Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

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.

It apparently augured the reconcilation of the intuition of the platonistic character of meanings with the modern mistrust of any 'ghostly entities' like ideas: we only have to presuppose the existence of the ordinary things and the possibility to group entities together - set theory has taught us that this alone is enough to yield us a platonistic heaven.

Meaning, in the ordinary sense of the word, is a matter of semanticsL - knowing meaning is a part of knowing language, not of knowing facts about the extralinguistic world.

For if it happened that an individual, even when asleep, had some very distinct idea, as, for example, if a geometer should discover some new demonstration, the circumstance of his being asleep would not militate against its truth; and as for the most ordinary error of our dreams, which consists in their representing to us various objects in the same way as our external senses, this is not prejudicial, since it leads us very properly to suspect the truth of the ideas of sense; for we are not infrequently deceived in the same manner when awake; as when persons in the jaundice see all objects yellow, or when the stars or bodies at a great distance appear to us much smaller than they are.

Semiotics, then, is not concerned with the study of a particular kind of object, but with ordinary objects in so far (and only in so far) as they participate in semiosis.'

It is often hinted that the difficulty in separating analytic statements from synthetic ones in ordinary language is due to the vagueness of ordinary language and that the distinction is clear when we have a precise artificial language with explicit "semantical rules.

It might conceivably be protested that an artificial language L (unlike a natural one) is a language in the ordinary sense plus a set of explicit semantical rules -- the whole constituting, let us say, an ordered pair; and that the semantical rules of L then are specifiable simply as the second component of the pair L. But, by the same token and more simply, we might construe an artificial language L outright as an ordered pair whose second component is the class of its analytic statements; and then the analytic statements of L become specifiable simply as the statements in the second component of L.

Not all the explanations of analyticity known to Carnap and his readers have been covered explicitly in the above considerations, but the extension to other forms is not hard to see. Just one additional factor should be mentioned which sometimes enters: sometimes the semantical rules are in effect rules of translation into ordinary language, in which case the analytic statements of the artificial language are in effect recognized as such from the analyticity of their specified translations in ordinary language.

The question whether someone else has what I have when I have toothache may be meaningless, though in an ordinary situation it might be a question of fact, and the answer, "He has not", a statement of fact.

Of course there isn't a philosophical grammar and ordinary English grammar, the former being more complete since it includes ostensive definitions such as the correlation of "white" with several of its applications, Russell's theory of descriptions, etc.