PHIL 3910 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Object Language, Thought Experiment, Alien Language
13 Mar 2016
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The student of quine, the most influential anglophone philosopher of the 20th century. Quine wrote about philosophy being informed by science. He argues that there is no difference between philosophy and science: same methods, same truth. In philosophy of language, quine was influenced by empirical psychology (behaviourism), language acquisition, skinner, etc. (however, chomsky criticized skinner and quine. ) Frege posited a third realm of senses, and thought those thoughts were objective, shareable, mind-independent, but quine thought that was weird, and that language was a form of behaviour engaged in by human organisms. Quine wanted to start again and figure out meaning from a scientific point of view. He imagined a field linguist visiting a group of people hitherto unstudied by other people trying to figure out what their words mean. Such a linguist cannot take any shortcuts (translators, etc. ), but rather must interpret and translate this strange language into their mother tongue.
