Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

This way of approaching the problem of meaning appeared to be particularly promising to the purposes of philosophy; and, in fact, this turn was to a large extent inspired by the heirs of the linguistic turn (especially by Carnap, 1957).

To answer this question, it is not enough to consider (3) in isolation: if it is isolated from the body of DRT, it obviously provides us with no semantic analysis at all, for any formula or diagram can successfully play the role of semantic analysatum only as a node within a large structure expounding relevant relations.

Take for example the large body of studies concerning the nature of definite and indefinite descriptions, which have persuasively shown that to see these locutions directly in terms of classical, Fregean quantification is inadequate and may be severely misguiding.

There is an indefinitely large stock of one- and many-place predicates, (1951)There is an indefinitely large stock of one- and many-place predicates, (1961)There is an indefinitely large stock of one-place predicates, (for example, 'F' where 'Fx' means that x is a man) and many-placed predicates (for example, 'G' where 'Gxy' means that x loves y, mostly having to do with extralogical subject matter.

Physical objects, small and large, are not the only posits.

In some cases it is senseless to ask "Which circle?", though "What sort of circle is in the square-a red one?, a large one?" may make sense.

HCF’s second argument against human adaptations for speech production is the discovery that the descended human larynx (which allows a large space of discriminable vowels, while compromising other functions) can be found in certain other mammalian species, where it may have evolved to exaggerate perceived size. HCF note that while a descended larynx “undoubtedly plays an important role in speech production in modern humans, it need not have first evolved for this function” but may be an example of “preadaptation” (in which a trait originally was selected for a function other than the one it currently serves).

A combinatorial sound system is a solution to the problem of encoding a large number of concepts (tens of thousands) into a far smaller number of discriminable speech sounds (dozens).

A fixed inventory of sounds, when combined into strings, can multiply out to encode a large number of words, without requiring listeners to make finer and finer analogue discriminations among physically similar sounds.

But they assign words to the broad language faculty, which is shared by other human cognitive faculties, without discussing the ways in which words appear to be tailored to language—namely that they consist in part (sometimes in large part) of grammatical information, and that they are bidirectional, shared, organized, and generic in reference, features that are experimentally demonstrable in young children’s learning of words.