66 ideas
| 3099 | Inference is never a conscious process [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Inference is never a conscious process. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 11.2) |
| 3077 | Reasoning might be defined in terms of its functional role, which is to produce knowledge [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Reasoning could be treated as a functionally defined process that is partly defined in terms of its role in giving a person knowledge. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 3.6) |
| 2463 | A standard naturalist view is realist, externalist, and computationalist, and believes in rationality [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: There seems to be an emerging naturalist consensus that is Realist in ontology and epistemology, externalist in semantics, and computationalist in cognitive psychology, which nicely allows us to retain our understanding of ourselves as rational creatures. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 3092 | If you believe that some of your beliefs are false, then at least one of your beliefs IS false [Harman] |
| Full Idea: If a rational man believes he has at least some other false beliefs, it follows that a rational man knows that at least one of his beliefs is false (the one believed false, or this new belief). | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 7.2) |
| 2435 | Psychology has to include the idea that mental processes are typically truth-preserving [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: A psychology that can't make sense of such facts as that mental processes are typically truth-preserving is ipso facto dead in the water. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.3) |
| 3093 | Any two states are logically linked, by being entailed by their conjunction [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Any two states of affairs are logically connected, simply because both are entailed by their conjunction. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 8.1) |
| 2442 | Inferences are surely part of the causal structure of the world [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Inferences are surely part of the causal structure of the world. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §3) |
| 3098 | Deductive logic is the only logic there is [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Deductive logic is the only logic there is. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 10.4) |
| 3094 | You don't have to accept the conclusion of a valid argument [Harman] |
| Full Idea: We may say "From P and If-P-then-Q, infer Q" (modus ponens), but there is no rule of acceptance to say that we should accept Q. Maybe we should stop believing P or If-P-then-Q rather than believe Q. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 10.1) |
| 3084 | Our underlying predicates represent words in the language, not universal concepts [Harman] |
| Full Idea: The underlying truth-conditional structures of thoughts are language-dependent in the sense that underlying predicates represent words in the language rather than universal concepts common to all languages. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 6.3) |
| 3080 | Logical form is the part of a sentence structure which involves logical elements [Harman] |
| Full Idea: The logical form of a sentence is that part of its structure that involves logical elements. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 5.2) |
| 3081 | A theory of truth in a language must involve a theory of logical form [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Some sort of theory of logical form is involved in any theory of truth for a natural language. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 5.2) |
| 21339 | We want the ontology of relations, not just a formal way of specifying them [Heil] |
| Full Idea: A satisfying account of relations must be ontologically serious. This means refusing to rest content with abstract specifications of relations as sets of ordered n-tuples. | |
| From: John Heil (Relations [2009], Intro) | |
| A reaction: A set of ordered entities would give the extension of a relation, which wouldn't, among other things, explain co-extensive relations (if all the people to my left were also taller than me). Heil's is a general cry from the heart about formal philosophy. |
| 21349 | Two people are indirectly related by height; the direct relation is internal, between properties [Heil] |
| Full Idea: If Simmias is taller than Socrates, they are indirectly related; they are related via their possession of properties that are themselves directly - and internally - related. Hence relational truths are made true by non-relational features of the world. | |
| From: John Heil (Relations [2009], 'Founding') | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a strategy for reducing external relations to internal relations, which are intrinsic to objects, which thus reduces the ontology. Heil is not endorsing it, but cites Kit Fine 2000. The germ of this idea is in Plato. |
| 21340 | Maybe all the other features of the world can be reduced to relations [Heil] |
| Full Idea: A striking idea is that relations are ontologically primary: monadic, non-relational features of the world are constituted by relations. A view of this kind is defended by Peirce, and contemporary 'structural realists' like Ladyman. | |
| From: John Heil (Relations [2009], 'Relational') | |
| A reaction: I can't make sense of this proposal, which seems to offer relations with no relata. What is a relation? What is it made of? How do you individuate two instances of a relations, without reference to the relata? |
| 21348 | In the case of 5 and 6, their relational truthmaker is just the numbers [Heil] |
| Full Idea: We might say that the truthmakers for 'six is greater than five' are six and five themselves. On this view, truthmakers for one class of relational truths are non-relational features of the world. | |
| From: John Heil (Relations [2009], 'Founding') | |
| A reaction: That seems to be a good way of expressing the existence of an internal relation. |
