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3 ideas
6093 | The names in a logically perfect language would be private, and could not be shared [Russell] |
Full Idea: A logically perfect language, if it could be constructed, would be, as regards its vocabulary, very largely private to one speaker; that is, all the names in it would be private to that speaker and could not enter into the language of another speaker. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §II) | |
A reaction: Wittgenstein obviously thought there was something not quite right about this… See Idea 4147, for example. I presume Russell's thought is that you would have no means of explaining the 'meanings' of the names in the language. |
1631 | You could know the complete behavioural conditions for a foreign language, and still not know their beliefs [Quine] |
Full Idea: We could know the necessary and sufficient stimulatory conditions of every possible act of utterance, in a foreign language, and still not know how to determine what objects the speakers of that language believe in. | |
From: Willard Quine (Speaking of Objects [1960], pt.III,p.11) | |
A reaction: I just don't believe this, because the same scepticism then creeps into discussions of native speakers of a single language, and all communcation is blighted - which is nonsense. |
1632 | Translation of our remote past or language could be as problematic as alien languages [Quine] |
Full Idea: Translation of our remote past or future discourse into the terms we now know could be about as tenuous and arbitrary a projection as translation of a heathen language was seen to be. | |
From: Willard Quine (Speaking of Objects [1960], pt.V,p.25) | |
A reaction: Is he seriously saying that we can't understand Shakespeare, because holism implies that we would have to be Elizabethans? So scholarship is in vain? Is yesterday the 'past'? |