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.

And, making a digression at this stage on the subject of light, I expounded at considerable length what the nature of that light must be which is found in the sun and the stars, and how thence in an instant of time it traverses the immense spaces of the heavens, and how from the planets and comets it is reflected towards the earth.

It is no more objectionable than making a model of a society by listing social roles alongside the 10 I argued for this claim at length elsewhere (see Peregrin, 2001).

But like the painters who, finding themselves unable to represent equally well on a plain surface all the different faces of a solid body, select one of the chief, on which alone they make the light fall, and throwing the rest into the shade, allow them to appear only in so far as they can be seen while looking at the principal one; so, fearing lest I should not be able to compense in my discourse all that was in my mind, I resolved to expound singly, though at considerable length, my opinions regarding light; then to take the opportunity of adding something on the sun and the fixed stars, since light almost wholly proceeds from them; on the heavens since they transmit it; on the planets, comets, and earth, since they reflect it; and particularly on all the bodies that are upon the earth, since they are either colored, or transparent, or luminous; and finally on man, since he is the spectator of these objects.

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".

I was disposed straightway to search for other truths and when I had represented to myself the object of the geometers, which I conceived to be a continuous body or a space indefinitely extended in length, breadth, and height or depth, divisible into divers parts which admit of different figures and sizes, and of being moved or transposed in all manner of ways (for all this the geometers suppose to be in the object they contemplate), I went over some of their simplest demonstrations.

The phrase "length of interval" has its sense in virtue of the way we determine it, and differs according to the method of measurement.

An intimately connected consideration concerns the words "time" and "length".

To verify "The concert lasted an hour" you must tell how you measured time. It is a misunderstanding about both time and length that they are independent of measurement.

They fail to segregate the initial consonant from the vowel when compensating for syllable length in discriminating phonemes (Sinnott, Brown,