13 ideas
| 18009 | Chomsky established the view that category mistakes are well-formed but meaningless [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The view of Chomsky in 1957 that category mistakes are syntactically well-formed but meaningless is a very standard one. | |
| From: report of Noam Chomsky (Syntactic Structure [1957]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 1.3 | |
| A reaction: I'm going off the idea that they are meaningless, largely because I am beginning to sympathise with the view that any composition of meaningful components is meaningful (even if blatantly false). |
| 21642 | If quantification is all substitutional, there is no ontology [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Ontology is meaningless for a theory whose only quantification is substitutionally construed. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968], p.64), quoted by Thomas Hofweber - Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics 03.5.1 n18 | |
| A reaction: Hofweber views it as none the worse for that, since clearly lots of quantification has no ontological commitment at all. But he says it is rightly called 'a nominalists attempt at a free lunch'. |
| 1633 | Absolute ontological questions are meaningless, because the answers are circular definitions [Quine] |
| Full Idea: What makes ontological questions meaningless when taken absolutely is not universality but circularity. A question of the form "What is an F?" can only be answered with "An F is a G", which makes sense relative to the uncritical acceptance of G. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968], p.53) |
| 18964 | Ontology is relative to both a background theory and a translation manual [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Ontology is doubly relative. Specifying the universe of a theory makes sense only relative to some background theory, and only relative to some choice of a manual of translation of one theory into another. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968], p.54) | |
| A reaction: People tend to forget about the double nature of Quine's notion of ontological commitment, and usually only talk about the commitment of the theory being employed. Why is the philosophical community not devoting itself to the study of tranlation manuals? |
| 18965 | We know what things are by distinguishing them, so identity is part of ontology [Quine] |
| Full Idea: We cannot know what something is without knowing how it is marked off from other things. Identity is thus of a piece with ontology. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968], p.55) | |
| A reaction: Actually it is failure of identity which seems to raise questions of individuation. If I say 'this apple is [pause] identical to this apple', I don't see how that helps me to individuate apples. |
| 18969 | How do you distinguish three beliefs from four beliefs or two beliefs? [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Suppose I say that I have given up precisely three beliefs since lunch. An over-coarse individuation could reduce the number to two, and an over-fine one could raise it to four. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Propositional Objects [1965], p.144) | |
| A reaction: Obviously if you ask how many beliefs I hold, it would be crazy to give a precise answer. But if I search for my cat, I give up my belief that it is in the kitchen, in the lounge and in the bathroom. That's precise enough to be three beliefs, I think. |
| 1634 | Two things are relative - the background theory, and translating the object theory into the background theory [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Relativity has two components: to the choice of a background theory, and to the choice of how to translate the object theory into the background theory. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968], p.67) |
| 8470 | Reference is inscrutable, because we cannot choose between theories of numbers [Quine, by Orenstein] |
| Full Idea: For Quine, we cannot sensibly ask which is the real number five, the Frege-Russell set or the Von Neumann one. There is no arithmetical or empirical way of deciding between the two. Reference is inscrutable. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968]) by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: To generalise from a problem of reference in the highly abstract world of arithmetic, and say that all reference is inscrutable, strikes me as implausible. |
| 18007 | Syntax is independent of semantics; sentences can be well formed but meaningless [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
| Full Idea: In 1957 Chomsky argues that syntax is an independent field from semantics. …To support this claim he argues that the now-famous category mistake 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously' is grammatical but meaningless. | |
| From: report of Noam Chomsky (Syntactic Structure [1957]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 1.3 | |
| A reaction: I'm tempted by the thought that this famous sentence actually is meaningful, although the meaning is fragmentary, and any proposition which can be assembled from it appears to be blatantly false. |
| 18967 | A 'proposition' is said to be the timeless cognitive part of the meaning of a sentence [Quine] |
| Full Idea: A 'proposition' is the meaning of a sentence. More precisely, since propositions are supposed to be true or false once and for all, it is the meaning of an eternal sentence. More precisely still, it is the 'cognitive' meaning, involving truth, not poetry. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Propositional Objects [1965], p.139) | |
| A reaction: Quine defines this in order to attack it. I equate a proposition with a thought, and take a sentence to be an attempt to express a proposition. I have no idea why they are supposed to be 'timeless'. Philosophers have some very odd ideas. |
| 18968 | The problem with propositions is their individuation. When do two sentences express one proposition? [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The trouble with propositions, as cognitive meanings of eternal sentences, is individuation. Given two eternal sentences, themselves visibly different linguistically, it is not sufficiently clear under when to say that they mean the same proposition. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Propositional Objects [1965], p.140) | |
| A reaction: If a group of people agree that two sentences mean the same thing, which happens all the time, I don't see what gives Quine the right to have a philosophical moan about some dubious activity called 'individuation'. |
| 18963 | Indeterminacy translating 'rabbit' depends on translating individuation terms [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The indeterminacy between 'rabbit', 'rabbit stage' and the rest depended only on a correlative indeterminacy of translation of the English apparatus of individuation - pronouns, plurals, identity, numerals and so on. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Ontological Relativity [1968], p.35) | |
| A reaction: This spells out the problem a little better than in 'Word and Object'. I just don't believe these problems are intractable. Quine is like a child endlessly asking 'why?'. |
| 18970 | The concept of a 'point' makes no sense without the idea of absolute position [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Unless we are prepared to believe that absolute position makes sense, the very idea of a point as an entity in its own right must be rejected as not merely mysterious but absurd. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Propositional Objects [1965], p.149) | |
| A reaction: The fact that without absolute position we can only think of 'points' as relative to a conceptual grid doesn't stop the grid from picking out actual locations in space, as shown by latitude and longitude. |