| 21351 | Truthmaking is a clear example of an internal relation [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Truthmaking is a paradigmatic internal relation: if you have a truthbearer, a representation, and you have the world as the truthbearer represents it as being, you have truthmaking, you have the truthbearer's being true. | |
| From: John Heil (Relations [2009], 'Causal') | |
| A reaction: It is nice to have an example of an internal relation other than numbers, and closer to the concrete world. Is the relation between the world and facts about the world the same thing, or another example? |
| 21344 | If R internally relates a and b, and you have a and b, you thereby have R [Heil] |
| Full Idea: A simple way to think about internal relations is: if R internally relates a and b, then, if you have a and b, you thereby have R. If you have six and you have five, you thereby have six's being greater than five. | |
| From: John Heil (Relations [2009], 'External') | |
| A reaction: This seems to work a lot better for abstracta than for physical objects, where I am struggling to think of a parallel example. Parenthood? Temporal relations between things? Acorn and oak? |
| 21350 | If properties are powers, then causal relations are internal relations [Heil] |
| Full Idea: On the conception that properties are powers, it is no longer obvious that causal relations are external relations. Given the powers - all the powers in play - you have the manifestations. | |
| From: John Heil (Relations [2009], 'Causal') | |
| A reaction: This also delivers on a plate the necessity felt to be in causal relations, because the relation is inevitable once you are given the relata. But can you have an accidental (rather than essential) internal relation? Not in the case of numbers. |
| 3100 | You have to reaffirm all your beliefs when you make a logical inference [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Since inference is inference to the best total account, all your prior beliefs are relevant and your conclusion is everything you believe at the end. So, you constantly reaffirm your beliefs in inference. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 12.1) |
| 3088 | Analyticity is postulated because we can't imagine some things being true, but we may just lack imagination [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Analyticity is postulated to explain why we cannot imagine certain things being true. A better postulate is that we are not good at imagining things. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 6.7) |
| 3089 | Only lack of imagination makes us think that 'cats are animals' is analytic [Harman] |
| Full Idea: That 'cats are animals' is often cited as an analytic truth. But (as Putnam points out) the inability to imagine this false is just a lack of imagination. They might turn out to be radio-controlled plastic spies from Mars. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 6.7) |
| 3101 | Memories are not just preserved, they are constantly reinferred [Harman] |
| Full Idea: I favour the inferential view of memory over the preservation view. …One constantly reinfers old beliefs. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 12.1) | |
| A reaction: This has a grain of truth, but seems a distortion. An image of the old home floats into my mind when I am thinking about something utterly unconnected. When we search memory we may be inferring and explaining, but the same applies to searching images. |
| 3074 | People's reasons for belief are rarely conscious [Harman] |
| Full Idea: The reasons for which people believe things are rarely conscious. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: Probably correct. The interesting bit is when they bring the beliefs into consciousness and scrutinise them rationally. Philosophers routinely overthrow their natural beliefs in this way. |
| 3097 | We don't distinguish between accepting, and accepting as evidence [Harman] |
| Full Idea: There is no distinction between what we accept as evidence and whatever else we accept. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 10.4) |
| 6369 | In negative coherence theories, beliefs are prima facie justified, and don't need initial reasons [Harman, by Pollock/Cruz] |
| Full Idea: According to Harman's negative coherence theory it is always permissible to adopt a new belief - any new belief; because beliefs are prima facie justified you do not need a reason for adopting a new belief. | |
| From: report of Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973]) by J Pollock / J Cruz - Contemporary theories of Knowledge (2nd) §3.4.1 | |
| A reaction: This must be placed alongside the fact that we don't usually choose our beliefs, but simply find ourselves believing because of the causal impact of evidence. This gives an unstated rational justification for any belief - something caused it. |
| 3096 | Coherence avoids scepticism, because it doesn't rely on unprovable foundations [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Scepticism is undermined once it is seen that the relevant kind of justification is not a matter of derivation from basic principles but is rather a matter of showing that a view fits in well with other things we believe. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 10.4) | |
| A reaction: I would (now) call myself a 'coherentist' about justification, and I agree with this. Coherent justification could not possibly deliver certainty, so it must be combined with fallibilism. |
| 2462 | Control of belief is possible if you know truth conditions and what causes beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Premeditated cognitive management is possible if knowing the contents of one's thoughts would tell you what would make them true and what would cause you to have them. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I love the idea of 'cognitive management'. Since belief is fairly involuntary, I subject myself to the newspapers, books, TV and conversation which will create the style of beliefs to which I aspire. Why? |
