Combining Texts

Ideas for 'works', 'Negative Dialectics' and 'From Metaphysics to Ethics'

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3 ideas

19. Language / C. Assigning Meanings / 3. Predicates
Successful predication supervenes on nature [Jackson]
     Full Idea: Successful predication supervenes on nature.
     From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.5)
     A reaction: A nice slogan, but it is in danger of being a tautology. If I say x and y 'are my favourites/are interesting', is that 'successful' predication? Is 'Juliet is the sun' unsuccessful?
19. Language / C. Assigning Meanings / 6. Truth-Conditions Semantics
I can understand "He has a beard", without identifying 'he', and hence the truth conditions [Jackson]
     Full Idea: If I hear someone say "He has a beard", and I don't know whether it is Jackson, Jones, or someone else, I don't know which proposition is being expressed in the sense of not knowing the conditions under which what is said is true.
     From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.3)
     A reaction: This is the neatest and simplest problem I have encountered for Davidson's truth-conditions account of meaning. However, we probably just say that we understand the sense but not the reference. The strict-and-literal but not contextual meaning.
19. Language / F. Communication / 1. Rhetoric
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.