Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Carnapian formal models of semantics: [Carnap’s formalization of semantic theory in terms of a primitive relation of designation which holds between words and extralinguistic entities] commits one to the idea that if a language is meaningful, there exists a domain of entities (the designata of its names and predicates) which exist independently of any human concept formation.

Hence a predicate can be seen as mapping names onto sentences and, on the semantic level, referents of names, i.e. objects, on the truth values of sentences.

S1 can say: 'You call B "N", but "N" is in fact the name of A!' This possibility is nevertheless limited to the case when both speakers are in possession not only of the name 'N', but also of the names 'A' and 'B'.

What about the case when they have no alternative names?

This means that if A differs from B in a property expressible in the language in question, the confusion of their names can be discovered.

To say that 'N' is used to name two different objects makes sense only with the background of a language which has two different names for the two objects.

If we can distinguish the two objects by means of what can be said about them, then the different names can possibly be formed as definite descriptions, otherwise not. This is Quine's inscrutability of reference.

In effect such a language enjoys the benefits also of descriptions and class names and indeed singular terms generally, these being contextually definable in known ways.

Thus Locke and Hume held that every idea must either originate directly in sense experience or else be compounded of ideas thus originating; and taking a hint from Tooke7a we might rephrase this doctrine in semantical jargon by saying that a term, to be significant at all, must be either a name of a sense datum or a compound of such names or an abbreviation of such a compound.

Were the world composed of "individuals" which were given the names "a", "b", "c", etc.