Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Hence, if we can understand the mechanics of language bypassing the question of the nature of meanings, meanings can be eschewed.

However, let us return to Wittgenstein's answer to the question about the peculiarity of our language games: these games, we noted, are characteristically governed by rules.

Perhaps the relevant question to ask here is whether the talk about rules is naturalizable.

In Sellars' words, the pattern in question propagates itself because it is something we were taught by our teachers ought to be, and hence we take it that we ought to do what would bring this ought-to-be about.

Wittgenstein (1969, 184-5) poses the question "Why don't I call cookery rules arbitrary, and why am I tempted to call the rules of grammar arbitrary?"; he answers as follows: Because I think of the concept "cookery" as defined by the end of cookery, and I don't think of the concept "language" as defined by the end of language.

The role-semantics So far we have concluded that it might be helpful to suspend the question What is meaning?

At this point we can ask: does the suspension of the question about the nature of meaning turn out to be its total cancellation, or is it now to be resuscitated?

By replacing the question what is consciousness?

A question of the form 'What is an F?' can be answered only by recourse to a further term: 'An F is a G.'

To answer this question, it is not enough to consider (3) in isolation: if it is isolated from the body of DRT, it obviously provides us with no semantic analysis at all, for any formula or diagram can successfully play the role of semantic analysatum only as a node within a large structure expounding relevant relations.