Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Hence, to accomplish such an account necessitates no specific methods, nor specific concepts.

And do we need some specific, irreducible concepts to account for this?

We have already indicated that those who embrace mentalism may want to invoke some specific, irreducibly mentalistic concepts, such as the concept of intension recommended by Searle.

Davidson, who follows Quine in many other respects, disagrees that meaning talk can be fully naturalized, and claims that to account for thinking beings and meaningful talk we have developed a battery of specific 6 See also Peregrin (2005).

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'.

Hence, Sellars (1954) suggests that our language games are a matter of a specific kind of behavior which qualifies neither as "merely conforming to rules", nor as fully-fledged "rule obeying".

What is the nature of our linguistic practices?; and then we have concluded that the distinctiveness of the way in which our words are meaningful can be traced back to the specific character of our linguistic practices – namely to the fact that they are rule-governed in the specific sense discussed above.

As Sellars (1949, 302) puts it: To think of a system of qualities and relations is, I shall argue, to use symbols governed by a system of rules which, we might say, implicitly define these symbols by giving them a specific task to perform in the linguistic economy.

Lewis (1972) correctly points out that trading expressions for other expressions is not in itself a semantic analysis, but this should not be understood as saying that the touchstone of a true semantic analysis is that it pairs expressions with things (for no theory can do better than to pair expressions with expressions); the touchstone is rather that it pairs expressions with expressions of a specific kind, namely with expressions of a (quasi)formal language with its (inferential) structure explicitly articulated.

The specific position within this group is occupied by the so-called structuralists (de Saussure, Hjelmslev, Derrida).