Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

When we start to use a suitable piece of stone to drive nails, it undoubtedly gains, thereby, in significance; but it seems that the difference between a meaningful word and a meaningless sound or inscription is something worlds apart from the difference between a stone used for driving nails and one that is of no use. When we say that the former stone, in contrast to the latter one, means something to us, we would seem to be employing means in a sense which is totally different from the sense in which we are using it when we say that a word means thus and so. Is not saying that a word has a meaning in the sense that it is useful for some purpose something quite different from saying that the word has meaning in the sense of having a 'semantic value'?

Besides, I have pointed out what are the laws of nature; and, with no other principle upon which to found my reasonings except the infinite perfection of God, I endeavored to demonstrate all those about which there could be any room for doubt, and to prove that they are such, that even if God had created more worlds, there could have been none in which these laws were not observed.

A simple example: linguists sometimes like to explain words like necessary simply by referring to possible worlds, whose real nature they take as something they need not bother very much about, because it is explained by philosophers.

However, the (post-linguistic-turn) philosophers would reduce explaining possible worlds to explaining the talk about possible worlds, which is nothing but the linguistic (or logicolinguistic) talk about words like necessary.

Leibniz spoke of the truths of reason as true in all possible worlds.

This account is an adaptation of Leibniz's "true in all possible worlds.

of organs of computation that enabled our ancestors to survive and reproduce in the physical and social worlds in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history.

Our affective repertoire comprises emotions pertaining to the physical world, such as fear and disgust, and emotions pertaining to the social and moral worlds, such as trust, sympathy, gratitude, guilt, anger, and humor.

More commonly, two-dimensional approaches are understood more narrowly to be a species of possible-worlds semantics, on which each dimension is understood in terms of possible worlds and related modal notions.

One can then associate expressions with an intension, which is a function from possible worlds to extensions.