Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Or should we rather conclude that the whole issue of meaning, including all our intuitions mentioned above, is illusory and that the only real matter are human linguistic transactions which can be accounted for analogously to how we describe all other kinds of transactions going on within our world.

The same would be the case, for that matter, if meanings were conceived as elements of the real or of a Platonist world christened by expressions.

And it is important to see that the indeterminacy of individual meanings is not an indeterminacy of semantics: semantics is a matter of the ability of our linguistic tools to serve as various kinds of vehicles of various language games, and though such an ability is vague in the sense that it is usually not a yes-no 6 matter, it is not indeterminate (indeed it is not even clear what it would mean to call it so).

Quine himself is unambiguous: for him meanings are decoys, misguiding our attention from the true subject matter of semantic theory.

Thereafter, I showed how the greatest part of the matter of this chaos must, in accordance with these laws, dispose and arrange itself in such a way as to present the appearance of heavens; how in the meantime some of its parts must compose an earth and some planets and comets, and others a sun and fixed stars.

Personally I confess that I have no deep convictions over whether, for example, the statement A football player ought not touch the ball with his hands (or, for that matter, Football has such and such rules) can, without a residuum, be translated into a non-normative claim couched in the naturalistic idiom.

Hence, Sellars (1954) suggests that our language games are a matter of a specific kind of behavior which qualifies neither as "merely conforming to rules", nor as fully-fledged "rule obeying".

This indicates that the boundary between the kind of 'meaningfulness' pertinent to a useful tool and the meaningfulness of a word lies precisely between those practices whose 'rules' are merely a matter of an orientation towards an end and those which are deliberate – which are a matter of human sovereignty to build virtual spaces.

We have rejected Quine's eschewing of meanings as premature; and we have concluded that though after the 'pragmatic turn' meanings are no longer the fundamental subject matter of semantic theory, they may still be pertinent – especially as tools of the theory.

After the pragmatic turn, semantic theory is inseparably connected with the interpretative stance – semantics is taken to be a matter of use and it is the witness of the use who is in a position to 11 account for it.