51 ideas
| 21887 | Derrida focuses on other philosophers, rather than on science [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: We should focus on other philosophers, and not on science. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 21888 | Philosophy is just a linguistic display [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is entirely linguistic, and is a display. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 21896 | Philosophy aims to build foundations for thought [Derrida, by May] |
| Full Idea: Derrida points out that the project of philosophy consists largely in attempting to build foundations for thought. | |
| From: report of Jacques Derrida (works [1990]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 1.04 | |
| A reaction: You would first need to be convinced that there could be such a thing as foundations for thinking. Derrida thinks the project is hopeless. I think of it more as building an ideal framework for thought. |
| 21893 | Philosophy is necessarily metaphorical, and its writing is aesthetic [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: All of philosophy is necessarily metaphorical, and hence aesthetic. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 6267 | A culture needs to admit that knowledge is more extensive than just 'science' [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The acknowledgement that the sphere of knowledge is wider than the sphere of 'science' seems to me to be a cultural necessity if we are to arrive at a sane and human view of ourselves or of science. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: A very nice remark, with which I intuitively agree, but then you are left with the problem of explaining how something can qualify as knowledge when it can't pass the stringent tests of science. How wide to we spread, and why? |
| 6272 | 'True' and 'refers' cannot be made scientically precise, but are fundamental to science [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Some non-scientific knowledge is presupposed by science; for example, I have been arguing that 'refers' and 'true' cannot be made scientifically precise; yet truth is a fundamental term in logic - a precise science. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: We might ask whether we 'know' what 'true' and 'refers' mean, as opposed to being able to use them. If their usage doesn't count as knowledge, then we could still end up with all actual knowledge being somehow 'scientific'. |
| 21892 | Interpretations can be interpreted, so there is no original 'meaning' available [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Because interpretations of texts can be interpreted, they can therefore have no 'original meaning'. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 20925 | Hermeneutics blunts truth, by conforming it to the interpreter [Derrida, by Zimmermann,J] |
| Full Idea: Derrida worried that hermeneutics blunts the disruptive power of truth by forcing it conform to the interpreter's mental horizon. | |
| From: report of Jacques Derrida (works [1990]) by Jens Zimmermann - Hermeneutics: a very short introduction 3 'The heart' | |
| A reaction: Good heavens - I agree with Derrida. Very French, though, to see the value of truth in its disruptiveness. I tend to find the truth reassuring, but then I'm English. |
| 20934 | Hermeneutics is hostile, trying to overcome the other person's difference [Derrida, by Zimmermann,J] |
| Full Idea: Derrida described the hermeneutic impulse to understand another as a form of violence that seeks to overcome the other's particularity and unique difference. | |
| From: report of Jacques Derrida (works [1990]) by Jens Zimmermann - Hermeneutics: a very short introduction App 'Derrida' | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about 'violence', but Derrida was on to somethng here. The 'hermeneutic circle' sounds like a creepy process of absorption, where the original writer disappears in a whirlpool of interpretation. |
| 21895 | Structuralism destroys awareness of dynamic meaning [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Structuralism destroys awareness of dynamic meaning. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 21934 | The idea of being as persistent presence, and meaning as conscious intelligibility, are self-destructive [Derrida, by Glendinning] |
| Full Idea: The tradition of conceiving being in terms of persisting presence, and meaning in terms of pure intelligibility or logos potentially present to the mind, finds itself dismantled by resources internal to its own construction. | |
| From: report of Jacques Derrida (works [1990]) by Simon Glendinning - Derrida: A Very Short Introduction 6 | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Glendinning says this is the basic meaning of de-construction. My personal reading of this is that Aristotle is right, and grand talk of Being is hopeless, so we should just aim to understand objects. I also believe in propositions. |
| 21883 | Sincerity can't be verified, so fiction infuses speech, and hence reality also [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Sincerity can never be verified, so fiction infuses all speech, which means that reality is also fictional. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 21882 | Sentences are contradictory, as they have opposite meanings in some contexts [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Sentences are implicitly contradictory, because they can be used differently in different contexts (most obviously in 'I am ill'). | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 21881 | We aim to explore the limits of expression (as in Mallarmé's poetry) [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: The aim is to explore the limits of expression (which is what makes the poetry of Mallarmé so important). | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 6276 | 'The rug is green' might be warrantedly assertible even though the rug is not green [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: 'The rug is green' might be warrantedly assertible even though the rug is not green. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: The word 'warranted' seems to be ambiguous in modern philosophy. See Idea 6150. There seem to be internalist and externalist versions. It seems clear to say that a belief could be well-justified and yet false. |
