more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
The quest of a simplest, clearest overall pattern of canonical notation is not to be distinguished from a quest of ultimate categories, a limning of the most general traits of reality.
Clarification
'Limning' means sketching
Gist of Idea
The quest for ultimate categories is the quest for a simple clear pattern of notation
Source
Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §33)
Book Ref
Quine,Willard: 'Word and Object' [MIT 1969], p.161
A Reaction
I won't disagree, as long as we recognise that reality calls the shots, not the notation, and that even animals must have some sort of system of categories, achieved without 'notation'.
| 16116 | Aristotle derived categories as answers to basic questions about nature, size, quality, location etc. [Aristotle, by Gill,ML] |
| 16655 | Different genera are delimited by modes of predication, which rest on modes of being [Aquinas] |
| 12989 | Our true divisions of nature match reality, but are probably incomplete [Leibniz] |
| 21754 | Our concepts and categories disclose the world, because we are part of the world [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| 21755 | For Hegel, categories shift their form in the course of history [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| 16462 | The quest for ultimate categories is the quest for a simple clear pattern of notation [Quine] |
| 16185 | Causality indicates which properties are real [Cartwright,N] |
| 18512 | Ontology aims to give the fundamental categories of being [Heil] |
| 13739 | Maybe categories are just the different ways that things depend on basic substances [Schaffer,J] |
| 17728 | The concepts we have to use for categorising are ones which map the real world well [Jenkins] |
| 18921 | Individuals are arranged in inclusion categories that match our semantics [Engelbretsen] |