Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

To say what an expression means is not to state how things are, but rather how they ought to be, namely how the expression is correctly used.

For the entities we mention to help specify a state of mind{ XE "mind" } do not have to play any psychological or epistemological role at all, just as numbers play no physical role.

I have ever remained firm in my original resolution to suppose no other principle than that of which I have recently availed myself in demonstrating the existence of God and of the soul, and to accept as true nothing that did not appear to me more clear and certain than the demonstrations of the geometers had formerly appeared; and yet I venture to state that not only have I found means to satisfy myself in a short time on all the principal difficulties which are usually treated of in philosophy, but I have also observed certain laws established in nature by God in such a manner, and of which he has impressed on our minds such notions, that after we have reflected sufficiently upon these, we cannot doubt that they are accurately observed in all that exists or takes place in the world and farther, by considering the concatenation of these laws, it appears to me that I have discovered many truths more useful and more important than all I had before learned, or even had expected to learn.

The key concept was that of possible world - a concept introduced implicitly by Rudolf Carnap (esp. 1957; under the name of state of affairs) and explicitly by Saul Kripke (1963).

The crucial difference is that semanticsL addresses things which one knows in virtue of knowing language: to know the meaning of, say, the king of France it is enough to know English3, there is no need to know anything about the present state of the world.

SemanticsW, on the other hand, addresses things which one knows when she knows language and something about the present state of the world: to know what the phrase the king of France refers to one has to know its meaning plus certain facts about France.

But, because I had already very clearly recognized in myself that the intelligent nature is distinct from the corporeal, and as I observed that all composition is an evidence of dependency, and that a state of dependency is manifestly a state of imperfection, I therefore determined that it could not be a perfection in God to be compounded of these two natures and that consequently he was not so compounded; but that if there were any bodies in the world, or even any intelligences, or other natures that were not wholly perfect, their existence depended on his power in such a way that they could not subsist without him for a single moment.

In recent years Carnap has tended to explain analyticity by appeal to what he calls state-descriptions.

A state-description is any exhaustive assignment of truth values to the atomic, or noncompound, statements of the language.

All other statements of the language are, Carnap assumes, built up of their component clauses by means of the familiar logical devices, in such a way that the truth value of any complex statement is fixed for each state-description by specifiable logical laws.