75 ideas
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'. |
17998 | Category mistakes are either syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic [Magidor] |
Full Idea: A plausible case can be made for explaining the phenomenon of category mistakes in terms of each of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 1.1) | |
A reaction: I want to explain them in terms of (structured) ontology, but she totally rejects that on p.156. Her preferred account is that they are presupposition failures, which is pragmatics. She splits the semantic view into truth-valued and non-truth-valued. |
18019 | People have dreams which involve category mistakes [Magidor] |
Full Idea: It is an empirical fact that people often sincerely report having had dreams which involve category mistakes. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.4) | |
A reaction: She doesn't give any examples, but I was thinking that this might be the case before I read this idea. Dreams seem to allow you to live with gaps in reality that we don't tolerate when awake. |
18011 | Category mistakes seem to be universal across languages [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The infelicity of category mistakes seems to be universal across languages. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 2.3) | |
A reaction: Magidor rightly offers this fact to refute the claim that category mistakes are purely syntax (since syntax obviously varies hugely across languages). I also take the fact to show that category mistakes concern the world, and not merely language. |
18012 | Category mistakes as syntactic needs a huge number of fine-grained rules [Magidor] |
Full Idea: A syntactic theory of category mistakes would require not only general syntactic features such as must-be-human, but also highly particular ones such as must-be-a-grape. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 2.3) | |
A reaction: Her grape example comes from Hebrew, but an English example might be the verb 'to hull', which is largely exclusive to strawberries. The 'must-be' form is one of Chomsky's 'selectional features'. |
18013 | Embedded (in 'he said that…') category mistakes show syntax isn't the problem [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The embedding data (such as 'John said that the number two is green', compared to '*John said that me likes apples') strongly suggests that category mistakes are not syntactically ill-formed. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 2.4) | |
A reaction: Sounds conclusive. The report of John's category error, unlike the report of his remark about apples, seems perfectly syntactically acceptable. |
18016 | Two good sentences should combine to make a good sentence, but that might be absurd [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The principle that if 'p' and 'q' are meaningful sentences then 'p and q' is a meaningful sentence seems highly plausible. But now consider the following example: 'That is a number and that is green'. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.2.2) | |
A reaction: This challenges the defence of the meaningfulness of category mistakes on the basis of strong compositionality. |
18015 | The normal compositional view makes category mistakes meaningful [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The principle that if a competent speaker understands some terms then they understand a sentence made up of them entails that category mistakes are meaningful (as in understanding 'the number two' and 'is green'). | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.2.1) | |
A reaction: [compressed version] It is normal to impose restrictions on plausible compositionality, and thus back away from this claim, but I rather sympathise with it. She adds to a second version of the principle the proviso 'IF the sentence is meaningful'. |
18017 | If a category mistake is synonymous across two languages, that implies it is meaningful [Magidor] |
Full Idea: Two sentences are synonymous if they have the same meaning, suggesting that they must both be meaningful. On the face of it the English 'two is green' and French 'deux est vert' are synonymous, suggesting meaningful category mistakes. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.3) | |
A reaction: I'm fairly convinced already that most category mistakes are meaningful, and this seems to confirm the view. Some mistakes could be so extreme that no auditor could compute their meaning, especially if you concatenated lots of them. |
18021 | Category mistakes are meaningful, because metaphors are meaningful category mistakes [Magidor] |
Full Idea: Metaphors must have literal meanings. …Since many metaphors involving category mistakes manage to achieve their metaphorical purpose, they must also have literal meanings, so category mistakes must be (literally) meaningful. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
A reaction: Hm. 'This guy is so weird that to meet him is to encounter a circular square'. |
18031 | If a category mistake has unimaginable truth-conditions, then it seems to be meaningless [Magidor] |