| 2454 | We can deliberately cause ourselves to have true thoughts - hence the value of experiments [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: A creature that knows what makes its thoughts true and what would cause it to have them, could therefore cause itself to have true thoughts. …This would explain why experimentation is so close to the heart of our cognitive style. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2455 | Interrogation and experiment submit us to having beliefs caused [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You can put yourself into a situation where you may be caused to believe that P. Putting a question to someone who is in the know is one species of this behaviour, and putting a question to Nature (an experiment) is another. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2460 | Participation in an experiment requires agreement about what the outcome will mean [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: To be in the audience for an experiment you have to believe what the experimenter believes about what the outcome would mean, but not necessarily what the outcome will be. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2461 | An experiment is a deliberate version of what informal thinking does all the time [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Experimentation is an occasional and more or less self-conscious exercise in what informal thinking does all the time without thinking about it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2458 | Theories are links in the causal chain between the environment and our beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Theories function as links in the causal chains that run from environmental outcomes to the beliefs that they cause the inquirer to have. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 3095 | Induction is an attempt to increase the coherence of our explanations [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Induction is an attempt to increase the explanatory coherence of our view, making it more complete, less ad hoc, more plausible. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 10.2) |
| 2443 | I say psychology is intentional, semantics is informational, and thinking is computation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I hold that psychological laws are intentional, that semantics is purely informational, and that thinking is computation (and that it is possible to hold all of these assumptions at once). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: When he puts it baldly like that, it doesn't sound terribly persuasive. Thinking is 'computation'? Raw experience is irrelevant? What is it 'like' to spot an interesting connection between two propositions or concepts? It's not like adding 7 and 5. |
| 2453 | We are probably the only creatures that can think about our own thoughts [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I think it is likely that we are the only creatures that can think about the contents of our thoughts. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I think this is a major idea. If you ask me the traditional question - what is the essential difference between us and other animals? - this is my answer (not language, or reason). We are the metathinkers. |
| 3073 | We see ourselves in the world as a map [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Our conception of ourselves in the world is more like a map than a story. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], Pref) | |
| A reaction: Dennett offer the 'story' view of the self (Ideas 7381 and 7382). How do we arbitrate this one? A story IS a sort of map. Maps can extend over time as well over space. I think the self is real, and is a location on a map, and the hero of a story. |
| 2446 | Cartesians consider interaction to be a miracle [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The Cartesian view is that the interaction problem does arise, but is unsolvable because interaction is miraculous. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: A rather unsympathetic statement of the position. Cartesians might think that God could explain to us how interaction works. Cartesians are not mysterians, I think, but they see no sign of any theory of interaction. |
| 2445 | Semantics v syntax is the interaction problem all over again [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The question how mental representations could be both semantic, like propositions, and causal, like rocks, trees, and neural firings, is arguably just the interaction problem all over again. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Interesting way of presenting the problem. If you seem to be confronting the interaction problem, you have probably drifted into a bogus dualist way of thinking. Retreat, and reformulate you questions and conceptual apparatus, till the question vanishes. |
| 3076 | Defining dispositions is circular [Harman] |
| Full Idea: There is no noncircular way to specify dispositions; for they are dispositions to behave given certain situations, and the situations must be include beliefs about the situation, and desires concerning it. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: This is nowadays accepted dogmatically as the biggest objection to behaviourism, but it could be challenged. Your analysis may begin by mentioning beliefs and desires, but if you keep going they may eventually fade out of the picture. |
| 2464 | Type physicalism equates mental kinds with physical kinds [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Type physicalism is, roughly, the doctrine that psychological kinds are identical to neurological kinds. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], App A n.1) | |
| A reaction: This gets my general support, leaving open the nature of 'kinds'. Presumably the identity is strict, as in 'Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus'. It seems unlikely that if you and I think the 'same' thought, that we have strictly identical brain states. |
| 2447 | Hume has no theory of the co-ordination of the mind [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: What Hume didn't see was that the causal and representational properties of mental symbols have somehow to be coordinated if the coherence of mental life is to be accounted for. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Certainly the idea that it all somehow becomes magic at the point where the brain represents the world is incoherent - but it is a bit magical. How can the whole of my garden be in my brain? Weird. |
