Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

This idea was clearly articulated by Davidson (1989, 11): Just as in measuring weight we need a collection of entities which have a structure{ XE "structure" } in which we can reflect the relations between weighty objects, so in attributing states of belief{ XE "belief" } (and other propositional attitude{ XE "attitude: propositional" }s) we need a collection of entities related in ways that will allow us to keep track of the relevant properties of the various psychological states.

This seems to indicate that it is misguided to see the semantic analysis of language as a matter of pairing words and things; that it is more appropriate to see it as a matter of 'finding the position of the expression within the structure of language'.

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.

The Myth of the Structure One of the common way to avoid this ‘intractability of meaning’ is to move the concept of meaning to the periphery of one’s teaching and to concentrate on the word struture.

The enterprise of semantic analysis, it is then claimed, consists in revealing the "semantic structure" of an expression (or of the mental content of an expression).

Thus, for many theoreticians of language, meaning has come to coincide with something like the semantic structure; and semantic analysis with pinpointing this structure.

This might be understood as accepting the structural approach to language urged above - but usually it is not. The point is whereas what we have urged is an approach which sees meaning of an expression as the possitionof the expression within the network of language, the common way of engaging the concept of structure is based on the picture that an expression is like, say, a mineral: that it can be analyzed and examined with tools akin to microscopes up to the point where we see its structure.

This picture essentially obscures the fact that an expression does not have any inherent structure in the sense in which a mineral has - at least no interesting inherent structure.

An expression does have an inherent structure in that it consists of words and letters but this is not the structure held in mind by those who use the term structure to make sense of semantics.

The structure of the expression, the story goes, is the structure of a mental entity behind the expression - be it called an idea, an intention, a cognitive content, or whatever.