Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

I argue that after this turn we should explain the peculiar kinds of 'meaningfulness' that characterizes our expressions in terms of what Sellars called "pattern governed behavior".

Tendencies arose to explain mind in terms of language, rather than vice versa (viz. the celebrated linguistic turn).

Although some philosophers still wanted to account for meaning in terms of an apparently unexplainable faculty of human mind, many others strived either to discard the concept of meaning completely, or at least to explain it in an utterly non-mentalist way. Does this mean that meanings are destined to end up in the naturalist mill constructed to produce a unified scientific theory of the whole universe?

But is this not a contradiction in terms?

Wittgenstein's approach seems to indicate the idea of accounting for our linguistic practices neither wholly in the way of natural science, nor in terms of a set of specific and irreducible concepts: what we need is not new concepts, but rather a specific mode of speech; aside of the indicative, also the normative mode: 'this ought to be done thus and so'.

Can we see the talk about the rules of football, and about what ought or ought not to be done during a football game, as a mere metaphor (or shorthand, or loose talk) which could be translated into a talk about the movements of the players, or something else wholly susceptible to expression in terms of the language of natural science?

What I want to suggest is that the difference between being meaningful in the sense of being a suitable means for a particular end (like a hammer) and being meaningful in the sense of being expressive of a meaning (like a word) can be elucidated in terms of the difference between those practices which are straightforwardly end-driven and those which are partly governed by deliberate rules.

Carnapian formal models of semantics: [Carnap’s formalization of semantic theory in terms of a primitive relation of designation which holds between words and extralinguistic entities] commits one to the idea that if a language is meaningful, there exists a domain of entities (the designata of its names and predicates) which exist independently of any human concept formation.

It follows from the considerations of Dummett (1974), that even if we consider that of the Fregean terms which is really closer to the intuitive concept of meaning, namely his Sinn (sense), we are likely to encounter a parallel ambiguity, for Fregean senses have come to be taken to play two incompatible roles: to explicate what a linguistic agent grasps when she grasps words, and to determine the corresponding Bedeutung, i.e. extension.

This indicates that the only real sense which can be made of formulas and diagrams as exemplified above is in terms of translating the analyzed language into another language.