Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.

And given the public practices are in place, the private associations become the idle beetle in the box.) However, is this not a kind of sophistry?

The shift in focus yields a kind of turn which can be labelled 'pragmatic'4 (understanding the term as a referring to giving pride of place to the practical5): the turn from studying language as a system of signifiers associated with their respective signifieds to studying it as a tool for interaction.

Why have we developed it, why are we interested in meaning in the first place?

Does this mean that meanings have no place within the process of communication itself, but only within its post hoc theoretical reflection?

On this supposition, I, in the first place, described this matter, and essayed to represent it in such a manner that to my mind there can be nothing clearer and more intelligible, except what has been recently said regarding God and the soul; for I even expressly supposed that it possessed none of those forms or qualities which are so debated in the schools, nor in general anything the knowledge of which is not so natural to our minds that no one can so much as imagine himself ignorant of it.

I have ever remained firm in my original resolution to suppose no other principle than that of which I have recently availed myself in demonstrating the existence of God and of the soul, and to accept as true nothing that did not appear to me more clear and certain than the demonstrations of the geometers had formerly appeared; and yet I venture to state that not only have I found means to satisfy myself in a short time on all the principal difficulties which are usually treated of in philosophy, but I have also observed certain laws established in nature by God in such a manner, and of which he has impressed on our minds such notions, that after we have reflected sufficiently upon these, we cannot doubt that they are accurately observed in all that exists or takes place in the world and farther, by considering the concatenation of these laws, it appears to me that I have discovered many truths more useful and more important than all I had before learned, or even had expected to learn.

MeaningL, on the other hand, is the matter of relations between expressions; hence the meaningL of an expression is best seen as something like materialisation of the place of the expression within the system of language, or of its role within the actual language game.

For, in the first place even the principle which I have already taken as a rule, viz.

The truth of this is sufficiently manifest from the single circumstance, that the philosophers of the schools accept as a maxim that there is nothing in the understanding which was not previously in the senses, in which however it is certain that the ideas of God and of the soul have never been; and it appears to me that they who make use of their imagination to comprehend these ideas do exactly the some thing as if, in order to hear sounds or smell odors, they strove to avail themselves of their eyes; unless indeed that there is this difference, that the sense of sight does not afford us an inferior assurance to those of smell or hearing; in place of which, neither our imagination nor our senses can give us assurance of anything unless our understanding intervene.