Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Over and above this, he concludes that as we are not involving ourselves with any such esoteric stuff as pieces of mind, but only with the motions of parts of the material, tangible world, there is no reason to assume that to study, analyze and explain linguistic conduct necessitates any other tools or concepts than those which we already use to study, analyze and explain the rest of the world.

Quine's behaviorism accords with the undeniable successes of natural sciences in describing and explaining ever more parts and aspects of our world, and their subsequent ambition to describe everything whatsoever.

Thereafter, I showed how the greatest part of the matter of this chaos must, in accordance with these laws, dispose and arrange itself in such a way as to present the appearance of heavens; how in the meantime some of its parts must compose an earth and some planets and comets, and others a sun and fixed stars.

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.

Anyway, given such a reconstruction we come to observe every expression as a construct built according to certain rules from parts of certain categories12.

A mineral does have its structure independently of (the existence of) any other minerals (at least independently of those which are not its spatial parts) - it is enough to use a microscope which would enable us to identify it. The structure of an abstract entity, on the other hand, is always the matter of the entity's position within the web of other abstract entities of the same category - there is no "mental microscope" to examine it in isolation and penetrate inside it. This has become especially clear with the development of the mathematical theory of categories (see, e.

Unfortunately not all the philosophers who have undergone the linguistic turn have really bothered to penetrate into the depths of the true semantic structure of language; and not all of those linguists who have succeeded in discerning the real nature and perplexities of various 13 parts of language have avoided seeing language uncritically as a kind of nomenclature of some 'cognitive contents'.

Frege (1892) recognized that if we identify the meaning of an expression with the real-world object which it is felt the expression normally stands for (the meaning of the expression Morning star with the planet Venus, for example), then we shall not be always able to recover the meaning of a complex expression from the meanings of its parts.

Frege and Wittgenstein also realized that the elements of language that are primarily significant are not words, but rather sentences, and that the discernment of the meanings of parts of a sentence is 'parasitic upon its structure' .

Structure and Parts & Wholes Structure is the way in which a whole is composed out of its parts; therefore there is no structure (and also no structuralism) where there are no parts and wholes.