display all the ideas for this combination of texts
8 ideas
12590 | Take meaning to be use in calculation with concepts, rather than in communication [Harman] |
Full Idea: (Nonsolipsistic) conceptual role semantics is a version of the theory that meaning is use, where the basic use is taken to be in calculation, not in communication, and where concepts are treated as symbols in a 'language of thought'. | |
From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.1) | |
A reaction: The idea seems to be to connect the highly social Wittgensteinian view of language with the reductive physicalist account of how brains generate concepts. Interesting, thought I never like meaning-as-use. |
12593 | The use theory attaches meanings to words, not to sentences [Harman] |
Full Idea: A use theory of meaning has to suppose it is words and ways of putting words together that have meaning because of their uses, not sentences. | |
From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.3) | |
A reaction: He says that most sentences are unique, so cannot have a standard use. Words do a particular job over and over again. How do you distinguish the quirky use of a word from its standard use? |
12588 | Meaning from use of thoughts, constructed from concepts, which have a role relating to reality [Harman] |
Full Idea: Conceptual role semantics involves meanings of expressions determined by used contents of concepts and thoughts, contents constructed from concepts, concepts determined by functional role, which involves relations to things in the world. | |
From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1) | |
A reaction: This essay is the locus classicus for conceptual-role semantics. Any attempt to say what something IS by giving an account of its function always feels wrong to me. |
12589 | Some regard conceptual role semantics as an entirely internal matter [Harman] |
Full Idea: I call my conceptual role semantics 'non-solipsistic' to contrast it with that of authors (Field, Fodor, Loar) who think of conceptual role solipsistically as a completely internal matter. | |
From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1) | |
A reaction: Evidently Harman is influenced by Putnam's Twin Earth, and that meanings ain't in the head, so that the conceptual role has to be extended out into the world to get a good account. I prefer extending into the language community, rather into reality. |
12600 | The content of thought is relations, between mental states, things in the world, and contexts [Harman] |
Full Idea: In (nonsolipsistic) conceptual role semantics the content of thought is not in an 'intrinsic nature', but is rather a matter of how mental states are related to each other, to things in the external world, and to things in a context understood as normal. | |
From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.3.3) | |
A reaction: This is part of Harman's functional view of consciousness, which I find rather dubious. If things only have identity because of some place in a flow diagram, we must ask why that thing has that place in that diagram. |
3324 | Plato's whole philosophy may be based on being duped by reification - a figure of speech [Benardete,JA on Plato] |
Full Idea: Plato is liable to the charge of having been duped by a figure of speech, albeit the most profound of all, the trope of reification. | |
From: comment on Plato (works [c.375 BCE]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.12 | |
A reaction: That might be a plausible account if his view was ridiculous, but given how many powerful friends Plato has, especially in the philosophy of mathematics, we should assume he was cleverer than that. |
12594 | If one proposition negates the other, which is the negative one? [Harman] |
Full Idea: A relation of negation might hold between two beliefs without there being anything that determines which belief is the negative one. | |
From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.4) | |
A reaction: [He attributes this thought to Brian Loar] This seems to give us a reason why we need a semantics for a logic, and not just a structure of inferences and proofs. |
12591 | Mastery of a language requires thinking, and not just communication [Harman] |
Full Idea: If one cannot think in a language, one has not yet mastered it. A symbol system used only for communication, like Morse code, is not a language. | |
From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.2) | |
A reaction: This invites the question of someone who has mastered thinking, but has no idea how to communicate. No doubt we might construct a machine with something like that ability. I think it might support Harman's claim. |