display all the ideas for this combination of texts
7 ideas
| 2439 | Semantic externalism says the concept 'elm' needs no further beliefs or inferences [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is the essence of semantic externalism that there is nothing that you have to believe, there are no inferences that you have to accept, to have the concept 'elm'. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: [REMINDER: broad content is filed in 18.C.7, under 'Thought' rather than under language. That is because I am a philospher of thought, rather than of language. |
| 2457 | If meaning is information, that establishes the causal link between the state of the world and our beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is the causal connection between the state of the world and the contents of beliefs that the reduction of meaning to information is designed to insure. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I'm not clear why characterising the contents of a belief in terms of its information has to amount to a 'reduction'. A cup of tea isn't reduced to tea. Connections imply duality. |
| 23482 | The 'form' of the picture is its possible combinations [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: The form of depiction is the possibility that the things are combined with one another as are the elements of the picture. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 2.151) | |
| A reaction: This is why 'model' (or even 'simulation'?) is a better term than 'picture' for his proposal. Pictures are fixed, but models can be adjusted. |
| 8172 | To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 4.024) | |
| A reaction: This established the Frege truth-conditions theory of meaning, which was expanded by Davidson, and then possible worlds semantics. You can't assess truth without knowing meaning. Dummett says the two go together. |
| 2451 | To know the content of a thought is to know what would make it true [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If you know the content of a thought, you thereby know what would make the thought true. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: The truthmaker might by physically impossible, and careful thought might show it to be contradictory - but that wouldn't destroy the meaning. |
| 7086 | Good philosophy asserts science, and demonstrates the meaninglessness of metaphysics [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: The correct method in philosophy would be to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science, and whenever someone wanted to say something metaphysical, to show that he had failed to give a meaning to signs in his propositions. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 6.53) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the germ of logical positivism, picked up by the Vienna Circle, and passed on the Ayer and co. How, though, do you 'show' that a sign is meaningless? Very abstract ideas are too far away from experience to be analysed that way. |
| 2433 | For holists no two thoughts are ever quite the same, which destroys faith in meaning [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If what you are thinking depends on all of what you believe, then nobody ever thinks the same thing twice. …That is why so many semantic holists (Quine, Putnam, Rorty, Churchland, probably Wittgenstein) end up being semantic eliminativists. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2b) | |
| A reaction: If linguistic holism is nonsense, this is easily settled. What I say about breakfast is not changed by reading some Gibbon yesterday. |