Full Idea: One motivation for taking category mistakes to be meaningless is that one cannot even imagine what it would take for 'Two is green' to be true. …Underlying this complaint is sometimes the thought that the meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.6) | |
A reaction: I defend the view that most sentences are meaningful if they compose from meaningful parts, but you have to acknowledge this view. It seems to come in degrees. Sentences can have fragmentary meaning, or be almost meaningful, or offer a glimpse of meaning? |
18030 | A good explanation of why category mistakes sound wrong is that they are meaningless [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The meaninglessness view does seem to offer a simple and compelling explanation for the fact that category mistakes are highly infelicitous. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.6) | |
A reaction: However, I take there to be quite a large gulf between why meaningless sentences like 'squares turn happiness into incommensurability', which I would call 'category blunders', and subtle category mistakes, which are meaningful. |
18032 | Category mistakes are neither verifiable nor analytic, so verificationism says they are meaningless [Magidor] |
Full Idea: No sense experience shows that 'two is green' is true or false. But neither is 'two is green' analytically true or false. So it fails to have legitimate verification conditions and hence, by the lights of traditional verificationism, it is meaningless. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.6.2) | |
A reaction: If a category mistake is an error in classification, then it would seem to be analytically false. If it wrongly attributes a property to something, that makes it verifiably false. The problem is to verify anything at all about 'two'. |
18034 | Category mistakes play no role in mental life, so conceptual role semantics makes them meaningless [Magidor] |
Full Idea: One might argue that conceptual role semantics entails that category mistakes are meaningless. Sentences such as 'two is green' play no role in the cognitive life of any agent. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.6.2) | |
A reaction: [She quotes Block's definition of conceptual role semantics] I would have thought that if a category mistake is believed by an agent, it could play a huge role in their cognitive life. |
18037 | Maybe when you say 'two is green', the predicate somehow fails to apply? [Magidor] |
Full Idea: One might argue that although 'two' refers to the number two, and 'is green' expresses the property of being green, in 'two is green' the property somehow fails to apply to the number two. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 4.2) | |
A reaction: It is an interesting thought that you say something which applies a predicate to an object, but the predicate then 'fails to apply' for reasons of its own, over which you have no control. The only possible cause of the failure is the nature of reality. |
18039 | If category mistakes aren't syntax failure or meaningless, maybe they just lack a truth-value? [Magidor] |
Full Idea: Having rejected the syntactic approach and the meaninglessness view, one might feel that the last resort for explaining the defectiveness of category mistakes is to claim that they are truth-valueless (even if meaningful). | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 4.3.1) | |
A reaction: She rejects this one as well, and votes for a pragmatic explanation, in terms of presupposition failure. The view I incline towards is just that they are false, despite being well-formed, meaningful and truth-valued. |
18041 | Category mistakes suffer from pragmatic presupposition failure (which is not mere triviality) [Magidor] |
Full Idea: I argue that category mistakes are infelicitous because they suffer from (pragmatic) presupposition failure, ...but I reject the 'naive pragmatic approach' according to which category mistakes are infelicitous because they are trivially true or false. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.1) | |
A reaction: She supports her case quite well, but I vote for them being false. The falsity may involve presuppositions. 'Two is green' is a category mistake, and false, because 'two' lacks the preconditions for anything to be coloured (notably, emitting light). |
18058 | Maybe the presuppositions of category mistakes are the abilities of things? [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The most promising way to characterise the presuppositions involved in category mistakes might be to rephrase them in modal terms ('x is able to be pregnant', 'x is able to be green'). | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.4.3) | |
A reaction: This catches my attention because it suggests that category mistakes contradict dispositions, rather than contradicting classifications or types. 'Let's use a magnet to repel this iron'? The dispositions of 'two' and 'green' in 'two is green'? Hm |
18056 | Category mistakes because of presuppositions still have a truth value (usually 'false') [Magidor] |