| 4756 | Derrida says that all truth-talk is merely metaphor [Derrida, by Engel] |
| Full Idea: Derrida's view is that every discourse is metaphorical, and there is no difference between truth-talk and metaphor. | |
| From: report of Jacques Derrida (works [1990]) by Pascal Engel - Truth §2.5 | |
| A reaction: Right. Note that this is a Frenchman's summary. How would one define metaphor, without mentioning that it is parasitic on truth? Certainly some language tries to be metaphor, and other language tries not to be. |
| 21877 | True thoughts are inaccessible, in the subconscious, prior to speech or writing [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: 'True' thoughts are inaccessible, buried in the subconscious, long before they get to speech or writing. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction | |
| A reaction: [My reading of some Derrida produced no quotations. I've read two commentaries, which were obscure. The Derrida ideas in this db are my simplistic tertiary summaries. Experts can chuckle over my failure] |
| 6266 | We need the correspondence theory of truth to understand language and science [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: A correspondence theory of truth is needed to understand how language works, and how science works. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Putnam retreated from this position to a more pragmatic one later on, but all my sympathies are with the present view, despite being repeatedly told by modern philosophers that I am wrong. See McGinn (Idea 6085) and Searle (Idea 3508). |
| 6277 | Correspondence between concepts and unconceptualised reality is impossible [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The great nineteenth century argument against the correspondence theory of truth was that one cannot think of truth as correspondence to facts (or 'reality') because one would need to compare concepts directly with unconceptualised reality. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the criticism was offered by idealists, who preferred a coherence theory. The defence is to say that there is a confusion here between a concept and the contents of a concept. The contents of a concept are designed to be facts. |
| 6264 | In Tarski's definition, you understand 'true' if you accept the notions of the object language [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Anyone who accepts the notions of whatever object language is in question - and this can be chosen arbitrarily - can also understand 'true' as defined by Tarski for that object language. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Thus if we say "'snow is white' is true iff snow is white", then if you 'accept the notion' that snow is white in English, you understand what 'true' means. This seems to leave you with the meaning of 'snow is white' being its truth conditions. |
| 6265 | Tarski has given a correct account of the formal logic of 'true', but there is more to the concept [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: What Tarski has done is to give us a perfectly correct account of the formal logic of the concept 'true', but the formal logic of the concept is not all there is to the notion of truth. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I find this refreshing. A lot of modern philosophers seem to think that truth is no longer an interesting philosophical topic, because deflationary accounts have sidelined it, but I take the concept to be at the heart of metaphysics. |
| 6269 | Only Tarski has found a way to define 'true' [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: There is only one way anyone knows how to define 'true' and that is Tarski's way. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec II.5) | |
| A reaction: However, Davidson wrote a paper called 'On the Folly of Trying to Define Truth', which seems to reject even Tarski. Also bear in mind Putnam's earlier remark (Idea 6265) that there is more to truth than Tarski's definition. Just take 'true' as primitive. |
| 21889 | 'I' is the perfect name, because it denotes without description [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: 'I' is the perfect name, because it denotes without description. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 21878 | Names have a subjective aspect, especially the role of our own name [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: We can give a subjective account of names, by considering our own name. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 21879 | Even Kripke can't explain names; the word is the thing, and the thing is the word [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Even Kripke can't explain names, because the word is the thing, and also the thing is the word. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 6280 | Realism is a theory, which explains the convergence of science and the success of language [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Realism is an empirical theory; it explains the convergence of scientific theories, where earlier theories are often limiting cases of later theories (which is why theoretical terms preserve their reference); and it explains the success of language. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: I agree. Personally, I think of Plato's Theory of Forms and all religions as empirical theories. The response from anti-realists is generally to undermine confidence in the evidence which these 'empirical theories' are said to explain. |
| 6284 | If a tautology is immune from revision, why would that make it true? [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: If we held, say, 'All unmarried men are unmarried' as absolutely immune from revision, why would this make it true? | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: A very nice question. Like most American philosophers, Putnam accepts Quine's attack on the unrevisability of analytic truths. His point here is that defenders of analytic truths are probably desperate to preserve basic truths, but it won't work. |
