Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Because it matters; meaningful stuff means something to us; words, in particular, are helpful for communicating, shaping and organizing our thought, recording knowledge etc., etc.

One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact.

Kant's cleavage between analytic and synthetic truths was foreshadowed in Hume's distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact, and in Leibniz's distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact.

There is no assurance here that the extensional agreement of 'bachelor' and 'unmarried man' rests on meaning rather than merely on accidental matters of fact, as does extensional agreement of 'creature with a heart' and 'creature with a kidney.'

In the extreme case where the linguistic component is all that matters, a true statement is analytic.

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.

Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.

The result, say a regular pentagon, only matters insofar as it is an incitement to make certain manipulations.

We still have no good phrase structure theory for such simple matters as attributive adjectives, relative clauses, and adjuncts of many different types” (Chomsky, 1995, p.

Any of these differences could explain why human languages might differ from invented symbolic systems, quite apart from matters of “imperfection.