Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Does the sign-post leave no doubt open about the way I have to go?

Because we humans are able to have (i.e. establish, respect and follow) rules, we open the door for the transgenerational elaboration of complicated patterns which come to constitute our culture.

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.

Now, oddly enough, a similar difficulty affects Tarski-style model theoretic accounts such as Davidson’s, because if we are to say that the key notion is satisfaction, and we can explain satisfaction recursively, then the problem is that if an object satisfies an open sentence, then there must be a relation in which the open sentence stands to the object, the relation of being satisfied by that object.

HCF contrast this idea with their recursion-only hypothesis, which “has the interesting effect of nullifying the argument from design, and thus rendering the status of FLN as an adaptation open to question” (p. 1573).

HCF go further and suggest that there have been no evolutionary changes to the mammalian auditory system 4 We leave open whether such concepts are simply impossible without language or whether they are within the expressive power of the conceptual system but require language as a crutch to attain them.

We do not know of other human capacities that have been shown to re?ect this formal organization, though it is it an interesting open question. Is phonology uniquely human?

Thus also, those ancient cities which, from being at first only villages, have become, in course of time, large towns, are usually but ill laid out compared with the regularity constructed towns which a professional architect has freely planned on an open plain; so that although the several buildings of the former may often equal or surpass in beauty those of the latter, yet when one observes their indiscriminate juxtaposition, there a large one and here a small, and the consequent crookedness and irregularity of the streets, one is disposed to allege that chance rather than any human will guided by reason must have led to such an arrangement.

I revered our theology, and aspired as much as any one to reach heaven: but being given assuredly to understand that the way is not less open to the most ignorant than to the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead to heaven are above our comprehension, I did not presume to subject them to the impotency of my reason; and I thought that in order competently to undertake their examination, there was need of some special help from heaven, and of being more than man.

Just how restricted such a vocabulary can be is an open question.