Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Fodor, thus, in general concludes that concepts, and hence, in effect, meanings are mental particulars which get associated with expressions.

On this supposition, I, in the first place, described this matter, and essayed to represent it in such a manner that to my mind there can be nothing clearer and more intelligible, except what has been recently said regarding God and the soul; for I even expressly supposed that it possessed none of those forms or qualities which are so debated in the schools, nor in general anything the knowledge of which is not so natural to our minds that no one can so much as imagine himself ignorant of it.

Part V I would here willingly have proceeded to exhibit the whole chain of truths which I deduced from these primary but as with a view to this it would have been necessary now to treat of many questions in dispute among the earned, with whom I do not wish to be embroiled, I believe that it will be better for me to refrain from this exposition, and only mention in general what these truths are, that the more judicious may be able to determine whether a more special account of them would conduce to the public advantage.

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.

In general, providing a diagram may encapsule one of two essentially different enterprises: providing a translation, or providing a description.

If the rules which we consider are the rules of syntax (i.e. if they provide for the criterial reconstruction of well-formedness), then the resulting categories are known as syntactic categories (they express the expressions' behaviour from the viewpoint of constituting well-formed expressions and statements); if they are the rules of semantics (i.e. if they amount to truth, assertibility, or use in general), then the categories are meanings (they express the expressions' behaviour from the viewpoint of truth, or, more generally, from the viewpoint of their employability within language games).

Evincing Kamp's own example (personal communication), if we analyze the sentences One of the three candidates is over forty and Two of the three candidates are under forty by traditional means, we are unable to account for the important difference between them, namely that the former can, while the latter cannot, be followed by We eliminate him. This vantage point lets us see DRT, and semantic theory in general, as an explicit reconstruction of structural, inferential patterns governing our use of language carried out via explicating the roles of individual expressions within these patterns.

A detailed argument against a particularistic construal of mind in general has been presented in the famous paper of Sellars (1956).

Hence, this modest conceptualism and modest realism coincide - for our knowledge (in general) arises out of apprehending particular occurrences as displaying universal structures.

Hence a part-whole system can be considered as the ordered pair <U,<Oi> ∈I>where U is a set and each Oi is a (in general n partial) function from the Cartesian power U into U; in other words a part-whole system is a certain (partial) algebra.