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Srap Tasmaner

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You may have something here. We regularly produce speech errors (I haven't found a solid source on the frequency). Why? Why isn't our speech productio...
October 08, 2020 at 02:47
No. But I'm inclined to doubt it was Davidson's mistake. It's just amusing. PhilPapers links to another version (mostly) available through Google Book...
October 08, 2020 at 00:48
Here's a curiosity. I only noticed yesterday that the underlined words should be swapped around.
October 07, 2020 at 23:14
While I take your point, what you quoted refers to a single and specific rule change that is widely made by players for speed chess: in all versions o...
October 07, 2020 at 19:41
Sorry @"Hirnstoff" but you lost me 2 minutes in this time. I know your heart is in the right place, but when it comes to the flat earth it is probably...
October 07, 2020 at 16:51
In: Platonism  — view comment
I see. The difference is that you know more about cloudhood than meteorologists do, even if they know more about clouds than you do. If meteorologists...
October 07, 2020 at 16:40
The accepted transcription of this seems to be but the Pillows' English can be hard to parse. Anyway, listen to The Pillows and rediscover hope: https...
October 07, 2020 at 16:25
In what way? If there are semantic rules, what are they like? You seem to assume, and impute to me and other "conventionalists", a view of the lexicon...
October 07, 2020 at 15:19
In fact there's plenty of evidence, near as I can tell, that top-down constraints play a huge role here -- the phrasal, sentence, and conversational c...
October 07, 2020 at 13:56
As it turns out, a lot of research in the field of "speech perception" nowadays is driven by the desire to have computers that can understand human sp...
October 07, 2020 at 13:43
That's actually really nice! (Players actually find themselves doing this out of necessity too, like at a club where there's one set that's short a pi...
October 07, 2020 at 13:37
I don't have anything in particular to say about malapropisms at the moment. They're not in themselves important to Davidson's argument, near as I can...
October 07, 2020 at 01:35
Hey! I resemble that remark!
October 07, 2020 at 01:10
He does try to make his case against conventions, rules, and regularities quite broad -- going beyond malapropisms to include not only all successful ...
October 06, 2020 at 23:57
No they aren't. The substituted word is almost always the same part of speech, even the same number of syllables with the same prosody, and the result...
October 06, 2020 at 22:19
Think of a great game of chess: every single move is in accordance with the rules, but if you asked me to explain what happened and why, I wouldn't ju...
October 06, 2020 at 22:03
Two points: 1.) I don't know what you're talking about here. It is consistent to hold of linguistic communication, that absolutely all of it is govern...
October 06, 2020 at 21:55
Yeah, that's totally fair. I haven't gone back and re-read the earlier stuff for this discussion (and never read much later stuff) so I'm not in any p...
October 06, 2020 at 20:44
I've never tried to work through it in any practical way! I think I might have an example of how it could work. The approach ends up being inherently ...
October 06, 2020 at 17:35
Agreed pretty much all around, except I'd be more inclined to say "following the rules", or if I wanted to be really careful, "acting in accordance wi...
October 06, 2020 at 15:44
That seems fair, and an interesting point, that communication is not just the delivery of a semantic payload but confirmation of that delivery. But ab...
October 06, 2020 at 14:30
I believe in Tarski's original version, which was intended for formalized not natural languages, the LHS within quotation marks is in the object langu...
October 06, 2020 at 14:25
No, that's clearly not right. I might wonder whether you've misused a word if I understood what you said but am very surprised to hear you say it, esp...
October 06, 2020 at 14:04
The world holds its breath.
October 06, 2020 at 06:16
An excuse for talking as much as I do about chess and baseball: Chess, like language use most of the time, is turn-based. Baseball is kind of a hybrid...
October 06, 2020 at 05:59
I've looked at the post a couple times, since you keep suggesting you provided all the answers there, and it's not doing much for me. On the one hand,...
October 06, 2020 at 05:14
This: Stated as you have here, this sounds like a truism. But I see no reason to believe what you have written here, even discounting the meaninglessn...
October 06, 2020 at 04:52
If it were this simple, not only would Davidson's paper have only been one sentence, but it wouldn't have been needed in the first place because there...
October 06, 2020 at 03:55
Actually there is! But these would be violations not of the pure syntax of chess, but either of its "school grammar", the received wisdom of how to pl...
October 06, 2020 at 03:24
One last but of baseball lore, for those who like that sort of thing. How to spot a rookie or an idealist: a fielder who, after making the last put-ou...
October 06, 2020 at 02:08
I meant to mention baseball! Baseball distinguishes between acceptable and unacceptable cheating. A runner on second is expected to try to steal the c...
October 06, 2020 at 01:27
There is a legitimate source of tension here. Is playing chess just a matter of following the rules? In some sense, yes. Do the rules alone explain wh...
October 06, 2020 at 01:05
What would Davidson say?
October 05, 2020 at 23:51
Surely there are cases where there is a failure to communicate that we'd be inclined to explain by either a speaker misusing a word, or by an interpre...
October 05, 2020 at 23:50
That's a funny thing. We can easily conceive of Mrs Malaprop having a conversation with her sister in which neither has any idea that they are using s...
October 05, 2020 at 22:48
I'm going to have to work for a while, but quickly: I haven't figured out how to read him. Yes, you've said things like this before. And I've asked be...
October 05, 2020 at 21:39
I think this is the form of the prior theory, and thus the form of the passing theory that actually does the work, according to Davidson. I'm not sure...
October 05, 2020 at 19:39
True story: When I was in college, I drove over to Atlanta one day to go to the Ansley Mall Bookshop (RIP) and brought a stack of books by Wittgenstei...
October 05, 2020 at 18:06
The key term in this passage, the target of Davidson's argument, is linguistic competence. If you have a glance at the cluster of related Wikipedia pa...
October 05, 2020 at 17:26
I understand the theory. But we're talking about malapropisms and Davidson's claim that the intended meaning takes over from the literal meaning. Is m...
October 05, 2020 at 02:40
I'm really not sure what you think you're demonstrating here. Maybe it was a genuine malapropism; maybe it was, as I said above, a sort of pun, and so...
October 05, 2020 at 00:26
Are you not entertained?
October 04, 2020 at 21:39
WeekWell that's a question, isn't it. What sort of thing is a Davidsonian method of interpretation? Davidson is very clear that the literal meaning of...
October 04, 2020 at 21:37
To continue speculating... If you know that your dinner guest is looking at your dining table, and seems to be commenting on it, "latrine" is not one ...
October 04, 2020 at 16:25
If you were compiling a dictionary or a Tarski-style model of the English language, what would you do with the "latrine" sentence? If it's a one-off, ...
October 04, 2020 at 14:20
Out of context, that sounds weirdly fascist. Eh. Probably just me.
October 04, 2020 at 00:59
Good point. Repeatability is crucial. In general, though, I'd say the mountains of science about how children learn their native language should be th...
October 03, 2020 at 23:52
I don't know what you were talking about, but I was talking about just plain imitating, like the babbling of pre-linguistic children.
October 03, 2020 at 23:38
Imitating is just imitating. If no one is judging whether you've correctly copied or how good the copy is, I'm not sure what you're worried about.
October 03, 2020 at 23:18
Imitation alone clearly couldn't establish language. That doesn't even make sense. Big part of learning it, sure.
October 03, 2020 at 22:56