PHIL 415 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Georg Cantor
12 Jun 2018
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How do meaning, truth, and reference hang together?
Frege starts off on the dominant way of thinking about meaning – truth-conditional
semantics
The meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions
Another way of doing things: Davidson
To have a theory of meaning, we need it to be connected to other things
A theory of meaning in isolation is not a good theory
David Lewis: If he says something should be done, he goes and does it
He says, you can think of all of these practices as conventions, think of it as a convention
of trust and truthfulness…
So, we agree to abide by the usual maxims of conversation
Why can’t we mean whatever we want words to mean?
In one way, we can intend anything we want
If there were only private languages, there would no languages at all
We did see that there’s a crucial role to be played by the speaker’s intention
Nevertheless, with David Lewis points out the crucial role of conventions in
communication
If you expect to be understood by other people, you have to communicate in such a way
that makes it possible to understand you
Why can’t you not mean whatever you want, just as we have creativity of freedom, your
freedom to intend what you want to intent are constrained by conventions and needing to
use language in such a way that we want others to follow
Georg Cantor: “The essence of mathematics lies precisely in its freedom”
But there is only one correct answer, how could there be any creativity or freedom about
that?
We are free and constrained at the same time, just as we are in language use
There’s a tension between creativity and rule-governess
Philosophy of Language is doing very well
There is a lot of potential in this field
It’s a safe area of specialty for going for, for the PhD
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Frege starts off on the dominant way of thinking about meaning truth-conditional semantics. The meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions. To have a theory of meaning, we need it to be connected to other things. A theory of meaning in isolation is not a good theory. David lewis: if he says something should be done, he goes and does it. He says, you can think of all of these practices as conventions, think of it as a convention of trust and truthfulness . So, we agree to abide by the usual maxims of conversation. In one way, we can intend anything we want. If there were only private languages, there would no languages at all. We did see that there"s a crucial role to be played by the speaker"s intention. Nevertheless, with david lewis points out the crucial role of conventions in communication.
