Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Mahaprajnaparamitashastra', 'Begriffsschrift' and 'Introduction to German Philosophy'

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2 ideas

19. Language / C. Assigning Meanings / 4. Compositionality
Frege's account was top-down and decompositional, not bottom-up and compositional [Frege, by Potter]
     Full Idea: Frege's account was top-down, not bottom-up: he aimed to decompose and discern function-argument structure in already existing sentences, not to explain how those sentences acquired their meanings in the first place.
     From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 03 'Func'
     A reaction: This goes with the holistic account of meaning, which leads to Quine's gavagai and Kuhn's obfuscation of science. I recommend compositionality for everthing.
19. Language / F. Communication / 1. Rhetoric
Rhetoric is built into language, so it cannot be stripped from philosophy [Bowie]
     Full Idea: The attempt to rid philosophy of rhetoric falls prey precisely to that fact that what is involved in rhetoric is inherent in what is built into all natural languages by their genesis in the real historical world.
     From: Andrew Bowie (Introduction to German Philosophy [2003], 2 'Hamann')
     A reaction: Rhetoric can range from charming to bullying, and it is the latter which is the problem. The underlying issue is dogma versus dialectic. Some analytic philosophers have a good shot at being non-rhetorical.