| 6273 | Knowledge depends on believing others, which must be innate, as inferences are not strong enough [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Our ability to picture how people are likely to respond may well be innate; indeed, our disposition to believe what other people tell us (which is fundamental to knowledge) could hardly be an inference, as that isn’t good enough for knowledge. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: An interesting claim. There could be an intermediate situation, which is a hard-wired non-conscious inference. When dismantled, the 'innate' brain circuits for assessing testimony could turn out to work on logic and evidence. |
| 6274 | Empathy may not give knowledge, but it can give plausibility or right opinion [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Empathy with others may give less than 'Knowledge', but it gives more than mere logical or physical possibility; it gives plausibility, or (to revive Platonic terminology) it provides 'right opinion'. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: See Ideas 174 and 2140 for Plato. Putnam is exploring areas of knowledge outside the limits of strict science. Behind this claim seems to lie the Principle of Charity (3971), but a gang of systematic liars (e.g. evil students) would be a problem case. |
| 17084 | You can't decide which explanations are good if you don't attend to the interest-relative aspects [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Explanation is an interest-relative notion …explanation has to be partly a pragmatic concept. To regard the 'pragmatics' of explanation as no part of the concept is to abdicate the job of figuring out what makes an explanation good. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], p. 41-2), quoted by David-Hillel Ruben - Explaining Explanation Ch 1 | |
| A reaction: I suppose this is just obvious, depending on how far you want to take the 'interest-relative' bit. If a fool is fobbed off with a trivial explanation, there must be some non-relative criterion for assessing that. |
| 21890 | Heidegger showed that passing time is the key to consciousness [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Heidegger showed us the importance of transient time for consciousness. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 21880 | 'Tacit theory' controls our thinking (which is why Freud is important) [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: All thought is controlled by tacit theory (which is why Freud is so important). | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction | |
| A reaction: This idea is said to be the essential thought of Derrida's Deconstruction. The aim is liberation of thought, by identifying and bypassing these tacit metaphysical schemas. |
| 6282 | Theory of meaning presupposes theory of understanding and reference [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Theory of meaning presupposes theory of understanding and reference. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: How can you have a theory of understanding without a meaning that requires to be understood? Personally I think about the minds of small animals when pondering this, and that seems to put reference and truth at the front of the queue. |
| 21886 | Meanings depend on differences and contrasts [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Meaning depends on 'differences' (contrasts). | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 21930 | For Aristotle all proper nouns must have a single sense, which is the purpose of language [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: A noun [for Aristotle] is proper when it has but a single sense. Better, it is only in this case that it is properly a noun. Univocity is the essence, or better, the telos of language. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Simon Glendinning - Derrida: A Very Short Introduction 5 | |
| A reaction: [no ref given] His target seem to be Aristotelian definition, and also formal logic, which usually needs unambiguous meanings. {I'm puzzled that he thinks 'telos' is simply better than 'essence', since it is quite different]. |
| 21884 | Capacity for repetitions is the hallmark of language [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: The capacity for repetitions is the hallmark of language. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 21935 | The sign is only conceivable as a movement between elusive presences [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: The sign is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers, and moving toward the deferred presence that it aims to reappropriate. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Simon Glendinning - Derrida: A Very Short Introduction 6 | |
| A reaction: [Glendinning gives no source for this] I take the fundamental idea to be that meanings are dynamic, when they are traditionally understood as static (and specifiable in dictionaries). |
| 21933 | Writing functions even if the sender or the receiver are absent [Derrida, by Glendinning] |
| Full Idea: Writing can and must be able to do without the presence of the sender. ...Also writing can and must he able to do without the presence of the receiver. | |
| From: report of Jacques Derrida (works [1990]) by Simon Glendinning - Derrida: A Very Short Introduction 6 | |
| A reaction: In simple terms, one of them could die during the transmission. This is the grounds for the assertion of the primacy of writing. It opposes orthodox views which define language in terms of sender and receiver. |
| 21894 | Madness and instability ('the demonic hyperbole') lurks in all language [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Madness and instability ('the demonic hyperbole') lurks behind all language. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 6281 | Truth conditions can't explain understanding a sentence, because that in turn needs explanation [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: You can't treat understanding a sentence as knowing its truth conditions, because it then becomes unintelligible what that knowledge in turn consists in. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: The implication, I take it, is circularity; how can you specify truth conditions if you don't understand sentences? Putnam here agrees with Dummett that verification must be involved. Something has to be taken as axiomatic in all this. |
