Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

It apparently augured the reconcilation of the intuition of the platonistic character of meanings with the modern mistrust of any 'ghostly entities' like ideas: we only have to presuppose the existence of the ordinary things and the possibility to group entities together - set theory has taught us that this alone is enough to yield us a platonistic heaven.

The approaches of the first group perceive language as a mathematical structure and understand any theory of language as a kind of application of mathematics or logic.

The approaches of the other group do not approve of formalization and consider a theory of language closer to psychology than to mathematics.

The specific position within this group is occupied by the so-called structuralists (de Saussure, Hjelmslev, Derrida).

The reason for using the word "good" is that there is a continuous transition from one group of things called good to another.

It means that given collective intentionality, if anyone intentionally engages in one of these procedures, then other members of the group have a right to expect that the procedures are being followed correctly.

A more explicit discussion of the relation between human language and animal communication systems appears in a recent discussion by the comparative ethologist W. H. Thorpe. He points out that mammals other than man appear to lack the human ability to imitate sounds, and that one might therefore have expected birds (many of which have this ability to a remarkable extent) to be “the group which ought to have been able to evolve language in the true sense, and not the mammals.

Suppose one group of historians of the distant future studies Mark Twain and another studies Samuel Clemens.

Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defence.

Or again, the new theory might be simply a higher level theory than those known before, one that linked together a whole group of lower level theories without substantially changing any. Today, the theory of energy conservation provides just such links between dynamics, chemistry, electricity, optics, thermal theory, and so on. Still other compatible relationships between old and new theories can be conceived.