Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

As it is always a sentence (or sometimes perhaps even a supersentential whole) that must be employed for a valid move within a language game and that is hence independently meaningful in this sense, individual meanings can only be the artificially individuated contributions which the individual words bring to the sentence's achieving the moves within the relevant games.

A predicate typically connects with a name to form a sentence, which is either true or false, depending on the name, or, more precisely, by the referent of the name.

The values of the pieces are exclusively a matter of the rules to which the pieces are subjected, and the rules are the matter of our (3) It is the rules of language that make a kind of sound/inscription displayed by the speakers into a name of a dog, a conjunction connective, or a true sentence.

The latter 'rule' merely indicates that to assert the described sentence is not usually the way to achieve anything.

It makes no sense to say: "What you can assert is obviously a meaningful sentence not a mere meaningless sound/inscription – hence you cannot establish rules of language unless you have expressions which already are meaningful."

The concepts to assert and meaningful sentence are established in mutual interdependence.

I wonder who gave the book to whom; (3) is Kamp’s (15) discourse representation structure (DRS) corresponding to the sentence Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it; and (4) is the ‘tectogrammatical representation’ of one of the articulations of the sentence The professor of chemistry will come tomorrow as given by Sgall et al.

In what sense do we explain the analyzed sentence?

Restricting ourselves to the two most prominent reducienda of the meaning of an expression, namely the use of the expression and the mental entity ('cognitive content') 'behind' the expression, the following main possibilities seem to emerge as to what a diagram associated with a sentence, or, more generally, with an expression, can amount to: (i) a description of the meaning of the expression (ii) a description of the way the expression is used 6 (iii) a description of a mental entity associated with the expression (iv) a translation of the sentence into another language The first alternative seems to offer the most promising route: what could be a more direct realisation of the task of semantics than displaying expressions alongside with their meanings?8 However, this proposal is rather tricky; for what could count as a description of meaning, which, as we have concluded in the preceding section, is best seen not as a 'real' object, but rather as a value?

The most straightforward way to characterize the use of 'Every farmer owns a donkey' is to say something like The sentence 'Every farmer owns a donkey' is (correctly) produced if and only if every farmer owns a donkey (this is, of course, a severe oversimplification, but not one that affects the point made here).