Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

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.

To assess the adequacy and reasonability of a diagram used to pursue semantic analysis we thus should not try to probe the speaker's and hearer's minds to find out whether we glimpse something which could be pictured by the diagram, but we should rather consider the following two points: (A) Is the analysandum adequate to the analysatum, does the inferential role of the former within the analyzing language 'reasonably approximate' that of the latter within the analyzed one?; and (B) is the inferential role of the analysatum, as a part of the analyzing formal language, in some sense explicit?

It may not really tackle the praxis itself; for this praxis largely consists in collecting and cataloguing facts about language, and this is something that is largely independent of an 'ideologic' background.

I am convinced that nobody, not even the most diehard mentalists and conceptualists, would claim that semantics is the matter of describing some mental (neural) particulars within the head of an individual speaker - for this would be no theory of English (nor of any other language), but rather the theory of some features of a particuar person.

It is precisely this fact which Quine (1960) took seriously to gain his well-known robust 'behavioristic' constraints of the theory of meaning, which then led to the indeterminacy theses and subsequent dismantling of the atomistic view of language.

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.

I have indicated why I think this conception of a theory of language is futile: I have indicated why the mentalistic conception of meaning is problematic (only hinting at all the complexities discussed at length by Wittgenstein and his direct and indirect followers - in the American context especially by Sellars, Quine and Davidson); and I have also indicated that any theory worth its name must concern itself with public universals rather than with private particulars, and must envisage an intersubjectively understandable "form" or "structure".

This invokes the picture of our descending into the depths of the sentence in question, and inspecting a certain floor in its underground to see whether it displays a certain feature; the picture criticised in Section 5. This is why I prefer adjudicating between that which I argue to be an adequate theory of language and that which I claim to be inadequate not in terms of the realist versus conceptualist distinction, but in terms of the difference between the structuralistic, or inferentialistic, and the nomenclaturistic, or representationalistic, theory.

We should investigate how our language actually functions, and how we can construct a workable systematic description of how it functions; the answers to those questions will then determine the answers to the metaphysical ones.

Philosophy, at least in its analytic variety, has in a certain sense come to rest on the analysis of language; any notion of metaphysics over and above 'natural language metaphysics' has proven itself to be rather precarious.