Full Idea: I am assuming that even in those contexts in which the presupposition of 'the number two is green' fails and the utterance is infelicitious, it nevertheless receives a bivalent truth-value (presumably 'false'). | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.4.1) | |
A reaction: It seems to me obvious that, in normal contexts, 'the number two is green' is false, rather than meaningless. Is 'the number eight is an odd number' meaningless? |
18055 | In 'two is green', 'green' has a presupposition of being coloured [Magidor] |
Full Idea: My proposal is that the truth-conditional content of 'green' (in 'two is green') is the property of being green, and its presuppositional content is the property of being coloured. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.4.1) | |
A reaction: This requires a two-dimensional semantics of truth-conditional and presuppositional content. I fear it may have a problem she spotted elsewhere, of overgenerating presuppositions. Eyes are presupposed by 'green'. Ambient light is required. |
18057 | 'Numbers are coloured and the number two is green' seems to be acceptable [Magidor] |
Full Idea: 'The number two is green' is normally infelicitous, but, interestingly, 'numbers are coloured and the number two is green' is not infelicitous. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.4.1) | |
A reaction: A nice example, which gives good support for her pragmatic account of category mistakes in terms of presupposition failure. But how about 'figures can have contradictory shapes, and this square is circular'? Numbers are not coloured!!! |
18059 | The presuppositions in category mistakes reveal nothing about ontology [Magidor] |
Full Idea: My pragmatic account of category mistakes does not support a key role for them in metaphysics. It is highly doubtful that the presuppositions associated with category mistakes reveal anything about the fundamental nature of ontological categories. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.6) | |
A reaction: Thus she dashes my hope, without even bothering to offer a reason. I think she should push her enquiry further, and ask why we presuppose things. Why do we take presuppositions for granted? Why are they obvious? |
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. |
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. |
18040 | Intensional logic maps logical space, showing which predicates are compatible or incompatible [Magidor] |
Full Idea: Intensional logic aims to capture necessary relations between certain predicates, such as that 'green all over' and 'red all over' cannot be co-instantiated. Each predicate is allocated a set of points in logical space, and every object has one point. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 4.4) | |
A reaction: This produces an intriguing model of reality, as a vast and rich space of multiply overlapping modal predicates. Things can be blue, square, dangerous and large. They can't be small and large, or square and round. Objects are optional extras! |
17997 | Some suggest that the Julius Caesar problem involves category mistakes [Magidor] |
Full Idea: Various authors have argued that identity statements arising in the context of the 'Julius Caesar' problem in philosophy of mathematics constitute category mistakes. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 1.1 n1) | |
A reaction: [She cites Benacerraf 1965 and Shapiro 1997:79] |
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. |
18060 | We can explain the statue/clay problem by a category mistake with a false premise [Magidor] |
Full Idea: Since 'the lump of clay is Romanesque' is a category mistake, a pragmatic account of that phenomenon is key to pursuing the strategy of saying that the problem rests on a false premise. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.6) | |
A reaction: [compressed] |
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. |
18020 | Propositional attitudes relate agents to either propositions, or meanings, or sentence/utterances [Magidor] |
Full Idea: Three views of the semantics of propositional attitudes: they are relations between agents and propositions ('propositional' view); relations between individuals and meanings (Fregean); or relations of individuals and sentences/utterances ('sentential'). | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.4) | |
A reaction: I am a propositionalist on this one. Meanings are too vague, and sentences are too linguistic. |
18035 | Two sentences with different meanings can, on occasion, have the same content [Magidor] |
Full Idea: It is commonly assumed that meaning and content can come apart: the sentence 'I am writing' and 'Ofra is writing' may have different meanings, even if, as currently uttered, they express the same content. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 4.1) | |
A reaction: From that, I would judge 'content' to mean the same as 'proposition'. |
18018 | To grasp 'two' and 'green', must you know that two is not green? [Magidor] |
Full Idea: Is it a necessary condition on possessing the concepts of 'two' and 'green' that one does not believe that two is green? I think this claim is false. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.4) | |
