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Re:The power of language 2 Years, 2 Months ago
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leonardomenderes wrote:
A bit off...perhaps, more like many thousands.
Still "not very many" when compared to the total number of people alive on Earth today, though.
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Re:The power of language 2 Years, 2 Months ago
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Szavieur wrote: Anyone well-versed enough in philosophy knows that linguistic considerations have some great power over how philosophers reach their conclusions, right? But it often seems (and I emphasize that this is just seeming) to me as if this power is regarded as one of imprisonment: dispirited (or dispiriting) talk of "the limits of language"
While ordinary language is social in origin and is bound by the limitations of common experience, there is language for imagined experience, ideals without reference, and vague concepts with precise references like the ones I mention in the other thread, below.
What Plato meant by Virtue or Beauty will forever remain a mystery. But Aristotle's causes or Kant's Categories are precise enough to kick up controversy.
If we create a theoretical world, we can either make up new keywords or give new meaning to old ones. Just look at theories of personality, biochemistry, or baseball. They had fun coining.
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Re:The power of language 2 Years, 2 Months ago
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side-conversation:
I think we can get lots of insight into what Virtue and Beauty meant in Plato by looking at what would make sense to be at stake in the dialogues.
Trying to characterize what the soul is in Phaedo only takes us looking at what would have mattered to Socrates as he faced his own death.
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Re:The power of language 2 Years, 2 Months ago
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Aaahhh! The great Phaedo. A dialogue for eternity.
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Re:The power of language 2 Years, 1 Month ago
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Here's maybe a good example of imprisoning yourself (conceptually) in your language:
A particularly vivid way to feel the force of Quine's challenge is afforded by a recent case that came before the Ontario Supreme Court concerning whether laws that confined marriage to heterosexual couples violated the equal protection clause of the constitution (see Halpern et al. 2001). The question was regarded as turning in part on the meaning of the word “marriage”, and each party to the dispute solicited affidavits from philosophers, one of whom claimed that the meaning of the word was tied to heterosexuality, the other that it wasn't. Putting aside the complex socio-political issues, Quine's challenge can be regarded as a reasonably sceptical request to know precisely what the argument is about, and how any serious theory of the world might settle it. It certainly wouldn't be sufficient merely to claim that marriage is/isn't necessarily heterosexual on the basis of “platitudes,” much less on “an act of rational insight [into] the propositional content itself”; or because speakers found the inference from marriage to heterosexuality “primitively compelling” and couldn't imagine gay people getting married! (In this connection see also the data of “experimental philosophy” in §4.4 below.) (Rey, "The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction," sec. 4.1)
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