Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Hence it is that I cannot in any degree approve of those restless and busy meddlers who, called neither by birth nor fortune to take part in the management of public affairs, are yet always projecting reforms; and if I thought that this tract contained aught which might justify the suspicion that I was a victim of such folly, I would by no means permit its publication.

Part II I was then in Germany, attracted thither by the wars in that country, which have not yet been brought to a termination; and as I was returning to the army from the coronation of the emperor, the setting in of winter arrested me in a locality where, as I found no society to interest me, and was besides fortunately undisturbed by any cares or passions, I remained the whole day in seclusion, with full opportunity to occupy my attention with my own thoughts.

The Concept of ‘Modularity’ in The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way Constraint satisfaction architecture is one part of the solution to abduction in HTMW, but one still needs principles on how such networks are organized into mutually relevant collections of knowledge.

For the most part, Fodor assimilates the concept of specialization in HTMW to his own notion of modularity.

Perhaps sexual emotions are fed, in part, by a system for inferring who is related to the self.

Natural selection is a falsifiable scientific explanation of how biological functionality arises, not a part of the concept of functionality itself.

As a result, Stalnaker characterizes his use of the two-dimensional framework as a "metasemantic" use: unlike Kaplan's character, diagonal propositions are not really part of the meaning of an utterance, but rather capture something about how meaning is determined by the external world.

From other work, it seems clear that Evans thinks in the case of ordinary proper names (as opposed to descriptive names), there is a a semantic rule that ties a name to its referent, so that the referent is part of the content.

T2) When the extension of a complex expression token depends compositionally on the extensions of its part, the value of its primary intension at a scenario depends in the same way on the value of its parts at that scenario, and the value of its secondary intension at a world depends in the same way on the value of its parts at that world.

This sort of judgment is part of the inferential role associated with our use of the terms 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus'.