Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Note that this does not mean that it cannot be relevant from other viewpoints, such as that of the psychology of communication – i.e. the study of what goes on in one's mind when one communicates.

Quine therefore holds that to discover what meaning is, we must study how we acquire meanings, in particular which aspects of human behavior an adept of language must observe to learn what a word means.

Over and above this, he concludes that as we are not involving ourselves with any such esoteric stuff as pieces of mind, but only with the motions of parts of the material, tangible world, there is no reason to assume that to study, analyze and explain linguistic conduct necessitates any other tools or concepts than those which we already use to study, analyze and explain the rest of the world.

There is nothing to study save linguistic behavior, for once we pay due attention to the way in which meanings spread, we can see that nothing is in the meaning that was not earlier in behavior.

In this way, Quine's original idea that in order to understand what meaning is we should study linguistic behavior (especially within the setting of radical translation) slowly mutates into the idea that the truly important thing is the behavior itself – if studying it brings us also the understanding of the concept of meaning, 7 very well; if not, the worse for the concept of meaning and we should simply throw it by the board.

The interpretive stance instituted by the pragmatic turn naturally involves what Sellars (1974) called a "functional classification" of expressions (from the viewpoint of the rules of the language games) and consequently the study of their roles vis-à-vis the rules.

This was the famous linguistic turn: philosophers came to accept that everything that is is in a sense through language, and that to study what there is is to study what our words mean.

True, it is not the business of philosophers to study details of our grammar; and it is not the business of linguists to answer the philosophical questions about the nature of our language.

And though men of the highest genius study this question as long as they please, I do not believe that they will be able to give any reason which can be sufficient to remove this doubt, unless they presuppose the existence of God.

Semiotics, then, is not concerned with the study of a particular kind of object, but with ordinary objects in so far (and only in so far) as they participate in semiosis.'