Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Many patterns of behavior are passed from generation to generation simply in force of natural selection: those individuals happening to have such patterns wired in their genes have outsmarted those without them.

Were the world composed of "individuals" which were given the names "a", "b", "c", etc.

Russell and I both expected to find the first elements, or "individuals", and thus the possible atomic propositions, by logical analysis.

And we were at fault for giving no examples of atomic propositions or of individuals.

As more genes with effects on speech and language are identified, sequenced, and compared across individuals and species, additional tests contrasting the language-asadaptation hypothesis with the recursion-only hypothesis will be available.

We are unaware of cases in which deaf individuals develop a complex vocabulary and grammar just to talk to themselves.

And, to speak of human affairs, I believe that the pre-eminence of Sparta was due not to the goodness of each of its laws in particular, for many of these were very strange, and even opposed to good morals, but to the circumstance that, originated by a single individual, they all tended to a single end. In the same way I thought that the sciences contained in books (such of them at least as are made up of probable reasonings, without demonstrations), composed as they are of the opinions of many different individuals massed together, are farther removed from truth than the simple inferences which a man of good sense using his natural and unprejudiced judgment draws respecting the matters of his experience.

The extension of a general term is the class of individuals that fall under the term: for example, the extension of 'cat' is the class of cats.

The intension of a general term maps a possible world to the class of individuals that fall under the term in that world: the intension of 'cat' maps a possible world to the class of cats in that world.

For example, Quine's terms 'cordate' (creature with a heart) and 'renate' (creature with a kidney) pick out the same class of individuals in the actual world, so they have the same extension.