Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

And it seems that this is what struck Quine. He realized that we want to know how language works, and therefore we set out to discover what meanings are; however, the best way to find out what meanings are is to investigate how language works.

However, once we understand how language works, we are done.

However, the sagest abstract philosophical conception of language is empty if it does not reflect the facts of how language really works; and the most detailed atlas of the landscape of language is impotent if it is not clear which questions it purports to answer.

The same explanation works for any pair of one-place predicates, of course, and it can be extended in obvious fashion to many-place predicates.

Lasnik’s recent tutorial (Lasnik, 2002) concedes that after more than a dozen years, “Minimalism is as yet still just an ‘approach’, a conjecture about how language works (‘perfectly’) and a general program for exploring and developing the conjecture” (p. 436).

Given the relative rigor and cumulativeness of biology and linguistics, this strikes us as somewhat presumptuous (especially since the Minimalist Program is “still just an ‘approach’”, “a conjecture about how language works”).

Of these one of the very first that occurred to me was, that there is seldom so much perfection in works composed of many separate parts, upon which different hands had been employed, as in those completed by a single master.

Abstract: In my book How the Mind Works, I defended the theory that the human mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation.

The way that the mind doesn’t work, according to Fodor, is the way that I said the mind does work in my book How the Mind Works (HTMW).

But for reasons that soon become clear, a more fitting title might be No One Ever Said it Did. Fodor calls the theory in How the Mind Works the New Synthesis.