Fafner

It seems to me that you don't really understand what W' meant by 'use', since your critique has nothing to do with his actual views (and he certainly ...

As I said, it's not a philosophical question and therefore completely irrelevant to philosophical problems about language and meaning. It is not somet...

Well but that's not a philosophical question but a scientific one (about the psychological conditions under which some organism is capable of learning...

Yes you can say that there is a Kantian ring to Wittgenstein's philosophy, but it has nothing to do with 'cognition' (whatever it means) as you say. A...

But Wittgenstein's argument is that 'cognition' by itself can't do anything magical that is over and above what behavior can, as far as language or me...

What does it mean "language is use"?

As Srap Tasmaner suggested, it's better not to use the word 'meaning' here, or any of its cognates, to describe what you say since it will only cause ...

When I say "meaningless" I mean semantic content, and save few rare exceptions (such as 'a' like in "a man"), letters don't have any semantic function...

It can't be right that if something is composed of meaningless parts, then it itself must be meaningless (if this is what you meant). Surely, the lett...

Sorry I don't get your point. On my account you don't have to know the truth or falsehood of this or that particular sentence, only understand the tru...

I'm not sure how the issue of overlapping is relevant here. Surly not all truth conditions of past tense sentences overlap with each other - the truth...

And some general remarks about the relations between all these notions (you should keep in mind that this is philosophically very controversial topic)...

(a) analytic truth: truth by virtue of meaning (like "red is a color" or "all bachelors are unmarried"). (b) a priori truth: something you can know (=...

And I don't want conversations with people who can't be bothered to properly explain themselves.

Listen, I don't want to argue about meaningless verbal questions. If you still don't understand, or want to ignore the substantial objection that I ma...

I already told you that if you don't like the word 'definition' then you can drop it, I don't care. My point is the same whether you call what you sai...

Whatever you were talking about. Again, if you are trying to explain a term then it's a definition in my understanding. If you don't like the word, yo...

First, it is a definition even if it doesn't apply to everyone who uses the term. Secondly, I don't think that any serious philosopher actually thinks...

Well you ought to talk about definitions because you claimed at the beginning of your post that "In contemporary analytic philosophy..." reference mea...

But it's a question of definition, not you opinion. This is what the term means in the philosophical literature, it has nothing to do with what you or...

'Reference' is not the same as the act of fixing reference (in the sense of an ostensive definition). 'Reference' is believed by philosophers to be a ...

The notion of 'sense' (if you mean it the way Frege used it) introduces many other difficulties over and above the concept of meaning (frankly I don't...

Hi mcdoodle, nice to see you too. Are you from the old forum?

You are probably right, my fault.

I don't see how this is relevant. So on your account, do you want to say that all meaningful words must have mental associations? (because that's an e...

And by the way, don't change my words when you quote me. I didn't say "There's no analysis of "meaning""

What's the alternative?

What does it mean then to make a philosophical analysis of meaning? How should we decide who is right? I'm just saying that someone who's complaining ...

There's no "correct" analysis of 'meaning', because there are many different senses in which this word is employed, inside and outside philosophy.

Well, and biology gets things right about beetles and flowers - would you also say that it is philosophically significant? So far you are the one here...

That's fine, but in itself it doesn't have any philosophical significance. As I said, it really depends on your philosophical goals. Usually in philos...

I should also add that I'm not objecting (on the behalf of the contextualist) that words can be legitimately said to have "meaning" in some non-philos...

The short answer is that the philosophical notion of "meaning" is pretty obscure (as it was argued for example by Quine in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism")...

Here's how I think the two principles could be reconciled. The primary goal of the principle of compositionality (the idea that the meaning of sentenc...

Your version of radical empiricsm simply cannot work (i.e., that all cognition is explainable by experience), and even the logical positivsts understo...