Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

For the entities we mention to help specify a state of mind{ XE "mind" } do not have to play any psychological or epistemological role at all, just as numbers play no physical role.

The space of meaningfulness The physical space in which we live our lives is formed by certain laws – the laws making some of the things we can think of doing (flying by ourselves, living under water ...) impossible, thereby delimiting a certain spectrum of possibilities.

The propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions.

This semantic mentalism is often complemented with a kind of 'reduction axiom': everything mental is physical, every event in the mind is (in fact) an event in the underlying brain etc. This seems to guard against the suspicion that what is going on is the old mentalism which has been seriously challenged by so many philosophers - the structures which are studied are ultimately tangible structures of the human brain.

The construction of even the simplest statements about the physical world was left in a sketchy state.

Carnap did not seem to recognize, however, that his treatment of physical objects fell short of reduction not merely through sketchiness, but in principle.

Carnap seems to have appreciated this point afterward; for in his later writings he abandoned all notion of the translatability of statements about the physical world into statements about immediate experience.

My countersuggestion, issuing essentially from Carnap's doctrine of the physical world in the Aufbau, is that our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.

Certain statements, though about physical objects and not sense experience, seem peculiarly germane to sense experience -- and in a selective way: some statements to some experiences, others to others.

Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries -- not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits18b comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.