Srap Tasmaner

We treat children as potentially competent speakers of our language right from the start, in part because they begin understanding speech earlier and ...

Normal distributions. Watch the video. There's lots more to talk about after you accept that as an example. (At which point I'll beg @"andrewk" to exp...

I just have a resistance to Quine. And the label doesn't matter. I don't think doing philosophy should be like choosing a breakfast cereal. ("I really...

Given this argument: (1) If there is order, there is an orderer. (2) There is order. ? (3) There is an orderer. If I deny (1) or (2) and conclude that...

I lean away from holism. I'm not clear on all the labels, but I think my camp might be molecularism.

No more mysterious than information, or energy, heh heh. Analogies for language always come up short in some way. The sharing of semantic content just...

Exactly. Frege argues that what you happen to have in mind, your ideas, associations, and so on, cannot be the meaning of what you say, because that's...

I hope not? Use is what we expect here, so I'm not sure why that's a problem. To start with expressions: "my" and "car" have senses, but not until you...

Sure. You could also say it's the stuff that logic can ignore, lovely though it may be, just as it ignores the difference between "and" and "but." Unf...

Exactly. It's why an equation can be informative. Remember that Frege came up with the whole sense/reference business to explain why saying "The morni...

Yeah, reference and extension on one side; sense and intension on the other.

Yeah, utterance is actually saying something, in a particular situation. Or at least that's how I use the word, and I think it's at least close to sta...

I'm more or less just defending Fregean orthodoxy these days until I'm convinced to stop. There was a time when I was inclined to say that words never...

Oh sure, I agree it can't be done. And I didn't mean at all to admonish you. I was going to reach for a more or less technical use of "reference," in ...

I'm not clear about this. Are you talking about the impossibility of defining everything, or about some sort of indeterminacy?

I think it's clearest with an example: "2+2" and "4" both refer to the same object, 4, but have different senses. Thus "2+2=4" and "4=4" express diffe...

But Davidson wants to treat language as purely extensional. We Fregeans have sense as well as reference.

Just nailing down the terminology. I would say this: the meaning of a word is the contribution it makes to the meaning of a sentence in which it is us...

"Hello" just is the greeting; it doesn't refer to it.

Some of the issue here may be terminological, because it's perfectly clear that not every sort of word has anything to do with things: the logical con...

Change of vocabulary is no help, as they suffer from almost exactly the same ambiguity. There's what words mean, as used in sentences, and then there'...

I guess I'm okay with it as indicating what's being explained in terms of what. If A is explained in terms of B, then B is prior to A. That could be c...

Hmmm. Doesn't Austin point out that when the judge says, "Guilty," he has done something with words besides mean something? More to the point of the t...

So meaning is separable from language, because we can mean something with a painting, but language is not separable from meaning because all we can do...

You seem to be saying several different things, Banno. If language is a tool we mean things with, then it's conceivable we could mean things with some...

That's the bit I had in mind. If you take the additional step of linking the truth of a statement to a conception of what could count as evidence for ...

Many other species have some ability to communicate, have calls and such that might qualify as symbols. I am coming to believe that the peculiarity of...

You really need to get the basics squared away, man. 1, 2, and 3 do not have truth-values. They cannot be premises.

The expected ordering of my thoughts is not coming along, so I'll just indicate a few of the things on my mind. It seems to me there is a broad sense ...

Thanks, John! This is an excellent response. You tie together several things nicely here. I have loads to say about this, but I want to try to set my ...

This struck me as an interesting position to take. I suppose I think of an intuition, philosophically, as a belief for which no reason comes readily t...

There's a remark of Frank Ramsey's I often think of -- I think he was talking about aesthetics, but it seems to apply more broadly. He said too many a...

I think somehow the "unity of science" hasn't been explicitly addressed in this thread. I'd guess you have your doubts, but If like to see arguments f...

One way to start is to say that Harry Potter is a person we pretend exists, or, better, that we pretend there's a world the novels describe in which H...

Well, truth is truth. All true statements are (truth-functionally) equivalent. Btw, I hope "1", "2", and "3" are statements, not the numbers 1, 2, and...

In natural deduction, if that's what we're doing here, the introduction rule for ? is roughly: ________ (a) P . . . Q ________ P?Q (a) That is, if ass...

I don't think so. They're defined relative to something, but that something is not so much the context of their utterance, but how the sequence is def...

Do you perceive order here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xUBhhM4vbM

Here's an example to clarify my view of the context principle. I mentioned the logical constants several times. Let's suppose someone asks me, "What d...

Now that I think of it, maybe "rhetoric" is the traditional term for my pragmatics level. It's acquired some crust I wouldn't want to disturb though.

It's not really worded well there. What I meant was there are several choices for where to go after sentences, and I gave some examples. I don't know ...

There's something to this, so long as, as you follow the chain up from phoneme to morpheme to word to sentence, you manage to mark the boundaries. (Th...

Like Captain America, I'm loyal to nothing but the dream.

That's really lovely.

If words are the smallest units of meaning, then letters are meaningless. If sentences are the smallest unit of meaning, then words are meaningless. B...

You either analyse sentences into components or you don't. If only sentences have meaning, then their components are meaningless. You can't have your ...

The past tense thing was just meant as a proxy for all the stuff we learn to talk about where we cannot directly check that the relevant truth conditi...

Fafmer's summary is very good. These things can be confusing because philosophy addresses what is the case, how we know what is the case, and how we t...

Among the points you should consider: (1) is not, in the modern era, a reasonable premise. We now know many, many ways in which what appears as order ...

It is the argument from design. I just wondered if you were familiar with any previous discussion of the argument, or if you're starting from scratch ...