Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

I argue that after this turn we should explain the peculiar kinds of 'meaningfulness' that characterizes our expressions in terms of what Sellars called "pattern governed behavior".

This is a sketch of the picture that was taken for almost self-evident for many centuries thereafter: words gain their peculiar qualities by being somehow animated by human souls or minds; indeed they are crucial vehicles of the soul's revealing itself within the material world; and the way in which they are animated is that they become somehow attached to pieces of the soul – to mental contents, in a more contemporary idiom.

The peculiar difference between a string meaning something and a meaningless chain of sounds or scribbles is obvious, and the metaphor that the former, in contrast to the latter, is animated appears to be peculiarly apt. The common metaphor of living (= meaningful) and dead (= meaningless) signs does render something intuitively very vital.

We give them their meaning in that we use them in a peculiar way. Besides private associations, what is needed to establish meaning are some public practices that make the associations public and shared.

Hence if we were to follow Wittgenstein, we would have to clarify what peculiar kind of rulegoverned game can constitute a melting-pot from which genuine meanings can emerge.

And I think that, given (1), it should be reflected as the peculiar status of our language games vis-à-vis the activities of our non-human pals or the clatter of inanimate things.

What is peculiar about this is that the rules are implicit within our linguistic practices, rather than explicitly formulated.

Approaches to language may then be classified according to which of these notions of meaning they grant primacy: the "nomenclatural", or representational, ones take the relations between This is not literally true because of the proper name; but this is clearly peculiar to the Russellian example.

In logical and mathematical systems either of two mutually antagonistic types of economy may be striven for, and each has its peculiar practical utility.

MORAL philosophy, or the science of human nature, may be treated after two different manners; each of which has its peculiar merit, and may contribute to the entertainment, instruction, and reformation of mankind.