display all the ideas for this combination of texts
8 ideas
| 1619 | There is an attempt to give a verificationist account of meaning, without the error of reducing everything to sensations [Dennett on Quine] |
| Full Idea: This essay offered a verificationist account of language without the logical positivist error of supposing that verification could be reduced to a mere sequence of sense-experiences. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Daniel C. Dennett - works | |
| A reaction: This is because of Quine's holistic view of theory, so that sentences are not tested individually, where sense-data might be needed as support, but as whole teams which need to be simple, coherent etc. |
| 1617 | The word 'meaning' is only useful when talking about significance or about synonymy [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The useful ways in which ordinary people talk about meanings boil down to two: the having of meanings, which is significance, and sameness of meaning, or synonymy. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.11) | |
| A reaction: If the Fregean criterion for precise existence is participation in an identity relation, then synonymy does indeed pinpoint what we mean by 'meaning. |
| 1609 | I do not believe there is some abstract entity called a 'meaning' which we can 'have' [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers construe meaningfulness as the having (in some sense of 'having') of some abstract entity which he calls a meaning, whereas I do not. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.11) | |
| A reaction: To call a meaning an 'entity' is to put a spin on it that makes it very implausible. Introspection shows us a gap between grasping a word and grasping its meaning. |
| 19159 | Quine relates predicates to their objects, by being 'true of' them [Quine, by Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Quine relates predicates to the things of which they can be predicated ...and hence predicates are 'true of' each and every thing of which the predicate can be truly predicated. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Donald Davidson - Truth and Predication 5 | |
| A reaction: Davidson comments that the virtue of Quine's view is negative, in avoiding a regress in the explanation of predication. I'm not sure about true 'of' as an extra sort of truth, but I like dropping predicates from ontology, and sticking to truths. |
| 14110 | Proposition contain entities indicated by words, rather than the words themselves [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A proposition, unless it happens to be linguistic, does not itself contain words: it contains the entities indicated by words. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Principles of Mathematics [1903], §051) | |
| A reaction: Russell says in his Preface that he took over this view of propositions from G.E. Moore. They are now known as 'Russellian' propositions, which are mainly distinguished by not being mental event, but by being complexes out in the world. |
| 19164 | If propositions are facts, then false and true propositions are indistinguishable [Davidson on Russell] |
| Full Idea: Russell often treated propositions as facts, but discovered that correspondence then became useless for explaining truth, since every meaningful expression, true or false, expresses a proposition. | |
| From: comment on Bertrand Russell (The Principles of Mathematics [1903]) by Donald Davidson - Truth and Predication 6 | |
| A reaction: So 'pigs fly' would have to mean pigs actually flying (which they don't). They might correspond to possible situations, but only if pigs might fly. What do you make of 'circles are square'? Russell had many a sleepless night over that. |
| 14111 | A proposition is a unity, and analysis destroys it [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A proposition is essentially a unity, and when analysis has destroyed the unity, no enumeration of constituents will restore the proposition. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Principles of Mathematics [1903], §054) | |
| A reaction: The question of the 'unity of the proposition' led to a prolonged debate. |
| 19157 | Russell said the proposition must explain its own unity - or else objective truth is impossible [Russell, by Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Moore and Russell reacted strongly against the idea that the unity of the proposition depended on human acts of judgement. ...Russell decided that unless the unity is explained in terms of the proposition itself, there can be no objective truth. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Principles of Mathematics [1903], p.42) by Donald Davidson - Truth and Predication 5 | |
| A reaction: Put like this, the Russellian view strikes me as false. Effectively he is saying that a unified proposition is the same as a fact. I take a proposition to be a brain event, best labelled by Frege as a 'thought'. Thoughts may not even have parts. |