Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

To know English is to know, for example, that the form of words 'there are cats' is standardly used to express the thought that there are cats; and that the form of words 'it's raining' is standardly used to express the thought that it's raining; and that the form of words 'it's not raining' is standardly used to express the thought that it's not raining; and so on for in(de)finitely many such cases."

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.

Concentrating on this issue led Quine to develop his much discussed thought experiments with "radical translation" – the situation where a linguist faces an utterly unknown language and must learn what its words mean by studying the behavior of its speakers.

But this, I think, is not the most important lesson (in fact, as I will try to indicate later, such an outcome is not so surprising given the pragmatic nature of the turn); a more important lesson is that meanings, at least as usually conceived, are perhaps less crucial for semantic theory than previously thought.

Because it matters; meaningful stuff means something to us; words, in particular, are helpful for communicating, shaping and organizing our thought, recording knowledge etc., etc.

But because I have essayed to expound the chief of these discoveries in a treatise which certain considerations prevent me from publishing, I cannot make the results known more conveniently than by here giving a summary of the contents of this treatise. It was my design to comprise in it all that, before I set myself to write it, I thought I knew of the nature of material objects.

It might seem that in this case we may be able to pick up some relevant 'content of consciousness' independently of any linguistic articulation; however, it is hard to see how we could identify contentful mental entities save by way of language; we cannot describe the mental entity 'beyond' the sentence 'Every farmer owns a donkey' save by saying that it is the thought (or idea, or whatever) that every farmer owns a donkey, or the thought that for every x, if x is a farmer, then x owns a donkey etc. What is worse, even if we could give an independent 8 9 See Chomsky (1967).

Semantic analysis as envisaging inferential structure This line of thought leads to a picture of semantic analysis quite different from the one envisaged by the usual uncritical construal.

However, on second thought it is quite clear that there is no infinite set we could really encounter within our 'real' world.

But now we have abandoned the thought of any special realm of entities called meanings.