other language), but rather the theory of some features of a particuar person.

The paradigmatic picture is the Aristotelian one, as characterized by Cassirer: 'Nothing is presupposed save the existence of things in their inexhaustible multiplicity, and the power of the mind to select from this wealth of particular existences those features that are common to several of them.'

Statements of the form 'Quality q is at point-instant x; y; z; t' were, according to his canons, to be apportioned truth values in such a way as to maximize and minimize certain over-all features, and with growth of experience the truth values were to be progressively revised in the same spirit.

What features makes us say of a thing that it is the ideal, e.g., the ideal Greek profile?

Aesthetics is descriptive. What it does is to draw one's attention to certain features, to place things side by side so as to exhibit these features.

As in aesthetics, things are placed side by side so as to exhibit certain features.

The aim of this article is to explain some of the essential features of human language, and I will emphasize especially those features of language that relate to human society.

We can explore which structural features of language are useful or even essential, by exploring what use humans make of these structures.

I will proceed by addressing four specific questions: What features of language are already present in prelinguistic consciousness ?