Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

A similar perspective had always been natural for all kinds of pragmatists; and in Wittgenstein's times it was revived by neopragmatist philosophers, especially W. V.

And even Chomsky, who far from shares Quine's anti-mentalist zeal, expresses a similar disrespect for meanings: “communication," he claims (1993, 21), "does not require shared 'public meanings' ... Nor need we assume that the 'meanings' of one participant be discoverable by the other."

I suggest that a similar situation holds for language and meanings.

This concerns especially those philosophers who later came to be called analytic (see Rorty, 1967); but not only them - Heidegger, e.g., has accomplished a turn of a very similar kind.

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'.

We have concentrated on meaning; but also other linguistic abstracta can be accounted for in similar terms.

However, from the concept of synonymy of statements we could derive the concept of synonymy for other linguistic forms, by considerations somewhat similar to those at the end of Section III. Assuming the notion of "word," indeed, we could explain any two forms as synonymous when the putting of the one form for an occurrence of the other in any statement (apart from occurrences within "words") yields a synonymous statement.

Rules are arbitrary in the sense that they are not responsible to some sort of reality-they are not similar to natural laws; nor are they responsible to some meaning the word already has. If someone says the rules of negation are not arbitrary because negation could not be such that ~~p =~p, all that could be meant is that the latter rule would not correspond to the English word "negation".

In one's own case it makes no sense to ask "How do I know?" It might be thought that since my saying "He seems to have toothache" is sensible but not my saying a similar thing of myself, I could then go on to say "This is so for him but not for me".

It is used in different contexts because there is a transition between similar things called "good", a transition which continues, it may be, to things which bear no similarity to earlier members of the series.