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3 ideas
22280 | 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. |
17701 | Possible worlds semantics has a nice compositional account of modal statements [Mares] |
Full Idea: Possible worlds semantics is appealing because it gives a compositional analysis of the truth conditions of statements about necessity and possibility. | |
From: Edwin D. Mares (A Priori [2011], 02.2) | |
A reaction: Not sure I get this. Is the meaning composed by the gradual addition of worlds? If not, how is meaning composed in the normal way, from component words and phrases? |
17702 | Unstructured propositions are sets of possible worlds; structured ones have components [Mares] |
Full Idea: An unstructured proposition is a set of possible worlds. ....Structured propositions contain entities that correspond to various parts of the sentences or thoughts that express them. | |
From: Edwin D. Mares (A Priori [2011], 02.3) | |
A reaction: I am definitely in favour of structured propositions. It strikes me as so obvious as to be not worth discussion - so I am obviously missing something here. Mares says structured propositions are 'more convenient'. |