Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

While the traditional view was that in order to understand language and our linguistic practices we must explain meaning, the 'pragmatic turn' emerging within the writings of various philosohpers of the second half of the twentieth century caused a basic change of the perspective: the tendency is to concentrate directly on explaining the linguistic practices and leave the need for explaining meaning to emerge (or, as the case may be, not to emerge) subsequently.

As the traditional conception of mind slowly gave way to the overwhelming campaign of natural sciences, so the idea that the concept of mind was something beyond the natural, causal order began to appear inherently problematic, and definitely incapable of serving as an 'unexplained explainer'.

In order for it to mean something, it is not enough that each of them individually makes the association, he/she must also know that the others do the same, that he/she can use the word to intelligibly express its meaning in various public circumstances etc. Language is essentially public; and as such it cannot rest on private associations.

And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.

In this way, Quine's original idea that in order to understand what meaning is we should study linguistic behavior (especially within the setting of radical translation) slowly mutates into the idea that the truly important thing is the behavior itself – if studying it brings us also the understanding of the concept of meaning, 7 very well; if not, the worse for the concept of meaning and we should simply throw it by the board.

To say that an expression means thus and so is essentially to say that it ought to be used in a certain way. Thus, meanings are 'beyond the natural, causal order', but, at the same time, are not 'supernatural' in any abstruse or esoteric sense.

Their original point was that we cannot take the representing capacities of language at face value, that in order to treat of things - which cannot be done save with the help of words - we must first treat of words and make sure which of them are really capable of treating of things.

Some philosophers, like Quine and Davidson, rejected intensional logic in favour of the good, old, austere classical first-order logic.

Anyway, it seems to be quite clear that what is in the province of a linguist or a philosopher of language is meaningL, not meaningW: the project of discovering who is the present king of France, required in order to determine the meaningW of the expression the king of France and hence belonging to the project of semanticsW, is clearly not a part of the semantic theory of English.

The truth of this is sufficiently manifest from the single circumstance, that the philosophers of the schools accept as a maxim that there is nothing in the understanding which was not previously in the senses, in which however it is certain that the ideas of God and of the soul have never been; and it appears to me that they who make use of their imagination to comprehend these ideas do exactly the some thing as if, in order to hear sounds or smell odors, they strove to avail themselves of their eyes; unless indeed that there is this difference, that the sense of sight does not afford us an inferior assurance to those of smell or hearing; in place of which, neither our imagination nor our senses can give us assurance of anything unless our understanding intervene.