As I understand it, for Plato, telos isn't the source of truth, "being" is the source of truth. Plato in Phaedo argues that while materials that compo...
Premise 1 - language is created by humans Premise 2 - humans have free will Conclusion - humans cannot create a determinate language IE, I agree with ...
I agree that today in theory this is so. Today the typical English speaker will have acquired a vocabulary of up to 48,000 words. Perhaps in the futur...
Language (syntax and semantics) as a human creation is inherently indeterminate, in that it is not possible to create a determinate language, as illus...
A similar problem to the one experienced by Captain Kirk in the episode The Liar Paradox. Being trapped by machines on a planet, Captain Kirk tells th...
I agree that neither of us want to allow Platonic Forms back. But the answer to the question "do two people have the same idea" also depends on one's ...
There can be syntactic ambiguity, "He ate the cookies on the couch" and there can be semantic ambiguity, "We saw her duck" When asking what does ""two...
I should have distinguished between the two types of indeterminism, semantic indeterminism (SI) and metaphysical indeterminism (MI). The clause "two p...
Exactly so. That is the problem as I see it. As Gödel proved for mathematics the impossibility of finding a complete and consistent set of axioms, per...
As an aside, I intuitively believe that we live in a deterministic world, even allowing for apparent free-will, chaotic systems (still deterministic y...
The meaning is ultimately indeterminate. When Alice and Bob look at the same object, such as a square, they think about 1) a particular shape, 2) the ...
Truth within language A bear hunts for salmon in the coastal waters of Alaska. The bear believes that there are fish in the water and as there are fis...
As regards Davidson's semantic theory, Wikipedia's article on "Truth-Conditional Semantics" describes meaning as the same as, or reducible to, its tru...
It seems that, in his article "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs" 1) Davidson doesn't define what he means by "conventions", but infers a particular defi...
First part - yes As an Indirect Realist, I don't believe that I perceive the external world as it really is, what I perceive are mental objects. I hav...
As I see it : Definition An instantiated mental act is the act of mentally making an instance of, or representing, something perceived. Instantiated m...
Even with the first human interaction with fire, perhaps 1.5 million years ago, fire would have had a meaning. Fire would have meant light and fire at...
Perhaps my distinction is along the lines of Frege's attack on Locke. For Locke, ideas exist independently of words, where words just serve as vehicle...
There are perhaps two aspects to meaning: the semantic abstraction and the psychological instantiation. Frege and Husserl insisted on a clear distinct...
Naming I was thinking of "naming" more of an act of defining something rather than describing something - more "I name this ship Queen Elizabeth" than...
Language and use If I had lived amongst the Neanderthals, I could looked around me and named every object I saw - rock, water, gazelle, etc. This woul...
I don't find Davidson's sentences the clearest. Basic linguistic competence It seems that principles 1, 2 and 3 set out the "basic linguistic competen...
Yes, when I hear someone say something like "I dance the flamingo", in order to understand what they mean I need some knowledge of social context, som...
Whilst conventions internal and external to an utterance have the potential to be studied and codified, I agree that any codification of such conventi...
RussellA - The main difference as I see it is that both conventions internal and external to an utterance have the potential to be studied and codifie...
Russell A - "However, we should perhaps consider two types of conventions, those internal to the utterance and those external to the utterance" The ma...
It may be that malapropisms are part of the problem, but they could also be part of the solution. Davidson concludes his article by saying that "we sh...
I agree with the concept of Wittgenstein's family resemblance, and I agree with Davidson's conclusion "We must give up the idea of a clearly defined s...
I agree that an object may have several features. Given a set of objects each having several properties, I could define a particular object as being y...
The SEP article "Abstract Objects" notes that there need not be one single "correct" way of explaining the abstract/concrete distinction. A version of...
Thinking about the quote on abstract entities, how can abstract entities exist but neither in the mind nor the world external to the mind ? Because, i...
If the observer discovers the idea of squareness in the external world rather than in their own minds, this means that the observer has also discovere...
Perhaps the observer finds an instance of a square and then creates an idea of it. If I didn't know the idea of squareness, when looking at shapes in ...
Considering four elements A, B, C and D spatially located in a "configuration space" , an algorithm could list every possible instantiation of these f...
This relates to the problem of the Knowledge Argument (Mary's Room), the thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson intended to argue against physic...
Considering a statue existing within a marble block before being carved by the artist. The statue, being art, must have both concrete qualities (in ha...
Being new to the Forum, I didn't intend my previous post - but cannot see how to remove it. As regards whether patterns are objective or subjective, i...
Anscombe follows that particular sentence with "for them to be deterministic is for them, together with the description of the situation, to entail un...
I agree. If Anscombe is, as I believe, using the word "deterministic" in an unusual way, then that certainly casts doubt on her conclusion that "the l...
I believe that Anscombe's use of the word "deterministic" is different to common usage. Throughout her article, Anscombe states that the laws of natur...
In her conclusion, Anscombe wrote: "it ought not to have mattered whether the laws of nature were or were not deterministic" Because Anscombe uses the...
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