| 6278 | We should reject the view that truth is prior to meaning [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: I am suggesting that we reject the view that truth (based on the semantic theory) is prior to meaning. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: It is a nice question which of truth or meaning has logical priority. One might start by speculating about how and why animals think. A moth attracted to flame is probably working on truth without much that could be called 'meaning'. |
| 21931 | 'Dissemination' is opposed to polysemia, since that is irreducible, because of multiple understandings [Derrida, by Glendinning] |
| Full Idea: The intention to oppose polysemia with dissemination does not aim to affirm that everything we say is ambiguous, but that polysemia is irreducible in the sense that each and every 'meaning' is itself subject to more than one understanding. | |
| From: report of Jacques Derrida (works [1990]) by Simon Glendinning - Derrida: A Very Short Introduction 5 | |
| A reaction: The key point, I think, is that ambiguity and polysemia are not failures of language (which is the way most logicians see it), but part of the essential and irreducible nature of language. Nietzsche started this line of thought. |
| 21885 | Words exist in 'spacing', so meanings are never synchronic except in writing [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Words only exist is 'spacings' (of time and space), so there are no synchronic meanings (except perhaps in writing). | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 6271 | How reference is specified is not what reference is [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: A theory of how reference is specified isn't a theory of what reference is. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec V) | |
| A reaction: A simple and important point. We may achieve reference by naming, describing, grunting or pointing, but the question is, what have we achieved when we get there? |
| 6268 | The claim that scientific terms are incommensurable can be blocked if scientific terms are not descriptions [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The line of reasoning of Kuhn and Feyerabend can be blocked by arguing (as I have in various places, and as Saul Kripke has) that scientific terms are not synonymous with descriptions. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec II.2) | |
| A reaction: A nice clear statement of the motivation for creating the causal theory of reference. See Idea 6162. We could still go back and ask whether we could block scientific relativism by rethinking how descriptions work, instead of abandoning them. |
| 6279 | A private language could work with reference and beliefs, and wouldn't need meaning [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: A language made up and used by a being who belonged to no community would have no need for such a concept as the 'meaning' of a term. To state the reference of each term and what the language speaker believes is to tell the whole story. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: A subtle response to Wittgenstein's claim (e.g. Ideas 4152,4158), but I am not sure what Putnam means. I would have thought that beliefs had to be embodied in propositions. They may not need 'meaning' quite as urgently as sentences, but still… |
| 6270 | The correct translation is the one that explains the speaker's behaviour [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: What it is to be a correct translation is to be the translation that best explains the behaviour of the speaker. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec III) | |
| A reaction: This seems fairly close to Quine, but rather puzzlingly uses the word 'correct'. If our criteria of translation are purely behavioural, there is no way we can be correct after one word ('gavagai'), so at what point does it become 'correct'? |
| 6283 | Language maps the world in many ways (because it maps onto other languages in many ways) [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: We could say that the language has more than one correct way of being mapped onto the world (it must, since it has more than one way of being correctly mapped onto a language which is itself correctly mapped onto the world). | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: This spells out nicely the significance of Quine's 'indeterminacy of translation'. Others have pointed out that the fact that language maps onto world in many ways need not be anti-realist; the world is endless, and language is limited. |
| 6275 | You can't say 'most speaker's beliefs are true'; in some areas this is not so, and you can't count beliefs [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The maxim that 'most of a speaker's beliefs are true' as an a priori principle governing radical translation seems to me to go too far; first, I don't know how to count beliefs; second, most people's beliefs on some topics (philosophy) are probably false. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: Putnam prefers a pragmatic view, where charity is applicable if behaviour is involved. Philosophy is too purely theoretical. The extent to which Charity should apply in philosophy seminars is a nice question, which all students should test in practice. |
| 21891 | The good is implicitly violent (against evil), so there is no pure good [Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Even the good is implicitly violent (against evil), so there can be no 'pure' good. | |
| From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction |
| 19035 | General Relativity allows substantivalism about space-time - that it has independent properties [Hoefer] |
| Full Idea: General Relativity describes space-time in a way that allows it to exist with determinate properties not reducible to the properties and relations of its material contents. Hence nearly all physicists and philosophers writing on GR are substantivalists. | |
| From: Carl Hoefer (The Metaphysics of Space-Time Substantivalism [1996], p.5), quoted by Barbara Vetter - Potentiality 7.3 | |
| A reaction: I'm encouraged by this, as I instinctly favour substantivalism. Imagine removing all the objects from space-time, one by one. What happens as you approach the end of the task? Once they are removed, can they be replaced? |