A reaction: To see that it is false one only has to consider much more sophisticated concepts, which are grasped without knowing their full implications. I might think two is green because I fully grasp 'two', but have not yet mastered 'green'. |
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. |
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'. |
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. |
18008 | Generative semantics says structure is determined by semantics as well as syntactic rules [Magidor] |
Full Idea: Generative semanticists claimed that the structure of a sentence is determined by both 'syntactic' and 'semantic' considerations which interact with each other in complex ways. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 1.3) | |
A reaction: [She mentions George Lakoff for this view] You need to study a range of examples, but this sounds a better view to me than the tidy picture of producing a syntactic structure and then adding a semantics. We make up sentences while speaking them. |
18010 | 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' have different deep structure [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The sentences 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' can have very different deep structure (with the latter concerning John as a pleaser, while the former concerns John as the one being pleased). | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 2.1) | |
A reaction: This demolishes the old idea of grammar as 'parts of speech' strung together according to superficial rules. The question is whether we now just have deeper syntax, or whether semantics is part of the process. |
18053 | The semantics of a sentence is its potential for changing a context [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The basic semantics of sentences are not truth-conditions, but rather context change potential, which is a rule which determines what the effect of uttering the sentence would be on the context. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.2) | |
A reaction: [I. Heim's 'renowned' 1983 revision of Stalnaker] This means the semantics of a sentence can vary hugely, depending on context. It is known as 'dynamic semantics'. 'I think you should go ahead and do it'. |
18000 | Weaker compositionality says meaningful well-formed sentences get the meaning from the parts [Magidor] |
Full Idea: A weaker principle of compositionality states that if a syntactically well-formed sentence is meaningful, then its meaning is a function of the meaning of its parts. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 1.1) | |
A reaction: I would certainly accept this as being correct. I take the meaning of a sentence to be something which you assemble in your head as you hear the parts of it unfold. ….However, irony might exhibit meaning that only comes from the whole sentence. Hm. |
17999 | Strong compositionality says meaningful expressions syntactically well-formed are meaningful [Magidor] |
Full Idea: In the strong form of the principle of compositionality any meaningful expressions combined in a syntactically well-formed manner compose a meaningful expression. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 1.1) | |
A reaction: [She cites Montague as holding this view] I find this plausible, at least. If you look at whole sentences they can seem meaningless, but if you track the process of composition a collective meaning emerges, despite the oddities. |
18014 | Understanding unlimited numbers of sentences suggests that meaning is compositional [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The fact that speakers of natural languages have the capacity to understand indefinitely many new sentences suggests that meaning must be compositional. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.2.1) | |
A reaction: To some extent, the compositionality of meaning is so obvious as to hardly require pointing out. It is the precise nature of the claim, and the extent to which whole sentences can add to the compositional meaning, that is of interest. |
18001 | Are there partial propositions, lacking truth value in some possible worlds? [Magidor] |
Full Idea: Are there such things as 'partial propositions', which are truth-valueless relative to some possible worlds? | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 1.1) | |
A reaction: Presumably this could be expressed without possible worlds. Are there propositions meaningful in New Guinea, and meaningless in England? Do some propositions require the contingent existence of certain objects to be meaningful? |
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… |
18036 | A sentence can be meaningful, and yet lack a truth value [Magidor] |
Full Idea: 'That is red' in a context where the demonstrative fails to refer is truth-valueless, despite being meaningful, as is 'the queen of France in 2010 is bald'. ...The claim that some sentences are meaningful but truth-valueless is, then, widely accepted. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 4.1) | |
