Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Just as all men," he continues, "have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images."

And I think that, given (1), it should be reflected as the peculiar status of our language games vis-à-vis the activities of our non-human pals or the clatter of inanimate things.

To say what an expression means is not to state how things are, but rather how they ought to be, namely how the expression is correctly used.

In thinking and talking of the weights we need not suppose there are such things as weights for objects to have.

The space of meaningfulness The physical space in which we live our lives is formed by certain laws – the laws making some of the things we can think of doing (flying by ourselves, living under water ...) impossible, thereby delimiting a certain spectrum of possibilities.

Moreover, meanings are best seen not as things we describe when describing our language games, but rather as tools of our description, as the means of our representing the games and their rules.

Their original point was that we cannot take the representing capacities of language at face value, that in order to treat of things - which cannot be done save with the help of words - we must first treat of words and make sure which of them are really capable of treating of things.

It apparently augured the reconcilation of the intuition of the platonistic character of meanings with the modern mistrust of any 'ghostly entities' like ideas: we only have to presuppose the existence of the ordinary things and the possibility to group entities together - set theory has taught us that this alone is enough to yield us a platonistic heaven.

The term covers themes pertaining to two essentially distinct realms: the realm of language and the realm of the links between language and things in the world.

The crucial difference is that semanticsL addresses things which one knows in virtue of knowing language: to know the meaning of, say, the king of France it is enough to know English3, there is no need to know anything about the present state of the world.