7 ideas
| 21960 | Ordinary language is the beginning of philosophy, but there is much more to it [Austin,JL] |
| Full Idea: Ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word. | |
| From: J.L. Austin (A Plea for Excuses [1956], p.185), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics Intro | |
| A reaction: To claim anything more would be absurd. The point is that this remark comes from the high priest of ordinary language philosophy. |
| 10835 | True sentences says the appropriate descriptive thing on the appropriate demonstrative occasion [Austin,JL] |
| Full Idea: A sentence is said to be true when the historic state of affairs to which it is correlated by the demonstrative conventions (the one to which it 'refers') is of a type with which the sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive conventions. | |
| From: J.L. Austin (Truth [1950], §3) | |
| A reaction: This is correspondence by convention rather than correspondence by mapping. Personally I prefer some sort of mapping account, despite all the difficulty and vagueness of specifying what maps onto what. |
| 10836 | Correspondence theorists shouldn't think that a country has just one accurate map [Austin,JL] |
| Full Idea: Correspondence theorists too often talk as one would who held that every map is either accurate or inaccurate; that every country can have but one accurate map. | |
| From: J.L. Austin (Truth [1950], n 24) | |
| A reaction: A well-made point, for those who intuitively hang on to correspondence as not only good common sense, but also some sort of salvation for a realist view of the world which might give us certainty in epistemology. |
| 21598 | Austin revealed many meanings for 'vague': rough, ambiguous, general, incomplete... [Austin,JL, by Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Austin's account brought out the variety of features covered by 'vague' in different contexts: roughness, ambiguity, imprecision, lack of detail, generality, inaccuracy, incompleteness. Even 'vague' is vague. | |
| From: report of J.L. Austin (Sense and Sensibilia [1962], p.125-8) by Timothy Williamson - Vagueness 3.1 | |
| A reaction: Some of these sound the same. Maybe Austin distinguishes them. |
| 16861 | A false theory could hardly rival the explanatory power of natural selection [Darwin] |
| Full Idea: It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. | |
| From: Charles Darwin (The Origin of the Species [1859], p.476), quoted by Peter Lipton - Inference to the Best Explanation (2nd) 11 'The scientific' | |
| A reaction: More needs to be said, since the whims of God could explain absolutely everything (in a manner that would be somehow less that fully satisfying to the enquiring intellect). |
| 16236 | Maybe our persistence conditions concern bodies, rather than persons [Olson, by Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Instead of attributing person-like persistence conditions to bodies, we could attribute body-like persistence conditions to persons, …so human persons are identical with human organisms. | |
| From: report of Eric T. Olson (The Human Animal [1997]) by Katherine Hawley - How Things Persist 5.10 | |
| A reaction: In the case of pre-birth and advanced senility, Olson thinks we could have the body without the person, so person is a 'phase sortal' of bodies. A good theory, which seems to answer a lot of questions. 'Person' may be an abstraction. |
| 6669 | For 'animalism', I exist before I became a person, and can continue after it, so I am not a person [Olson, by Lowe] |
| Full Idea: According to 'animalism', I existed before I was a person and I may well go one existing for some time after I cease to be a person; hence, I am not essentially a person, but a human organism. | |
| From: report of Eric T. Olson (The Human Animal [1997]) by E.J. Lowe - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind Ch.10 | |
| A reaction: There is a very real sense in which an extremely senile person has 'ceased to exist' (e.g. as the person I used to love). On the whole, though, I think that Olson is right, and yet 'person' is an important concept. Neither concept is all-or-nothing. |