Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Nowhere does Fodor acknowledge that real computers overlay the bare metal with many layers of software that endow them with more global reach and more flexible powers, and that it is this ‘virtual machine’, the one visible to programmers and users, that specifies the system’s powers in practice. An obvious example is an internet search engine, which repeatedly examines pages on the World Wide Web and constructs a database capturing which words are found in which documents and which documents are linked to which other documents.

For these reasons, as soon as my age permitted me to pass from under the control of my instructors, I entire y abandoned the study of letters, and resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world.

Inductive inference systems must make fallible assumptions about the world, such as that surfaces are mostly cohesive, human languages conform to a universal grammar, and people who grow up with you are your biological siblings. If the world for which the system was designed has changed, those beliefs may be systematically false. Visual illusions are a prime example.

In other words, there is an important difference between a system designed to fixate likely beliefs in an ancestral world and a system designed to fixate true beliefs in this world.

Typically, one semantic value is associated with reference and ordinary truth-conditions, while the other is associated with the way that reference and truth-conditions depend on the external world.

In possible-world semantics, linguistic expressions and/or their utterances are first associated with an extension.

The intension of a sentence is a function that is true at a possible world if and only if the sentence is true there: the intension of 'Plato was a philosopher' is true at all worlds where Plato was a philosopher.

The intension of a singular term maps a possible world to the referent of a term in that possible world: the intension of 'Don Bradman' picks out whoever is Bradman in a world.

The intension of a general term maps a possible world to the class of individuals that fall under the term in that world: the intension of 'cat' maps a possible world to the class of cats in that world.

For example, Quine's terms 'cordate' (creature with a heart) and 'renate' (creature with a kidney) pick out the same class of individuals in the actual world, so they have the same extension.