19
The teacher's goal when asking is not merely to obtain a correct answer (spoiler alert, because they already know the answer), but for the students to demonstrate knowledge, in order to make sure the lesson is assimilated. By merely parroting the question, the student demonstrates no knowledge.
Also, "the derivative of f is the derivative of f" is ...
17
The unstated assumption is that the person asking the question is asking for an answer that is in the simplest form. "What is 2+2?" could better be expressed as "What natural number is equal to 2+2?". The answer 4 is simpler than the description 2+2. "What is the derivative of the function x?" means, "What function, ...
16
Short Answer
When you use talk about "expressions" and "objects" to which they refer, you are in the domain of semiotics, linguistics, and the philosophy of language.
Semioticians talk about symbol, reference, and referent. Analytical philosophers tend to talk in terms of sense and reference. In computer science, there are variables that ...
15
Wittgenstein in his intermediate period provided a response, before the age of AI research and Searle's objections. In a nutshell: semantics is another syntax. Words only mean as role players in a linguistic calculus, and their meaning reduces to the collection of rules governing their use in the calculus. Of course, he was thinking of mathematics and ...
11
Snobbery and present-chauvenism could be good explanations of why people make claims about scientific progress if those who argue for scientific progress being a real phenomenon were to defend progress by appealing to our superiority. For example, they might argue that we're superior, intelligent, evolved people, so we know best. They might say that claims ...
11
It is a natural idea, but unfortunately the answer is no, it is not feasible. The root of incompleteness is not numbers, but the possibility of (implicit) self-reference, arithmetic is just the simplest structure that already realizes that possibility. In fact, one does not even need the Peano arithmetic, but a much weaker Robinson arithmetic without even ...
11
Yes and no. They both criticize a certain approach to semantic theory that can be called realism about meaning. Roughly, realists see meanings as some kind of entities, although there is a wide range of opinions as to their nature. For Plato and Frege they are ideal forms occupying a separate realm, for Aristotle and Russell they are invariances of sensible ...
10
It is more than that. Even if we take the Galileo's metaphor literally, he is suggesting that there is a language of mathematics, specifically geometry, not that mathematics, as such, is a language:
"Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first ...
9
You are right that reading means interpreting, and we can never be sure that we did not misinterpret the author's intentions. But it is as with any human endeavor, we are fallible. The principle of charity only asks that we take the author's perspective seriously and in good faith. Seriousness includes researching historical and cultural background of the ...
9
The answer is straightforward in the context of Chomsky's universal grammar, which music does not fit. However, the innate grammar structures postulated by Chomsky were not as universally encountered outside of the major European and Oriental languages, and the conception has little purchase with modern linguists, see Does majority of linguists accept ...
8
I could make this a discussion about semantics or I could refer to a dictionary, but I think none of that would be very helpful.
A wide array of people
The group of people that identify themselves as atheists is not homogeneous at all, just like the group of theists (there are non-theistic religions, so I did not say 'religious people' here) is not ...
8
Bivalence and supertruth
Yes, clearly a supervaluationist makes a distinction between the truth of a particular precisification and the supertruth of a statement true for all possible precisifications, which on the face of it could imply multiple truth values rather than the pure true/false dichotomy of bivalence.
If we take for example the statement "...
8
Your view is similar to that of late Wittgenstein, after the so-called "linguistic turn". In Philosophical Investigations published in 1953 he writes “For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’—though not for all—this can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language”. He describes linguistic activity as a ...
7
There is a difference between semantic consequence expressed by truth tables, and syntactic consequence in a deductive system, some authors use ⊨ for the former and ⊢ for the latter, and the corresponding difference in equivalence. The latter can be used to capture what you are describing somewhat. In Kant's theory of conceptual containment equivalence "not ...
7
Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction is contained in a series of papers: Truth by Convention, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Carnap on Logical Truth, and in the early chapters of Word and Object. In broad brush terms he argues:
Attempts to establish that some sentences are true by virtue of their meanings is either vacuously true or viciously ...
