Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Conceptualism seems to claim that, first, the particulars which are relevant in lingustics are mental entities (or contents of consciousness, or the internal wirings of our ‘language faculty’), and, second, that the theoretician of language has no use of abstract entities whatsoever.

We can say the visual field has certain internal properties, but its being mine is not essential to its description.

More sophisticated accounts add that there must also be a pragmatic component that is not a component of specific languages; rather, it sets certain constraints on the use of language and is not internal to specific languages in the way that the syntax of French is internal to French and the syntax of German is internal to German.

Perhaps above all, it lacks internal and controllable structures in its thought processes.

In conscious hunger, thirst, and visual perception, for example, the determination of the conditions of satisfaction is internal to the experience.

By unstructured I mean that the propositional content so far has no internal syntax.

We need to distinguish between those communicative acts that involve intentionally representing a state of affairs in the world and those that simply express (in the original sense of pressing out, of giving vent to) an animal’s internal state, where that expression may convey information about the world but it does not do so by representing that something is the case, or by representing other sorts of conditions of satisfaction.

The devices we were imagining correspond to unstructured propositions, and have no internal syntactical structure.

So the propositional unity expressed by the complete sentence is already provided by prelinguistic intentionality, and the internal subject-predicate structure is provided by the way our phenomenology presents the propositional content to us.

Speaker meaning is typically the employment or use of those conventions in the performance of the speech act. Third, we have added internal structure to the speech act in the form of discriminable syntactic elements that have meanings, semantic content, but cannot stand on their own in utterances.