Banno

SO to the conclusion. We can't talk of conceptual schemes that are so different to our own that we could not understand them - because we do not under...

Looks fine to me.

Davidson's rejection of partially incommensurable conceptual schemes is just the observation that sometimes people have different beliefs to us - that...

Two things - the attribution of beliefs, and the interpretation of sentences - underpin understanding what someone is saying. When using "beliefs" her...

Beginning at the end, so we can see where Davidson is headed. The strategy Davidson takes with partial cases is to show that "we could not be in a pos...

Nuh. Get The Essential Davidson on Kindle...

@"Janus"'s comments might best be dealt with by continuing the exegesis of the article - since we are up to partial cases. His example of Western medi...

I couldn't see it either. I have it in a collection; it's more recent, and has a few replies to critics stuck on the end.

Perhaps its more of a minimal translation.

Exactly.

There's also A coherence theory of truth and knowledge, an article which I have not studied in any detail. Must get a round tuit.

Hmm. see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/davidson/#TrutPredRealReal A secondary source, but I was privileged to study with Malpas many years ago.

Pretty much Suits me, since my Wittgenstein -inspire prejudices tell me that philosophy amounts to nothing.

True to the Facts - which I think we have already mentioned. Althogh it is important to note that, so far as that essay implies a form of corresponden...

A parallel argument is found in Kripke, as he dismisses the theory that a proper name refers in virtue of an associated description. Proper names just...

Yes - but no - nothing makes the sentence true.

Hu? So when you say that the sun is setting, you are never talking about the actual sun? Nuh. That's off-track. Damn. You are right. End of that discu...

But it it not the sun - that very thing, considered apart from all else - that makes "the sun is setting" true. SO the sun is not the thing that makes...

I've got a half-dozen browser windows open with a different sub-thread on each. Just going to close down for a bit and let it settle.

So... how does the fact of the setting sun differ from the setting sun? Is the idea that somehow "the fact of the setting sun" intercedes between the ...

There's good reason to suppose that thinking in terms of "referring to a fact" is... problematic. A simple bit of logical substitution will show how t...

See A nice Derangement of Epitaphs.

Yeah. I think I have answered that.

It's an important joke. The mediation being rejected here is the baggage of theories of reference, meaning, truth, and so on. Why do we need them? Fol...

Isn't that the distinction Davidson rejects as the third dogma of empiricism?

Yeah, we do. We know "the sun is setting" is true if the sun is setting. SO if the sun is setting, then "the sun is setting" is true. What more do you...

Same as usual, then... :razz: That's the point; the new Scientific Language makes no difference. Eliminative materialism fails to eliminate what it se...

Yep.

Yep.

Well, what else is there?

Not by someone who is too lazy to engage with the challenge, no. I have enough to be getting on with.

Yeah. I'm with Austin: the language we use every day has evolved over tens of thousands of years; what we have is what has survived generation after g...

OK. A fart could be meaningful and true, for all we know. Do you want to start a discussion on farts? Go ahead; I'm not interested.

So what?

He did. and thereabouts.

I think Davidson's example of the Minister of Scientific Language eliminates eliminative materialism.

See the discussion of dolphins, earlier in this thread.

See here. Meaning, truth and belief are interlocked. Or better, the meaning of our various statements is in some part the attitude we adopt towards th...

Yep; with certain reservations about "...to put it to use we need a fact...". Those reservations are to do with there not being any facts of the mater...

Eliminative materialism

This is my third attempt at a reply to your post... There is considerable background here that I was taking for granted, but it seems would be fair to...

Sweet article. I like the point that Aristotle was dealing with objects in a fluid - One of those things that is obvious, once someone else points it ...

Cheers.

Here's a whole other thread. Some folk think so; I don't. Some folk think he meant forms of life to be incommensurable. But I don't see how that could...

Seems so.

Yep. So what is the lesson? What does your story tell us about conceptual schema?

Yep. It's fiction.

Then the task for you might be to show how it is relevant. Set it out. But then, even if relevant, is it right?

How can you tell that the protagonist has understood the alien language?

It's dealt with in the part of the article where Davidson talks about the transitivity of English.