Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

What Wittgenstein wanted philosophers to relinquish was the view of meaning which for so long had held sway – the view that our signs are animated by chunks of our minds, chunks normally hidden within the minds' depths, but which we somehow managed to bring to light by sticking them to the signs.

An expression does have an inherent structure in that it consists of words and letters but this is not the structure held in mind by those who use the term structure to make sense of semantics.

Vopenka also provides an insightful analysis of how we are "held captive" by the Cantorian framework.

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.

Every meaningful statement is held to be translatable into a statement (true or false) about immediate experience.

Thus Locke and Hume held that every idea must either originate directly in sense experience or else be compounded of ideas thus originating; and taking a hint from Tooke7a we might rephrase this doctrine in semantical jargon by saying that a term, to be significant at all, must be either a name of a sense datum or a compound of such names or an abbreviation of such a compound.

Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system.

Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws.

Suppose it is held that I must judge indirectly since I can't feel his ache.

This view of the relation of statements to truth is held by philosophers as diverse as Bernard Williams10, Paul Grice11 and David Lewis 12. But it is not correct.