| 3075 | Could a cloud have a headache if its particles formed into the right pattern? [Harman] |
| Full Idea: If the right pattern of electrical discharges occurred in a cloud instead of in a brain, would that also be a headache? | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: The standard objection to functionalism is to propose absurd implementations of a mind, but probably only a brain could produce the right electro-chemical combination. |
| 2440 | Propositional attitudes are propositions presented in a certain way [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Propositional attitudes are really three-place relations, between a creature, a proposition, and a mode of presentation (which are sentences of Mentalese). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about 'really'! Why do we need a creature? Isn't 'hoping it will rain' a propositional attitude which some creature may or may not have? Fodor wants it to be physical, but it's abstract? |
| 2450 | Rationality has mental properties - autonomy, productivity, experiment [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mentalism isn't gratuitous; you need it to explain rationality. Mental causation buys you behaviours that are unlike reflexes in at least three ways: they're autonomous, they're productive, and they're experimental. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: He makes his three ways sound all-or-nothing, which is (I believe) the single biggest danger when thinking about the mind. "Either you are conscious, or you are not..." |
| 3086 | Are there any meanings apart from in a language? [Harman] |
| Full Idea: The theory of language-independent meanings or semantic representations is mistaken. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 6.5) | |
| A reaction: This would make him (in Dummett's terms) a 'philosopher of language' rather than a 'philosopher of thought'. Personally I disagree. Don't animals have 'meanings'? Can two sentences share a meaning? |
| 2437 | XYZ (Twin Earth 'water') is an impossibility [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: There isn't any XYZ, and there couldn't be any, and so we don't have to worry about it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: Jadeite and Nephrite are real enough, which are virtually indistinguishable variants of jade. You just need Twin Jewellers instead of Twin Earths. We could build them, and employ twins to work there. |
| 2441 | Truth conditions require a broad concept of content [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We need the idea of broad content to make sense of the fact that thoughts have the truth-conditions that they do. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be (as Dummett points out) a potential circularity here, as you can hardly know the truth-conditions of something if you don't already know its content. |
| 3114 | Concepts aren't linked to stuff; they are what is caused by stuff [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If the words of 'Swamp Man' (spontaneously created, with concepts) are about XYZ on Twin Earth, it is not because he's causally connected to the stuff, but because XYZ would cause his 'water' tokens (in the absence of H2O). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], App B) | |
| A reaction: The sight of the Eiffel tower causes my 'France' tokens, so is my word "France" about the Eiffel Tower? What would cause my 'nothing' tokens? |
| 2452 | Knowing the cause of a thought is almost knowing its content [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If you know the content of a thought, you know quite a lot about what would cause you to have it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure where this fits into the great jigsaw of the mind, but it strikes me as an acute and important observation. The truth of a thought is not essential to make you have it. Ask Othello. |
| 2432 | Is content basically information, fixed externally? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I assume intentional content reduces (in some way) to information. …The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not the way that it is related to other thoughts. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2) | |
| A reaction: Does this make Fodor a 'weak' functionalist? The 'strong' version would say a thought is merely a location in a flow diagram, but Fodor's 'mentalism' includes a further 'content' in each diagram box. |
| 2438 | In the information view, concepts are potentials for making distinctions [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Semantics, according to the informational view, is mostly about counterfactuals; what counts for the identity of my concepts is not what I do distinguish but what I could distinguish if I cared to (even using instruments and experts). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: We all differ in our discriminations (and awareness of expertise), so our concepts would differ, which is bad news for communication (see Idea 223). The view has some plausibility, though. |
| 2439 | Semantic externalism says the concept 'elm' needs no further beliefs or inferences [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is the essence of semantic externalism that there is nothing that you have to believe, there are no inferences that you have to accept, to have the concept 'elm'. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: [REMINDER: broad content is filed in 18.C.7, under 'Thought' rather than under language. That is because I am a philospher of thought, rather than of language. |
| 3078 | Speech acts, communication, representation and truth form a single theory [Harman] |
| Full Idea: The various theories are not in competition. The theory of truth is part of the theory of representational character, which is presupposed by the theory of communication, which in turn is contained in the more general theory of speech acts. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: Certainly it seems that the supposed major contenders for a theory of meaning are just as much complements as they are competitors. |
