Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Meaning as an imprint of the mind In his On Interpretation, Aristotle famously claimed that "spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words".

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.

The other development, consequent upon the first, was Russell's discovery of the concept of incomplete symbols defined in use. (1961)      This emendation would unquestionably have been welcome to Locke and Hume and Tooke, but historically it had to await an important reorientation in semantics -- the reorientation whereby the primary vehicle of meaning came to be seen no longer in the term but in the statement.

Section 60), underlies Russell'a concept of incomplete symbols defined in use;16b also it is implicit in the verification theory of meaning, since the objects of verification are statements.

We need to distinguish between the conventional meaning of words, sentences and other symbols, and the speaker meaning which the speaker expresses in making an intentional utterance.

We will get to this point, the dependence of complex thought and meaning on language, in the next section when we get to symbols that have a compositional structure.

Children come into their second year of life expecting the noises other people make to be used symbolically; much of the job of learning language is figuring out what concepts (or sets of things in the world, depending on your view of semantics) these noises are symbols for. HCF observe that “the rate at which children build the lexicon is so massively different from non-human primates that one must entertain the possibility of an independently evolved mechanism.

Just as forelimbs originally were selected for stability in water and subsequently were selected for flight, legged locomotion, or grasping, certain circuitry 17 We concur that language does raise challenges for neurobiology, in particular, how neural networks can implement the kinds of computation found in language and the parts of cognition it interfaces with, especially the recursive concatenation of symbols and instantiation of variables (Jackendoff, 2002, chap.

It consists of a control unit and an infinite tape divided into squares which can be imprinted with any of a fixed number of symbols.

A Turing machine can compute any partial recursive function, any grammar composed of rewrite rules, and, it is commonly thought, anything that can be computed by any other physically realizable machine that works on discrete symbols and that arrives at an answer in a finite number of steps.