Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

True, a thing’s being put to a certain kind of use can give it a kind of significance, but is this the kind which is characteristic of meaningful words?

Quine himself is unambiguous: for him meanings are decoys, misguiding our attention from the true subject matter of semantic theory.

A rule is a lever necessary for putting to work the exclusively human kind of forming and maintaining of patterns – it is "an embodied generalization which to speak loosely but suggestively, tends to make itself true" (Sellars, 1949, 299).

A predicate typically connects with a name to form a sentence, which is either true or false, depending on the name, or, more precisely, by the referent of the name.

The values of the pieces are exclusively a matter of the rules to which the pieces are subjected, and the rules are the matter of our (3) It is the rules of language that make a kind of sound/inscription displayed by the speakers into a name of a dog, a conjunction connective, or a true sentence.

I have ever remained firm in my original resolution to suppose no other principle than that of which I have recently availed myself in demonstrating the existence of God and of the soul, and to accept as true nothing that did not appear to me more clear and certain than the demonstrations of the geometers had formerly appeared; and yet I venture to state that not only have I found means to satisfy myself in a short time on all the principal difficulties which are usually treated of in philosophy, but I have also observed certain laws established in nature by God in such a manner, and of which he has impressed on our minds such notions, that after we have reflected sufficiently upon these, we cannot doubt that they are accurately observed in all that exists or takes place in the world and farther, by considering the concatenation of these laws, it appears to me that I have discovered many truths more useful and more important than all I had before learned, or even had expected to learn.

Therefore, the proponents of the linguistic turn argue, philosophy can be nothing more and nothing else than a certain kind of analysis of language, "the pursuit of meaning", as Schlick (1932) puts it. Metaphysics is thus aufgehoben - it is exposed as a worthless enterprise stemming from the failure to understand the true role of language; it boils down to expressing one's "life feeling" (Carnap, 1931).

Approaches to language may then be classified according to which of these notions of meaning they grant primacy: the "nomenclatural", or representational, ones take the relations between This is not literally true because of the proper name; but this is clearly peculiar to the Russellian example.

And it must be noted that I say of our reason, and not of our imagination or of our senses: thus, for example, although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth; for otherwise it could not be that God, who is wholly perfect and veracious, should have placed them in us. And because our reasonings are never so clear or so complete during sleep as when we are awake, although sometimes the acts of our imagination are then as lively and distinct, if not more so than in our waking moments, reason further dictates that, since all our thoughts cannot be true because of our partial imperfection, those possessing truth must infallibly be found in the experience of our waking moments rather than in that of our dreams.

There is also no help in recourse to talking of 'neural events' or the like: it is true that these, unlike mental entities, are specifiable independently of the sentences whose usage they may accompany (at least in principle); however they are quite like thoughts in that if they are specified in this way, they cannot really provide us with meanings.