| 2457 | If meaning is information, that establishes the causal link between the state of the world and our beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is the causal connection between the state of the world and the contents of beliefs that the reduction of meaning to information is designed to insure. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I'm not clear why characterising the contents of a belief in terms of its information has to amount to a 'reduction'. A cup of tea isn't reduced to tea. Connections imply duality. |
| 2451 | To know the content of a thought is to know what would make it true [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If you know the content of a thought, you thereby know what would make the thought true. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: The truthmaker might by physically impossible, and careful thought might show it to be contradictory - but that wouldn't destroy the meaning. |
| 2433 | For holists no two thoughts are ever quite the same, which destroys faith in meaning [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If what you are thinking depends on all of what you believe, then nobody ever thinks the same thing twice. …That is why so many semantic holists (Quine, Putnam, Rorty, Churchland, probably Wittgenstein) end up being semantic eliminativists. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2b) | |
| A reaction: If linguistic holism is nonsense, this is easily settled. What I say about breakfast is not changed by reading some Gibbon yesterday. |
| 3090 | There is only similarity in meaning, never sameness in meaning [Harman] |
| Full Idea: The only sort of sameness of meaning we know is similarity in meaning, not exact sameness of meaning. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 6.8) | |
| A reaction: The Eiffel Tower and le tour Eiffel? If you want to be difficult, you can doubt whether the word 'fast' ever has exactly the same meaning in two separate usages of the word. |
| 3082 | Ambiguity is when different underlying truth-conditional structures have the same surface form [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Ambiguity results from the possibility of transforming different underlying truth-conditional structures into the same surface form. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: Personally I would call a 'truth-conditional structure' a 'proposition', and leave it to the philosophers to decide what a proposition is. |
| 2436 | It is claimed that reference doesn't fix sense (Jocasta), and sense doesn't fix reference (Twin Earth) [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that Frege cases [knowing Jocasta but not mother] show that reference doesn't determine sense, and Twin cases [knowing water but not H2O] show that sense doesn't determine reference. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.3) | |
| A reaction: How about 'references don't contain much information', and 'descriptions may not fix what they are referring to'? Simple really. |
| 2434 | Broad semantics holds that the basic semantic properties are truth and denotation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Broad semantic theories generally hold that the basic semantic properties of thoughts are truth and denotation. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2b) | |
| A reaction: I think truth and denotation are the basic semantic properties, but I am dubious about whole-hearted broad semantic theories, so I seem to have gone horribly wrong somewhere. |
| 2459 | Externalist semantics are necessary to connect the contents of beliefs with how the world is [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You need an externalist semantics to explain why the contents of beliefs should have anything to do with how the world is. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Since externalist semantics only emerged in the 1970s, that implies that no previous theory had any notion that language had some connection to how the world is. Eh? |
| 3079 | Truth in a language is explained by how the structural elements of a sentence contribute to its truth conditions [Harman] |
| Full Idea: A theory of truth for a language shows how the truth conditions of any sentence depend on the structure of that sentence. The theory will say, for each element of structure, what its contribution is. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: This just seems to push the problem of truth back a stage, as you need to know where the truth is to be found in the elements from which the structure is built. |
| 3085 | Sentences are different from propositions, since two sentences can express one proposition [Harman] |
| Full Idea: 'Bob and John play golf' and 'John and Bob play golf' are equivalent; but if they were to be derived from the same underlying structure, one or the other of Bob and John would have to come first; and either possibility is arbitrary. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 6.4) | |
| A reaction: If I watch Bob and John play golf, neither of them 'comes first'. A proposition about them need not involve 'coming first'. Only if you insist on formulating a sentence must you decide on that. |
| 3087 | The analytic/synthetic distinction is a silly division of thought into encyclopaedia and dictionary [Harman] |
| Full Idea: No purpose is served by thinking that certain principles available to a person are contained in his internal encyclopaedia - and therefore only synthetic - whereas other principles are part of his internal dictionary - and are therefore analytic. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 6.5) | |
| A reaction: If it led to two different ways to acquire knowledge, then quite a lot of purpose would be served. He speaks like a pragmatist. The question is whether some statements just are true because of some feature of meaning. Why not? |
| 3083 | Many predicates totally resist translation, so a universal underlying structure to languages is unlikely [Harman] |
| Full Idea: There are many predicates of a given language that resist translation into another language, …so it is unlikely that there is a basic set of underlying structures common to all languages. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: Not convincing. 'Structures' are not the same as 'predicates'. Once a language has mapped its predicates, that blocks the intrusions of differently sliced alien predicates. No gaps. |