Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Mechanisms', 'De rebus naturalibus' and 'The Elm and the Expert'

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4 ideas

19. Language / A. Nature of Meaning / 1. Meaning
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.
19. Language / A. Nature of Meaning / 4. Meaning as Truth-Conditions
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.
19. Language / A. Nature of Meaning / 7. Meaning Holism / b. Language holism
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.