Abstract
Contemporary thinkers either hold that meanings cannot be mental states, or that they are patterns of brain functions. But patterns of social, or brain, interactions cannot be that which we understand. Wittgenstein had another answer (not the one attributed to him by writers who ignore his work in psychology): understanding, he said, is seeing an item as embodying a type Q, thus constraining what items will be seen as “the same”. Those who cannot see things under an aspect are meaning-blind.
That idea is expanded in this article. Its ontology consists of types only: entities that recur in space, time, and possible worlds. Types (Socrates, Man, Red, On, etc.) overlap; Socrates = Bald at some index and not in another. The logic used is thus that of contingent identity. Now some possible worlds are mentally represented; the entities that occur in them are meanings. But such entities may also recur in the real world. Thus the entities we experience, the phenomena, which serve as our meanings, may be identical in the real world with real things. A correspondence theory of truth is thus developed: a sentence is true iff its meaning constitutes, in a specified way, a real situation.
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Notes
In the appendix to Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge, 1981) and in the appendix to Representation and Reality (MIT, 1988).
W. V. O. Quine: 1983, ‘Ontology and Ideology Revisited’, The Journal of Philosophy 80, 499–502: “If the subject is disposed to react to the presence of any and every cat in some manner in which he is not disposed to react to anything but cats, then I shall reckon the term ‘cat’ to his ideology”.
D. Davidson: 1989, ‘The Myth of the Subjective’, in M. Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, pp. 159–71. Quote is on p. 164.
D. Davidson: 1989, ‘The Myth of the Subjective’, in M. Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, pp. 159–71. Quote is on, p. 165.
D. Davidson: 1989, ‘The Myth of the Subjective’, in M. Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, pp. 159–71. Quote is on, p. 170.
D. Davidson: 1989, ‘The Myth of the Subjective’, in M. Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, pp. 159–71. Quote is on, p. 156.
D. Davidson: 1989, ‘The Myth of the Subjective’, in M. Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, pp. 159–71. Quote is on p. 164.
D. Davidson: 1989, ‘The Myth of the Subjective’, in M. Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, pp. 159–71. Quote is on, p. 164.
I discuss this issue in my 1989: ‘Wittgenstein on Meaning’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 33–34, 415–435.
See my 1976: ‘Substance Logic’ (with E. Walther), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 43, 55–74 “A Plea for a New Nominalism’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12, 527–37 and my 1985 ‘Numbers’, Synthese 64, 225–39.
The formalization of that statement involves a variable-binding operator, x(… x…). It is, l(J = l 1 & M = l 2 ).
J. Barwise and J. Perry: 1983, Situations and Attitudes, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
See, e.g., ‘Rationality and Believing the Impossible’, Journal of Philosophy 80, 321–38 (1983).
See S. Kripke, ‘A Puzzle about Belief, in A. Margalit (ed.): 1979, Meaning and Use, Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 239–83.
I argued that point in my 1987: Truth and Some Relativists’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 29, 1–11.
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Zemach, E.M. (1991). Human Understanding. In: Fetzer, J.H. (eds) Epistemology and Cognition. Studies in Cognitive Systems, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3716-4_11
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