display all the ideas for this combination of texts
7 ideas
| 15667 | To understand a statement is to know what would make it acceptable [Habermas] |
| Full Idea: We understand the meaning of a speech act when we know what would make it acceptable. | |
| From: Jürgen Habermas (The Theory of Communicative Action [1981], I:297), quoted by James Gordon Finlayson - Habermas Ch.3:37 | |
| A reaction: Finlayson glosses this as requiring the reasons which would justify the speech act. |
| 15668 | Meaning is not fixed by a relation to the external world, but a relation to other speakers [Habermas, by Finlayson] |
| Full Idea: On Habermas's view, meanings are not determined by the speaker's relation to the external world, but by his relation to his interlocutors; meaning is essentially intersubjective. | |
| From: report of Jürgen Habermas (The Theory of Communicative Action [1981]) by James Gordon Finlayson - Habermas Ch.3:38 | |
| A reaction: This view is not the same as Grice's, but it is clearly much closer to Grice than to (say) the Frege/Davidson emphasis on truth-conditions. I'm not sure if I would know how to begin arbitrating between the two views! |
| 2744 | Verificationism (the 'verification principle') is an earlier form of anti-realism [Dancy,J] |
| Full Idea: Verificationism (the 'verification principle') is an earlier form of anti-realism. | |
| From: Jonathan Dancy (Intro to Contemporary Epistemology [1985], 1.note) | |
| A reaction: If the one true God announced that there is a real world out there, I might take that as a verification of the fact. |
| 2760 | Logical positivism implies foundationalism, by dividing weak from strong verifications [Dancy,J] |
| Full Idea: The foundationalist claim that there are inferential and non-inferential justifications is mirrored by the claim of logical empiricism (the verification principle) that all significant statements are either strongly or weakly verifiable. | |
| From: Jonathan Dancy (Intro to Contemporary Epistemology [1985], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: I take it to be characteristic of both to divide the support for something into two types, one of which is basic, and the other built up on the basics. The first step is to decide what is basic. |
| 2761 | If the meanings of sentences depend on other sentences, how did we learn language? [Dancy,J] |
| Full Idea: It is clearly possible to learn a language from scratch, because we have all done it, but if holism is true and the meaning of each sentence depends on the meanings of others, how did we do it? | |
| From: Jonathan Dancy (Intro to Contemporary Epistemology [1985], 7.2) | |
| A reaction: The question of 'how did it ever get started?' actually seems to block almost every explanation of everything that ever happens. How do I begin to move my hand? |
| 2763 | There is an indeterminacy in juggling apparent meanings against probable beliefs [Dancy,J] |
| Full Idea: Indeterminacy stems from an interplay between belief and meaning, as with a man who tells you he keeps two rhinoceri in the fridge and squeezes the juice of one for a drink each morning. | |
| From: Jonathan Dancy (Intro to Contemporary Epistemology [1985], 7.4) | |
| A reaction: I don't understand why an 'interplay' is called an 'indeterminacy'. Typical philosophers. Close examination will usually show whether the change is just in belief, or just in meaning, or in both. |
| 2762 | Charity makes native beliefs largely true, and Humanity makes them similar to ours [Dancy,J] |
| Full Idea: One criterion for successful translation is that it show native beliefs to be largely true (Principle of Charity), and another is that it imputes to natives beliefs we can make sense of them having (Principle of Humanity). | |
| From: Jonathan Dancy (Intro to Contemporary Epistemology [1985], 7.4) | |
| A reaction: The trouble with such guidelines is that they always have to be 'all things being equal'. Sometimes the natives are really idiotic, and sometimes their attitudes seem quite inhuman. |