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12739
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If we are dreaming, it is sufficient that the events are coherent, and obey laws [Leibniz]
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Full Idea:
Skeptics may doubt the truth of things, and if it pleases them to call the things that occur to us dreams, it suffices for these dreams to be in agreement with each other, and to obey certain laws.
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From:
Gottfried Leibniz (On Perceptions [1680], A6.4.1398), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 7
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A reaction:
Leibniz flirted a great deal with phenomenalism throughout the middle of his career, as charted by Garber. Descartes made similar points. It is really only Berkeley who took this idea seriously.
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18006
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Chomsky's 'interpretative semantics' says syntax comes first, and is then interpreted [Chomsky, by Magidor]
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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.
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From:
report of Noam Chomsky (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax [1965]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 1.3
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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.
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