Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

When we start to use a suitable piece of stone to drive nails, it undoubtedly gains, thereby, in significance; but it seems that the difference between a meaningful word and a meaningless sound or inscription is something worlds apart from the difference between a stone used for driving nails and one that is of no use. When we say that the former stone, in contrast to the latter one, means something to us, we would seem to be employing means in a sense which is totally different from the sense in which we are using it when we say that a word means thus and so. Is not saying that a word has a meaning in the sense that it is useful for some purpose something quite different from saying that the word has meaning in the sense of having a 'semantic value'?

There is no absolute measure of what is or is not more perspicuous - it all depends on the purpose and on the visual angle.

Every structure we ascribe to language and to individual expressions is the result of our theoretical reconstruction, and every theory is guided by a purpose.

The main purpose of the paper then is to show how meanings can be considered to materialize out of the oppositions of the system of language.

But note that this version of analyticity serves its purpose only if the atomic statements of the language are, unlike 'John is a bachelor' and 'John is married,' mutually independent.

His simplified model language with its state-descriptions is aimed primarily not at the general problem of analyticity but at another purpose, the clarification of probability and induction.

In explication the purpose is not merely to paraphrase the definiendum into an outright synonym, but actually to improve upon the definiendum by refining or supplementing its meaning.

Any word worth explicating has some contexts which, as wholes, are clear and precise enough to be useful; and the purpose of explication is to preserve the usage of these favored contexts while sharpening the usage of other contexts.

Here the definiendum becomes synonymous with the definiens simply because it has been created expressly for the purpose of being synonymous with the definiens.

L0 can be specified for various purposes or for no purpose; what does it mean to say that K, as against M, N, etc., is the class of the 'analytic' statements of L0?