Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The reason for this shift is that while we persist in seeing the quest for meanings as necessarily underlying and prior to any explanation of our language games, we are kept in the grip of a certain view of the nature of language – the view that a word comes to be meaningful only by being associated, within our mind, with some kind of entity.

But this, I think, is not the most important lesson (in fact, as I will try to indicate later, such an outcome is not so surprising given the pragmatic nature of the turn); a more important lesson is that meanings, at least as usually conceived, are perhaps less crucial for semantic theory than previously thought.

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.

Hence, if we can understand the mechanics of language bypassing the question of the nature of meanings, meanings can be eschewed.

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.

What is the nature of our linguistic practices?; and then we have concluded that the distinctiveness of the way in which our words are meaningful can be traced back to the specific character of our linguistic practices – namely to the fact that they are rule-governed in the specific sense discussed above.

At this point we can ask: does the suspension of the question about the nature of meaning turn out to be its total cancellation, or is it now to be resuscitated?

The basic difference between such a man-made space and the nature-made 'real' space is in that the former, in contrast to the latter, is not a matter of making some courses of action impossible, but rather of making them merely improper.

Besides, I have pointed out what are the laws of nature; and, with no other principle upon which to found my reasonings except the infinite perfection of God, I endeavored to demonstrate all those about which there could be any room for doubt, and to prove that they are such, that even if God had created more worlds, there could have been none in which these laws were not observed.

Further, to enable me to cast this variety of subjects somewhat into the shade, and to express my judgment regarding them with greater freedom, without being necessitated to adopt or refute the opinions of the learned, I resolved to leave all the people here to their disputes, and to speak only of what would happen in a new world, if God were now to create somewhere in the imaginary spaces matter sufficient to compose one, and were to agitate variously and confusedly the different parts of this matter, so that there resulted a chaos as disordered as the poets ever feigned, and after that did nothing more than lend his ordinary concurrence to nature, and allow her to act in accordance with the laws which he had established.