A reaction: The lack of truth value is usually because of reference failure. It is best to say the words are meaningful, but no proposition is expressed. |
18051 | In the pragmatic approach, presuppositions are assumed in a context, for successful assertion [Magidor] |
Full Idea: According to the pragmatic approach, presuppositions are constraints on the context: if a sentence s generates a presupposition p, an assertion of s cannot proceed smoothly unless the context already entails p (p is taken for granted). | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.2) | |
A reaction: She credits Stalnaker for this approach. There is a choice between the presuppositions being largely driven by internal features of the sentence, or by external features of context. You may not know the context of some statements. |
18043 | The infelicitiousness of trivial truth is explained by uninformativeness, or a static context-set [Magidor] |
Full Idea: In Grice's theory if a sentence is trivially true, asserting it would violate the maxim of quantity. For Stalnaker, if p is trivially true, it involves no update to the context-set, and is thus pointless. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.2) | |
A reaction: 'Let us remind ourselves, before we proceed, of the following trivial truth: p'. |
18042 | The infelicitiousness of trivial falsity is explained by expectations, or the loss of a context-set [Magidor] |
Full Idea: In Grice's theory if a sentence is trivially false, asserting it would violate the maxim of quality. For Stalnaker if p is trivially false, removing all worlds incompatible with p would result in an empty context-set, preventing any further communication. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.2) | |
A reaction: [compressed] I'm not sure whether we need to 'explain' the inappropriateness of uttering trivial falsities. I take the main rule of conversation to be 'don't be boring', but we all violate that. |
18050 | If both s and not-s entail a sentence p, then p is a presupposition [Magidor] |
Full Idea: In the traditional account, a sentence s presupposes p if and only if both s and ¬s entail p. Standardly, this entails that if s presupposes p, then whenever p is false, s must be neither true nor false. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.2) | |
A reaction: 'I'm looking down on the garden' presupposes 'I'm upstairs'. Why would 'I'm not looking down on the garden' entail 'I'm upstairs'? I seem to have missed something. |
18047 | A presupposition is what makes an utterance sound wrong if it is not assumed? [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The most obvious test for presupposition would be this: if s generates the presupposition p, then an utterance of s would be infelicitous, unless p is taken for granted by participants in the conversation. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.1.1) | |
A reaction: The principle of charity seems to be involved here - that we try to make people's utterances sound right, so we add in the presuppositions which would achieve that. The problem, she says, is that the infelicity may have other causes. |
18048 | A test for presupposition would be if it provoked 'hey wait a minute - I have no idea that....' [Magidor] |
Full Idea: A proposed test for presupposition is the 'Hey, wait a minute' test. S presupposes that p, just in case it would be felictious to respond to an utterance of s with something like 'Hey, wait a minute - I had not idea that p!'. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.1.2) | |
A reaction: [K. Von Finkel 2004 made the suggestion] That is, you think 'hm ...this statement seems to presuppose p'. She says the suggestion vastly over-generates possible presuppositions - unlikely ones, as well as the obvious ones. |
18049 | The best tests for presupposition are projecting it to negation, conditional, conjunction, questions [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The most robust tests for presupposition are the projection tests. If s presupposes p, then ¬s does too. If s1 presupposes p, then 'if s1 then s2' presupposes p. If s1 presupposes p, then 's1 and s2' presupposes p. If s presupposes p, then 's?' does too. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.1.3) | |
A reaction: [compressed] She also discusses quantifiers. In other words, the presupposition remains stable through various transformations of the underlying proposition. |
18054 | Why do certain words trigger presuppositions? [Magidor] |
Full Idea: We can ask why a range of lexical items (e.g. 'stop' or 'know') trigger the presuppositions they do. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.2) | |
A reaction: I'm not sure whether we'll get an answer, but I would approach the question by thinking about mental files. |
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. |
18022 | Metaphors tend to involve category mistakes, by joining disjoint domains [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The fact that most metaphors involve category mistakes is not a coincidence. …A big part of them is to do with connecting objects and properties that normally seem to belong to disjoint domains. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