7
In the context of the linked interview, both Chomsky and his interviewer have an understanding of the term "language" that excludes music from it.
To put it as a syllogism:
(P) All language activities involve the use of words, whether those words are expressed externally (spoken/written) or internally (your internal monologue).
(P) Music composition does ...
7
The problem with the idea that consciousness lasts forever because information is preserved is in the fact that information is being used in two different senses in your question. The differences lie in these two descriptions of the note example you gave. One sense is the physical description of information.
The amount of information contained within a ...
7
Narrowly construed the OP question is easy to answer and is not really philosophical, it concerns the colloquial semantics of "put X on Y". According to which, whatever goes on top or on the surface is X, and whatever is underneath or in the middle is Y. Given the traditional ways of applying mayo it will be mayo that is put on the eggs. However, if an ...
7
Language is about communication, not formal logic.
Most of the time, a question is asked to gain information. Usually, the information desired is about the subject of the question (e.g. “When's the train gonna get here?” is requesting information about the train), though sometimes the asker might want indirect information (e.g. whether the askee knows the ...
6
The first one (often called semantic brackets) is mostly found in formal semantics, and it's the name of the evaluation function, which maps expressions in a formal language to objects in the model of evaluation. Suppose A is the sentence "snow is white." Here's how semantic brackets are used:
[["A"]] is true ≡ snow is white
The second one (often ...
6
I dont think that they are synonyms.
Akrasia (ακρασία = insobriety ) is the explanation of not being able to do the morally good although their knowledge, ie what moral knowledge has no per se effect enforcement, employs a central problem in philosophy since antiquity. For Socrates, if anyone from people not sin on purpose, the problem is the lack of actual ...
6
See W.V.Quine, QUANTIFIERS AND PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES, in THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY (1956).
"Belief" contexts are "intensional" ones, and Quine does not "like" them because they have no satisfactory analysis in term of first-order logic.
A phrase like :
"Ralph believes that someone is a spy"
is ambiguous (I don not think that he says : "meaningless") ...
6
It would be to argue against meanings as mental or objective entities. Grice and Strawson rely on meaning as something propositional statement "inherently" has, Quine's position, like late Wittgenstein's, is to replace reified meanings with linguistic roles in social use when interpreting language. In Word and Object, that came out about a decade after the ...
6
Ice is H2O in solid state, and steam is H2O in gaseous state, so neither is H2O simpliciter and necessarily (or even actually) the other. The correct versions will be "the material of ice is necessarily H2O", "the material of steam is necessarily H2O", and "the material of steam is necessarily the material of ice". While "...
5
In set theory, the distinction you are asking about translates to the question of whether the domain of a model must be a set, or whether it is allowed to be a proper class. This is an important distinction giving rise to many subtle issues. In many mathematical contexts, we are tempted to allow a structure whose domain is a proper class, and the question is ...
5
I think what has confused you is the usual grammatical role of "nothing." It appears in sentences like:
(1) Nothing is what I got for Christmas.
(2) I gave her everything, asking for nothing in return.
It appears that "nothing" is a subject in these sentences, i.e., a thing about which other things are said. But actually the semantic value of "nothing" ...
5
"Symbiosis (from Ancient Greek σύν "together" and βίωσις "living") is close and often long-term interaction between two or more different biological species."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiosis
Assuming these married people belong to the same species, their pair-bond is not an example of symbiosis, by definition. In order for your idea to work, you ...
5
In the example, the oracle is part of the universe, that is, she plays your role (1). There are then two options:
She is governed by the same deterministic laws as the rest of the universe.
She is non-deterministic in some way, although the rest of the universe is deterministic
The latter option seems a non-starter to me -- in that case, given that the ...
5
Another option using a Possible Worlds account is to interpret "possible" and "impossible" slightly differently, making use of alternative Modal Logics for the box and diamond operators. These can still be worked into discussions about possible worlds, but the semantics of how these worlds are related to one another becomes a little more ...
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