Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

A different, more down-to-earth reason for reconsidering the mentalist paradigm came hand in hand with the flourishing of modern science and the consequent rise in popularity of philosophical naturalism and behaviorism.

One may accept the Brentano thesis [of the irreducibility of intentional idioms] either as showing the indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance of an autonomous science of intention, or as showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of the science of intention.

As Devitt (1994, 545) puts it, “semantics is an empirical science like any other.

Wittgenstein's approach seems to indicate the idea of accounting for our linguistic practices neither wholly in the way of natural science, nor in terms of a set of specific and irreducible concepts: what we need is not new concepts, but rather a specific mode of speech; aside of the indicative, also the normative mode: 'this ought to be done thus and so'.

Can we see the talk about the rules of football, and about what ought or ought not to be done during a football game, as a mere metaphor (or shorthand, or loose talk) which could be translated into a talk about the movements of the players, or something else wholly susceptible to expression in terms of the language of natural science?

One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science.

Objects of either sort are so elusive, not to say debatable, that there seems little hope of erecting a fruitful science about them.

Carnap was the first empiricist who, not content with asserting the reducibility of science to terms of immediate experience, took serious steps toward carrying out the reduction.

I think this is a good schematization (deliberately oversimplified, to be sure) of what science really does; but it provides no indication, not even the sketchiest, of how a statement of the form 'Quality q is at x; y; z; t' could ever be translated into Carnap's initial language of sense data and logic.

Taken collectively, science has its double dependence upon language and experience; but this duality is not significantly traceable into the statements of science taken one by one. (1951)       Russell's concept of definition in use was, as remarked, an advance over the impossible term-by-term empiricism of Locke and Hume.