- ...1994
- ©1994, John Perry
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- ...hopeless.
- Donald Davidson, ``Reality
Without Reference'', in Mark Platts, ; editor, Reference, Truth and
Reality:
Essays on the Philosophy of Language (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1980), pp. 134-135.
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- ...stands.
- Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan,
1953), p. 2.
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- ...activities.''
- Davidson, p. 137
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- ...passages.
- Wittgenstein, p.24. Of course I don't
really know how Davidson feels about various passages from
Frege, but I do recall that he cites this one a lot. The
closest Davidson comes to quoting the dictum in this
particular paper is by citing a paper of Wallace's that
takes the dictum as its title.
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- ...terms....
- Davidson, p. 135.
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- ...activities.
- Davidson, p. 137.
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- ...facts.
- Actually, if we take
``abstraction'' literally, more needs to be said; there is an
important difference between claiming that the reference
facts are derivative and claiming that they are
abstractions.
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- ...idea.
- Davidson's thoughts on the history of this
idea are compact and can be quoted in full: ``We have to go back
to the early British empiricists for fairly clear examples
of building-block theories (Berkeley, Hume, Mill). The
ambitious attempts at behavioristic analyses of meaning by
Ogden and Richards and Charles Morris are not clear cases,
for these authors tended to blur the distinction between
words and sentences (`Fire!', `Slab!' `Block!') and much of
what they said applies intelligibly only to sentences as the
basic atoms for analysis. Quine, in chapter II of Word and
Object, attempts a behavioristic analysis, but although his
most famous example (`Gavagai') is a single word, it is
explicitly treated as a sentence. Grice, if I understand
his project, wants to explain linguistic meaning ultimately
by appeal to nonlinguistic intentions - but again it is
the meaning of sentences, not of words, that are to be
analyzed in terms of something else. The historical
picture, much simplified, shows that as the problems became
clearer and the methods more sophisticated, behaviorists and
others who would give a radical analysis of language and
communication have given up the building-block approach in
favor of an approach that makes the sentence the focus of
empirical interpretation.'' (p. 135)
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- ...call..."
- Wittgenstein, p. 3
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- ...nothing.
- Wittgenstein, p. 5.
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- ...in.
- See footnote 10.
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- ...revision.
- Donald Davidson, ``Truth and Meaning,''
Syntheses, 17 (1967), pp. 320ff.
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- ...conceivable.
- Thanks to Eros Corazza, David Israel, Jerry
Seligman, Anil Gupta, Dagfinn Follesdal and Elizabeth Macken for
comments on various version of this essay.
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