Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Thus, semantic analysis is always ultimately a matter of translating the language that is to be analyzed into another language - it makes sense if the latter is in some relevant sense more perspicuous than the former.

Therefore, there is not much sense in striving for something as "the right and absolutely adequate semantic theory".

For if it happened that an individual, even when asleep, had some very distinct idea, as, for example, if a geometer should discover some new demonstration, the circumstance of his being asleep would not militate against its truth; and as for the most ordinary error of our dreams, which consists in their representing to us various objects in the same way as our external senses, this is not prejudicial, since it leads us very properly to suspect the truth of the ideas of sense; for we are not infrequently deceived in the same manner when awake; as when persons in the jaundice see all objects yellow, or when the stars or bodies at a great distance appear to us much smaller than they are.

Let us stress that it is just this primacy that makes incompatible the semiotic with the structural view - that expressions are signs in the sense that they simply are significant - that they 'have meanings' - is a truism that would hardly cause a quarrel.

There is little doubt that it is the semiotic view that accords with common sense; moreover, it seems that this view is also (consciously or unconsciously) adopted by many scholars.

Quine (1960) documented that if there were a relation of reference connecting expressions with objects of the world, then there would not be a possibility of determining it; and Davidson (1977) used this result to show that in such a case the whole concept of reference lacks sense.

In the same way as we posit colours by saying that two objects perceived as in a certain sense similar 'share a colour', we posit meanings by saying that two expressions understood as in a certain sense similar 'share a meaning'.

It is the language itself and the way we use it that is primary; meanings (as well as other linguistic abstracta) are only our means of representing these primary facts, of 'making sense' of them.

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.

The Indeterminacy of Meaning One of the basic characteristics of the structural approach, as contrasted with the semiotic one, is the fact that it leads to the notion of meaning that is in a sense indeterminate or relativistic.