It's one of the many jokes he scatters through the text — Banno
SO no thing makes a statement true; that is, there is no depth in being true, nothing to be explained, no correspondence to facts or what ever. Quite deflating. — Banno
Thus falls the Churchland's attempt to eliminate folk psychology. — Banno
I do not think that conceptual schemes inhere in the mind without or prior to language. To quite the contrary...
— creativesoul
Glad to hear it. But sometimes. — Banno
I suggest, following Quine, that we may without circularity or unwarranted assumptions accept certain very general attitudes towards sentences as the basic evidence for a theory of radical interpretation. For the sake of the present discussion at least we may depend on the attitude of accepting as true, directed at sentences, as the crucial notion. (A more full-blooded theory would look to other attitudes towards sentences as well, such as wishing true, wondering whether true, intending to make true, and so on). Attitudes are indeed involved here, but the fact that the main issue is not begged can be seen from this: if we merely know that someone holds a certain sentence to be true, we know neither what he means by the sentence nor what belief his holding it true represents. His holding the sentence true is thus the vector of two forces: the problem of interpretation is to abstract from the evidence a workable theory of meaning and an acceptable theory of belief.
I'm not grasping coming from the generalized form that Davidson cites
"S is true iff P"
to the conclusion that we could not make sense of a simultaneously true and untranslatable "x" — Moliere
We recognize sentences like" 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white" to be trivially true.Yet the totality of such English sentences uniquely determines the extension of the concept of truth for English.
Eliminative materialism — Banno
Any given conceptual scheme must be both true and meaningful - if not to us, then to those who understand it. Consider someone who has found an incommensurable conceptual scheme. They must be in a position to say "here is a conceptual scheme that is true and meaningful to those who adhere to it, and yet is not translatable into our conceptual scheme".
Now, how could they recognise it as meaningful and true, and yet not have some translation of it?
That is, if there were incommensurable conceptual schemes, we could not recognise them as such.
Hence consideration of incommensurable conceptual schemes makes no sense - literally, is meaningless. — Banno
Those reservations are to do with there not being any facts of the mater, apart from that snow is white... — Banno
I think Davidson's example of the Minister of Scientific Language eliminates eliminative materialism. — Banno
Did he? — creativesoul
The point is that for a theory to fit or face up to the totality of possible sensory evidence is for that theory to be true.
It's a lot to read through. — Janus
Do they have to recognize it as being meaningful and true, or merely recognize that it could be meaningful and true for all they know? — Janus
I think Davidson's example of the Minister of Scientific Language eliminates eliminative materialism. — Banno
Belief as a propositional attitude; something perhaps you cannot accept. — Banno
Right, you're not interested in being challenged: I understand. — Janus
I'm with Austin: the language we use every day has evolved over tens of thousands of years; what we have is what has survived generation after generation of elimination of weak expression. It'sour best bet. — Banno
I think the point about the ministry was that a change in terminological use alone does not always guarantee talking about the same things(referents). — creativesoul
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