Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

A theory is like a scheme someone draws up to help us see the principles of operation of a complicated machine, or to help us find our way through a town: it makes us see something which is otherwise obscured - and this may be accomplished at the cost of purposefully neglecting something else.

These nine years passed away, however, before I had come to any determinate judgment respecting the difficulties which form matter of dispute among the learned, or had commenced to seek the principles of any philosophy more certain than the vulgar.

And further, I continued to exercise myself in the method I had prescribed; for, besides taking care in general to conduct all my thoughts according to its rules, I reserved some hours from time to time which I expressly devoted to the employment of the method in the solution of mathematical difficulties, or even in the solution likewise of some questions belonging to other sciences, but which, by my having detached them from such principles of these sciences as were of inadequate certainty, were rendered almost mathematical: the truth of this will be manifest from the numerous examples contained in this volume.

Syntax organizes semantics according to three principles: discreteness, compositionality and generativity.

There must be repeatable devices each of which can function as a possible communication unit (sentence) and these must be composed of elements (words) which are such that the communicative content of the whole is determined by the elements and by the principles of their combination in the sentence.

And, without wishing to offer any remarks on the employments of others, I may state that it was my conviction that I could not do better than continue in that in which I was engaged, viz., in devoting my whole life to the culture of my reason, and in making the greatest progress I was able in the knowledge of truth, on the principles of the method which I had prescribed to myself.

He can then quite effortlessly make use of an intricate structure of specific rules and guiding principles to convey his thoughts and feelings to others, arousing in them novel ideas and subtle perceptions and judgments (Chomsky, 1975, p.

For example: It would be surprising indeed if we were to find that the principles governing [linguistic] phenomena are operative in other cognitive systems, although there might be certain loose analogies, perhaps in terms of figure and ground, or properties of memory, as we see when the relevant principles are made explicit.

However, the kinds of constituents, the principles of combination, and the nature of the adjustment processes in phonology appear to be specific to language.

But most words (as well as smaller morphemes such as affixes) can combine into complex words such as compounds (e.g. armchair) and other derived forms (e.g. squeezability) according to principles of the component of language called morphology.