more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
What sortal concepts we can bring to bear upon experience determines what we can find there.
Gist of Idea
Our sortal concepts fix what we find in experience
Source
David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 5.6)
Book Ref
Wiggins,David: 'Sameness and Substance' [Blackwell 1980], p.141
A Reaction
Wiggins would wince at being classed among linguistic relativists of the Sapir-Whorf type, but that's where I'm putting this idea. Wiggins is a realist, who knows there are things out there our concepts miss. He compares it to a fishing net. He's wrong.
| 3916 | Hopi consistently prefers verbs and events to nouns and things [Whorf] |
| 3914 | Language arranges sensory experience to form a world-order [Whorf] |
| 1634 | Two things are relative - the background theory, and translating the object theory into the background theory [Quine] |
| 4573 | If it is claimed that language correlates with culture, we must be able to identify the two independently [Cooper,DE] |
| 4575 | A person's language doesn't prove their concepts, but how are concepts deduced apart from language? [Cooper,DE] |
| 16525 | Our sortal concepts fix what we find in experience [Wiggins] |
| 8088 | People still say the Hopi have no time concepts, despite Whorf's later denial [Devlin] |