Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

To this I likewise added much respecting the substance, the situation, the motions, and all the different qualities of these heavens and stars; so that I thought I had said enough respecting them to show that there is nothing observable in the heavens or stars of our system that must not, or at least may not appear precisely alike in those of the system which I described.

The shift in focus yields a kind of turn which can be labelled 'pragmatic'4 (understanding the term as a referring to giving pride of place to the practical5): the turn from studying language as a system of signifiers associated with their respective signifieds to studying it as a tool for interaction.

He calls this kind of behavior pattern governed: "an organism may come to play a language game – that is to move from position to position in a system of moves and positions and to do it 'because of the system' without having to obey rules and hence without having to be playing a metalanguage game" (ibid.

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.

It was necessary either to develop a more sophisticated logical system, or to find ways how to capture the interesting aspects of natural language in an indirect fashion.

MeaningL, on the other hand, is the matter of relations between expressions; hence the meaningL of an expression is best seen as something like materialisation of the place of the expression within the system of language, or of its role within the actual language game.

This implies that the meaning of an expression is not a thing to be discovered within the extralinguistic world, but rather something as the value of the expression, the materialisation of the role of the expression within the system of language and within the language games that we play.

The thesis advocated here is that the structure of an expression is essentially a quite different kind - it is a theoretical construct which locates the expression within the system of the language to which it belongs.

We first reconstruct language as a rule-based system; and this reconstruction causes expressions to fall into certain categories.

And this is a holistic matter - the expression only has this kind of structure when considered as belonging to the system of language.