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2 ideas
| 19050 | Holism in language blurs empirical synthetic and empty analytic sentences [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Holism blurs the supposed contrast beween the synthetic sentence, with its empirical content, and the analytic sentence, with its null content. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Five Milestones of Empiricism [1975], p.71) | |
| A reaction: This spells out nicely that Quine's rejection of the distinction is completely tied to his holistic view of language. The obvious phenomenon of compositionality (building sentence meaning in steps) counts against holism. |
| 11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that affirming not-A is more complex than affirming the atomic sentence A itself, with the latter determining its sense. But we could learn 'not' directly, by learning at once how to either affirm A or reject A. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], IV) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems fairly anti-Fregean in spirit, because it looks at the psychology of how we learn 'not' as a way of clarifying what we mean by it, rather than just looking at its logical behaviour (and thus giving it a secondary role). |