Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

This is a sketch of the picture that was taken for almost self-evident for many centuries thereafter: words gain their peculiar qualities by being somehow animated by human souls or minds; indeed they are crucial vehicles of the soul's revealing itself within the material world; and the way in which they are animated is that they become somehow attached to pieces of the soul – to mental contents, in a more contemporary idiom.

Intentionality is that property of many mental states and events by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world" (ibid.

Or should we rather conclude that the whole issue of meaning, including all our intuitions mentioned above, is illusory and that the only real matter are human linguistic transactions which can be accounted for analogously to how we describe all other kinds of transactions going on within our world.

The same would be the case, for that matter, if meanings were conceived as elements of the real or of a Platonist world christened by expressions.

However, if the meaning is rather the role of the word within our language games, then the only way to grasp it is to investigate the word's interaction with other words and with the world within the relevant games.

Over and above this, he concludes that as we are not involving ourselves with any such esoteric stuff as pieces of mind, but only with the motions of parts of the material, tangible world, there is no reason to assume that to study, analyze and explain linguistic conduct necessitates any other tools or concepts than those which we already use to study, analyze and explain the rest of the world.

Quine's behaviorism accords with the undeniable successes of natural sciences in describing and explaining ever more parts and aspects of our world, and their subsequent ambition to describe everything whatsoever.

Accounting for these practices is methodologically and conceptually continuous with accounting for events in the non-human and inanimate world.

This has led Brandom (1994, 33) to conclude: “For brutes or bits of the inanimate world to qualify as engaging in practices that implicitly acknowledge the applicability of norms, they would have to exhibit the behavior that counts as treating conduct (their own or that of others) as correct or incorrect.

Further, to enable me to cast this variety of subjects somewhat into the shade, and to express my judgment regarding them with greater freedom, without being necessitated to adopt or refute the opinions of the learned, I resolved to leave all the people here to their disputes, and to speak only of what would happen in a new world, if God were now to create somewhere in the imaginary spaces matter sufficient to compose one, and were to agitate variously and confusedly the different parts of this matter, so that there resulted a chaos as disordered as the poets ever feigned, and after that did nothing more than lend his ordinary concurrence to nature, and allow her to act in accordance with the laws which he had established.