Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

What Wittgenstein wanted philosophers to relinquish was the view of meaning which for so long had held sway – the view that our signs are animated by chunks of our minds, chunks normally hidden within the minds' depths, but which we somehow managed to bring to light by sticking them to the signs.

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.

The problem of understanding the role of rules within human linguistic conduct, then, can be portrayed as that of steering among the Skylla of regularism, claiming that a rule is by its nature explicit (we have already seen that this leads to a vicious circle) and the Charybda of regulism, claiming that rule-governed behavior is nothing more than regular behavior (which would erase any difference between a stone's following the law of gravitation by falling and a person's following the rule of traffic by stopping at a red light)8.

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.

Conclusion We must not try to resolve the metaphysical questions first, and then construct a meaning-theory in the light of the answers.

As for the thoughts of many other objects external to me, as of the sky, the earth, light, heat, and a thousand more, I was less at a loss to know whence these came; for since I remarked in them nothing which seemed to render them superior to myself, I could believe that, if these were true, they were dependencies on my own nature, in so far as it possessed a certain perfection, and, if they were false, that I held them from nothing, that is to say, that they were in me because of a certain imperfection of my nature.

Alternatively we may, indeed, view the so-called rule as a conventional definition of a new simple symbol 'analytic-for-L0,' which might better be written untendentiously as 'K' so as not to seem to throw light on the interesting word "analytic.

But a model which takes analyticity merely as an irreducible character is unlikely to throw light on the problem of explicating analyticity.

But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience.

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience.