Marchesk

You may be right about the general, and I don't know about marathon swimming. Perhaps women have an advantage there. The context was McEnroe's stateme...

We can compare the top 700 male marathon runner times to female. Want to make a bet on it?

They're not, but the context is elite male/female athletes, not an average across all marathon participants, and I have run and watched enough track &...

The men's marathon record is 2:02:57. The women's records is 2:17:01. I used to run track and cross country. I was decent for a male, but would have b...

So it's a sociological explanation of meaning.

Evolution would weed out concepts too out of sync with the environment. But it's probably more of an ability to form and build upon fundamental concep...

I would argues this is innate, not something language communities create. Some ability for making sense of perception must exist for language to emplo...

Well, to make things more complicated, the use of language probably shapes the brain of those language speakers. So if Whorf-Sapir is correct, then te...

Right. So tying it back into what I've been trying to argue, the concept of length is not something created as part of a language game. It's something...

Put it this way. The stick has a property of being extended in space by so much, such that when we settle on a standard of measurement, it will be so ...

I get that 1 meter is assigned to the length of a particular stick to create a standard. I disagree that the standard stick has no length. It has a ph...

But it's simply not true that the 1 meter stick has no length. It most certainly has a physical length, and can be measured by all sorts of means, inc...

I have not read Carnap. Summary of his view on this topic?

Both, of course. Human interaction accounts for how we assign meaning. Cognition accounts for how we have concepts at all, and why human language diff...

Good point. But the meaning of length itself does not come from using an arbitrary standard, like a stick, or someone's foot. Length is innate to us, ...

Can't you measure the standard meter by other means? Say the time it takes light to traverse that distance, and then compare that to the time it takes...

This is very strange, because you have other posters in this thread, and other threads, like unenlightened, Michael and Banno arguing along the lines ...

Agreed. Good point about talking to ourselves. Language is use is something defended by the Wittgenstein followers, although the interpretation may de...

So you weren't ready the rest of the thread? I mentioned behavior many times. Did you miss all the posts on Witty by me and others?

Meaning as use has it's root in behavior, not cognitive science. I thought I made that clear? Now if all Witty was arguing is that we assign meaning b...

I'm thinking of meaning along the lines of how Gerge Lakhoff and Mark Johnson describe metaphors as understanding one conceptual domain in terms of an...

That another dog walked across Lassie's grave, and if I don't go left, I'll be possessed by the spirit of the Zodiac Killer. Unfortunately, since neit...

Wittgenstein said that if a lion could talk, we would not understand it, because we don't participate in the lion language games. As such, there's no ...

But how does this explain the difference between animal communication and human?

Better syllogism: 1. Meaning-as-use is language game behavior in the world. 2. The empirical world is particular. 3. But, language employs universals....

Sort of, but I think at this point one would invoke Kant, because this seems rather Humean and empirical. And Kant argued persuasively that you need c...

Yes and no. If you're just talking about he English word "you", then yes. If you're talking about the meaning assigned to it, then no. You entails und...

"I greet you" includes you as a meaning. If you didn't understand "you", then there would be no such greeting. The other needs to be part of one's cog...

It would seem that Wittgenstein's argument tends to be understood in purely behavioral terms. Notice what unlightened said about how Witty wanted to g...

Notice that a severely autistic person does not greet others, because others don't exist as selves to that person. They can't use "hello", because the...

Notice that I never said meaning can't be use, just that meaning isn't exclusively use (and cannot possibly be as I see it), which is what Witty seeme...

Right. I would have to think about how to do that. It's always been my reaction that "meaning is use" can't be right. But back to the OP, I could refo...

Yeah, but not all words are greetings. All that shows is that the meaning of a greeting is it's use.

Exactly. Also, if Witty is right about it being impossible for us to understand talking lions, because we're not part of their language games, then SE...

The claim is that meaning is use, and that is determined by the role it plays in a language game. I don't dispute that words have meaning in a context...

That formulation is trivial. Of course "Chair" means the universal of chairs in English, because we arbitrarily (or rather through evolution of Englis...

I'll try. 1 Meaning-is-use says meaning is the way words are used in the context of a language game. 2. But, word use alone cannot explain the existen...

I don't see how it gets off the ground. Say we want to use "Chair" to denote the category (or universal) for all chairs. Well how do we arrive at such...

As an analogy, consider the argument that tools are use. We certainly use tools, but tools are more than use. Tools are objects constructed with certa...

Yes, but that doesn't make concepts use. We use language to convey concepts. I don't see at all how that makes concepts the same as use. I don't think...

The real argument is whether understanding meaning as use can explain all aspects of human language, not whether animals can be said to have some aspe...

For some reason, it reminded me of this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon: http://arnoldzwicky.s3.amazonaws.com/CHSmellWords.jpg

I'll go one step further and claim that philosophy would not exist if meaning were just use. Maybe Witty would have been happy with that, but it doesn...

Thanks for that link. I would say that discreteness, displacement, and duality of patterning all rely on a conceptual underpinning which is required f...

I'll try a different approach that has a similar critique. The problem of universals shouldn't have cropped up if meaning was just use (I'm not saying...

I'd be excited if were shown that dolphins or birds had language. Pointing out that animals use sounds and what not for communication was just a tool ...

You tell me. What did he work out? Oh, that we're cognitively closed to such things? Maybe so.

Nah, I tend to be more dogmatic than skeptical, but philosophy encourages doubt. I don't know. Haha @ video.

I'm pretty sure most of my moral values come from growing up in the society I grew up in and not from myself. If I had grown up in ancient Sparta, I'm...

Yeah, that makes sense. It's tempting to suppose the world just is how it is, while logic, math, language, and scientific models are created by minds ...