A reaction: Metaphysica poets took disjoint domains and 'yoked them together by violence', according to Dr Johnson. |
18023 | Theories of metaphor divide over whether they must have literal meanings [Magidor] |
Full Idea: There are theories of metaphors that require them to have literal meanings in order to achieve their metaphorical purpose, and those that do not. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
A reaction: I take almost any string of proper language to have literal meaning (for compositional reasons), even if the end result is somewhat ridiculous. 'Churchill was a lion' obviously has literal meaning. And so does 'Churchill was a transcendental number'. |
18024 | One theory says metaphors mean the same as the corresponding simile [Magidor] |
Full Idea: On standard versions of the simile theory of metaphors, they mean the same as the corresponding simile. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
A reaction: Magidor points out that this allows the metaphor to work while being meaningless, since all the work is done by the perfectly meaningful simile. But the metaphor must at least mean enough to indicate what the simile is. |
18027 | Metaphors as substitutes for the literal misses one predicate varying with context [Magidor] |
Full Idea: A problem with the substitution view of metaphors is that the same predicate can have very different metaphorical contributions in different contexts. Consider 'Juliet is the sun' uttered by Romeo, and 'Stalin is the sun' from a devoted communist. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
A reaction: The substitution view never looked good (especially if you like poetry), and now it looks a lot worse. |
18025 | The simile view of metaphors removes their magic, and won't explain why we use them [Magidor] |
Full Idea: The simile theory of metaphors makes them too easy to figure out, when they cannot be paraphrased in literal terms, …and it does not explain why we use metaphors as well as similes. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
A reaction: [She cites Davidson for these points] They might just be similes with the added frisson of leaving out 'like', so that they seem at first to be false, until you work out the simile and see their truth. |
18026 | Maybe a metaphor is just a substitute for what is intended literally, like 'icy' for 'unemotional' [Magidor] |
Full Idea: According to the substitution view of metaphors, a word used metaphorically is merely a substitute for another word or phrase that expresses the same meaning literally. Thus 'John is an ice-cube' is a substitute for 'John is cruel and unemotional'. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
A reaction: This seems to capture the denotation but miss the connotation. Whoever came up with this theory didn't read much poetry. |
18028 | Gricean theories of metaphor involve conversational implicatures based on literal meanings [Magidor] |
Full Idea: Gricean theories of metaphor …assume that conversational implicatures are generated via literal contents, and hence that a sentence cannot generate an implicature without being literally meaningful. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
A reaction: Magidor gives not details of such theories, but presumably the metaphor is all in the speaker's intention, which is parasitic on the wayward literal meaning, as in cases of irony. |
18029 | Non-cognitivist views of metaphor says there are no metaphorical meanings, just effects of the literal [Magidor] |
Full Idea: According to non-cognitivists there is no such thing as metaphorical meaning. …The effects on the hearer are induced directly via the literal meaning of the metaphor. | |
From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
A reaction: [This is said to be Davidson's view] I wonder how many people defended some explicit 'metaphorical meaning', as opposed to connotations that accumulate as you take in the metaphor? Any second meaning is just a further literal meaning. |
22381 | Being a good father seems to depend on intentions, rather than actual abilities [Foot] |
Full Idea: Being a good father, or daughter, or friend seems to depend on one's intentions, rather than on such things as cleverness and strength. | |
From: Philippa Foot (Goodness and Choice [1961], p.138) | |
A reaction: Not sure about that. In wartime a good father might need to be actually brave, and in times of hardship be actually economically successful. 'He meant well, but he was a hopeless father'? |
22380 | Some words, such as 'knife', have a meaning which involves its function [Foot] |
Full Idea: The word 'knife' names an object in respect of its function. That is not to say (simply) that it names an object which has a function, but also that the function is involved in the meaning of the word. | |
From: Philippa Foot (Goodness and Choice [1961], p.134) | |
A reaction: It seems faintly possible that someone (a child, perhaps) could know the word and recognise the object, but not know what the object is for. Ditto with other things which have functional names. |