Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

This is a sketch of the picture that was taken for almost self-evident for many centuries thereafter: words gain their peculiar qualities by being somehow animated by human souls or minds; indeed they are crucial vehicles of the soul's revealing itself within the material world; and the way in which they are animated is that they become somehow attached to pieces of the soul – to mental contents, in a more contemporary idiom.

Although some philosophers still wanted to account for meaning in terms of an apparently unexplainable faculty of human mind, many others strived either to discard the concept of meaning completely, or at least to explain it in an utterly non-mentalist way. Does this mean that meanings are destined to end up in the naturalist mill constructed to produce a unified scientific theory of the whole universe?

Or should we rather conclude that the whole issue of meaning, including all our intuitions mentioned above, is illusory and that the only real matter are human linguistic transactions which can be accounted for analogously to how we describe all other kinds of transactions going on within our world.

Quine therefore holds that to discover what meaning is, we must study how we acquire meanings, in particular which aspects of human behavior an adept of language must observe to learn what a word means.

Quine's verdict is thus that we should account for human linguistic conduct without a roundabout via meanings.

Human linguistic behavior is, to be sure, more complicated than the behavior of, say, bees, but this difference seems to be quantitative, rather than qualitative. With respect to the mentalistic conception (here in the Brentanian and Searlian form of basing meaning on intention), Quine (1960, p.

And Quine is convinced that even those islands which still offer resistence to the trend – especially human minds and their alleged imprints, meanings – must yield.

Accounting for these practices is methodologically and conceptually continuous with accounting for events in the non-human and inanimate world.

And I think that, given (1), it should be reflected as the peculiar status of our language games vis-à-vis the activities of our non-human pals or the clatter of inanimate things.

Our language games and their rules Hence, what is so special about our, human, language games?