Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Explaining the A Priori', 'MacIntyre versus the Enlightenment' and 'Aspects of the Theory of Syntax'

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3 ideas

13. Knowledge Criteria / E. Relativism / 4. Cultural relativism
You would have to be very morally lazy to ignore criticisms of your own culture [Nagel]
     Full Idea: One would have to be very morally lazy to be unconcerned with the possibility that the prevailing morality of one's culture had something fundamentally wrong with it.
     From: Thomas Nagel (MacIntyre versus the Enlightenment [1988], 203)
18. Thought / D. Concepts / 2. Origin of Concepts / a. Origin of concepts
The concept 'red' is tied to what actually individuates red things [Peacocke]
     Full Idea: The possession conditions for the concept 'red' of the colour red are tied to those very conditions which individuate the colour red.
     From: Christopher Peacocke (Explaining the A Priori [2000], p.267), quoted by Carrie Jenkins - Grounding Concepts 2.5
     A reaction: Jenkins reports that he therefore argues that we can learn something about the word 'red' from thinking about the concept 'red', which is his new theory of the a priori. I find 'possession conditions' and 'individuation' to be very woolly concepts.
19. Language / C. Assigning Meanings / 1. Syntax
Chomsky's 'interpretative semantics' says syntax comes first, and is then interpreted [Chomsky, by Magidor]
     Full Idea: Chomsky and his followers (whose position was labelled 'interpretative semantics') claimed that a sentence is first assigned a syntactic structure by an autonomous syntactic module, and this structure is then provided as input for semantic interpretation.
     From: report of Noam Chomsky (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax [1965]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 1.3
     A reaction: This certainly doesn't fit the experience of introspecting speech, but then I suppose good pianists focus entirely on the music, and overlook the finger movements which have obvious priority. But I don't know the syntax of the sentence when I begin it.