5 ideas
| 1556 | By nature people are close to one another, but culture drives them apart [Hippias] |
| Full Idea: I regard you all as relatives - by nature, not by convention. By nature like is akin to like, but convention is a tyrant over humankind and often constrains people to act contrary to nature. | |
| From: Hippias (fragments/reports [c.430 BCE]), quoted by Plato - Protagoras 337c8 |
| 8872 | It is widely supposed that externalism cannot be reconciled with first-person authority [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: It has been widely supposed that externalism, which holds that the contents of a person's propositional attitudes are partly determined by factors of which the person may be ignorant, cannot be reconciled with first-person authority. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Epistemology Externalized [1990], p.197) | |
| A reaction: It is certainly a bit puzzling if you go around saying 'Actually, people don't know their own thoughts'. Davidson aims to defend first-person authority. The full story is developed in Tyler Burge's views on 'anti-individualism'. |
| 8874 | It is hard to interpret a speaker's actions if we take a broad view of the content [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: It will explain a speaker's actions far better if we interpret him as he intended to be interpreted, than if we suppose he means and thinks what someone else might mean and think who used the same words 'correctly'. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Epistemology Externalized [1990], p.199) | |
| A reaction: This comes down to the fact that our actions have to be motivated by internal meanings. If I defer to experts on the essence of gold, I still buy gold according to how I myself understand it. So meaning has two components? |
| 18285 | All translation loses some content (but language does not create reality) [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: I do not believe in translatability without loss of content, and therefore I think that the content of a world description is influenced to a certain degree by choice of a language form. But that does not mean that reality is created through language. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Letters to Schlick [1935], 1935.12.04), quoted by J. Alberto Coffa - The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap 19 'Truth' | |
| A reaction: It is a mistake to think Quine was the first to spot the interest of translation in philosophy of language. 'Does translation always lose content?' is a very nice question for focusing the problem. |
| 8873 | The cause of a usage determines meaning, but why is the microstructure of water relevant? [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: While I agree that the usual cause of the use of the word determines what it means, I do not see why sameness of microstructure is necessarily the relevant similarity that determines my reference of the word 'water'. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Epistemology Externalized [1990], p.198) | |
| A reaction: This is a problem for essentialists who build their views on semantic considerations. But the stability of what causes 'water' thoughts is the microstructure of water. However, that is an explantion of meaning, not a definition of it. |