Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

To indicate the kind of answers Wittgenstein has to these worries, let me quote him at length: Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning.

But this, I think, is not the most important lesson (in fact, as I will try to indicate later, such an outcome is not so surprising given the pragmatic nature of the turn); a more important lesson is that meanings, at least as usually conceived, are perhaps less crucial for semantic theory than previously thought.

Before continuing, let me point out, by way of digression, another important aspect of the 'pragmatic turn': the fact that it brings about a certain amount of semantic holism.

And it is important to see that the indeterminacy of individual meanings is not an indeterminacy of semantics: semantics is a matter of the ability of our linguistic tools to serve as various kinds of vehicles of various language games, and though such an ability is vague in the sense that it is usually not a yes-no 6 matter, it is not indeterminate (indeed it is not even clear what it would mean to call it so).

In this way, Quine's original idea that in order to understand what meaning is we should study linguistic behavior (especially within the setting of radical translation) slowly mutates into the idea that the truly important thing is the behavior itself – if studying it brings us also the understanding of the concept of meaning, 7 very well; if not, the worse for the concept of meaning and we should simply throw it by the board.

Hence are we to denounce meanings as red herrings which divert us from concentrating on the important thing – the linguistic behavior?

To see that this objection is misplaced, it is helpful to explore the parallel between language and a rule-governed game like chess; in particular to show some important respects in which language, in the view of the role-semanticist, is like chess (as well as some respects in which it is not).

I have ever remained firm in my original resolution to suppose no other principle than that of which I have recently availed myself in demonstrating the existence of God and of the soul, and to accept as true nothing that did not appear to me more clear and certain than the demonstrations of the geometers had formerly appeared; and yet I venture to state that not only have I found means to satisfy myself in a short time on all the principal difficulties which are usually treated of in philosophy, but I have also observed certain laws established in nature by God in such a manner, and of which he has impressed on our minds such notions, that after we have reflected sufficiently upon these, we cannot doubt that they are accurately observed in all that exists or takes place in the world and farther, by considering the concatenation of these laws, it appears to me that I have discovered many truths more useful and more important than all I had before learned, or even had expected to learn.

It is important to realize that the same applies, mutatis mutandis, to (ii).

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.