Indeterminacy Of Translation
The indeterminacy of translation is a thesis propounded by 20th-century American analytic philosopher W. V. Quine. The classic statement of this thesis can be found in his 1960 book ''Word and Object'', which gathered together and refined much of Quine's previous work on subjects other than formal logic and set theory. The indeterminacy of translation is also discussed at length in his ''Ontological Relativity''. Crispin Wright suggests that this "has been among the most widely discussed and controversial theses in modern analytical philosophy". This view is endorsed by Putnam who states that it is "the most fascinating and the most discussed philosophical argument since Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the Categories". Three aspects of indeterminacy arise, of which two relate to indeterminacy of translation. The three indeterminacies are (i) inscrutability of reference, and (ii) holophrastic indeterminacy, and (iii) the underdetermination of scientific theory. The last of th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Analytic Philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and continues today. Analytic philosophy is often contrasted with continental philosophy, coined as a catch-all term for other methods prominent in Europe. Central figures in this historical development of analytic philosophy are Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Other important figures in its history include the logical positivists (particularly Rudolf Carnap), W. V. O. Quine, and Karl Popper. After the decline of logical positivism, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others led a revival in metaphysics. Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny and others brought analytic approach to Thomism. Analytic philosophy is characterized by an empha ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pragmatic , a political outlook opposing significant shift to the left or the right
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Pragmatism is a philosophical movement. Pragmatism or pragmatic may also refer to: *Pragmaticism, Charles Sanders Peirce's post-1905 branch of philosophy *Pragmatics, a subfield of linguistics and semiotics *''Pragmatics'', an academic journal in the field of pragmatics *Pragmatic ethics, a theory of normative philosophical ethics *''Realpolitik'', politics or diplomacy based primarily on practical considerations rather than ideological notions, simply referred to as "pragmatism" in politics See also *Centrism Centrism is a political outlook or position involving acceptance or support of a balance of social equality and a degree of social hierarchy while opposing political changes that would result in a significant shift of society strongly to the l ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dagfinn Føllesdal
Dagfinn Føllesdal (born 22 June 1932) is a Norwegian-American philosopher. He is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University, and professor emeritus at the University of Oslo. Biography and career Føllesdal was born in Askim. After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Oslo, he attended Harvard University and earned his Ph.D. in 1961 under Willard Van Orman Quine. He taught at Harvard University from 1961 to 1964, and began teaching at Stanford University in 1968. Føllesdal is a member of the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He resides at Tanum. He is a practicing Roman Catholic. He regularly participates in the sport of Orienteering. Philosophical work Føllesdal has written extensively on topics relating to the philosophy of language, phenomenology, existentia ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is a paper by analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine published in 1951. According to University of Sydney professor of philosophy Peter Godfrey-Smith, this "paper ssometimes regarded as the most important in all of twentieth-century philosophy". The paper is an attack on two central aspects of the logical positivists' philosophy: the first being the analytic–synthetic distinction between analytic truths and synthetic truths, explained by Quine as truths grounded only in meanings and independent of facts, and truths grounded in facts; the other being reductionism, the theory that each meaningful statement gets its meaning from some logical construction of terms that refer exclusively to immediate experience. "Two Dogmas" has six sections. The first four focus on analyticity, the last two on reductionism. There, Quine turns the focus to the logical positivists' theory of meaning. He also presents his own holistic theory of meaning. Analytici ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Radical Translation
Radical translation is a thought experiment in ''Word and Object'', a major philosophical work from American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. It is used as an introduction to his theory of the indeterminacy of translation, and specifically to prove the point of inscrutability of reference. Using this concept of radical translation, Quine paints a setting where a linguist discovers a native linguistic community whose linguistic system is completely unrelated to any language familiar to the linguist. Quine then describes the steps taken by the linguist while attempting to fully translate this unfamiliar language based on the only data available: the events happening around the linguist combined with the verbal and non-verbal behaviour of natives. Direct translation As a first step, the linguist will use direct translation on occasion sentences. Hearing a lot of utterances of the one-word-sentence 'Gavagai' whenever the linguist sees rabbits, he suspects the one-word-sentence 'Rabb ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Radical Interpretation
Radical interpretation is interpretation of a speaker, including attributing beliefs and desires to them and meanings to their words, from scratch—that is, without relying on translators, dictionaries, or specific prior knowledge of their mental states. The term was introduced by American philosopher Donald Davidson (1973) and is meant to suggest important similarity to W. V. O. Quine's term radical translation, which occurs in his work on the indeterminacy of translation. Radical translation is translation of a speaker's language, without prior knowledge, by observing the speaker's use of the language in context.Davidson, Donald. Radical Interpretation. Originally published in Dialectica, 27 (1973), 314-28. Reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (2n. ed. 125-39). New York: Clarendon Press. Even more so than radical translation did for Quine, radical interpretation plays an important role in Davidson's work, but the exact nature of this role is up for debate. Some ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Philosophy Of Language
In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought. Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell were pivotal figures in analytic philosophy's "linguistic turn". These writers were followed by Ludwig Wittgenstein ('' Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus''), the Vienna Circle, logical positivists, and Willard Van Orman Quine. In continental philosophy, language is not studied as a separate discipline. Rather, it is an inextricable part of many other areas of thought, such as phenomenology, structural semiotics, language of mathematics, hermeneutics, existentialism, deconstruction and critical theory. History Ancient philosophy In the West, inquiry into language stretches back to the 5th century BC with Socrates, Plato, Aristotl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Naturalized Epistemology
Naturalized epistemology (a term coined by W. V. O. Quine) is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying knowledge shifts focus to the empirical processes of knowledge acquisition and away from many traditional philosophical questions. There are noteworthy distinctions within naturalized epistemology. Replacement naturalism maintains that traditional epistemology should be abandoned and replaced with the methodologies of the natural sciences. The general thesis of cooperative naturalism is that traditional epistemology can benefit in its inquiry by using the knowledge we have gained from the cognitive sciences. Substantive naturalism focuses on an asserted equality of facts of knowledge and natural facts. Objections to naturalized epistemology have targeted features of the general project as well as characteristics of specific versions. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Meta-ontology
Meta-ontology is the study of the field of inquiry known as Ontology. The goal of meta-ontology is to clarify what ontology is about and how to interpret the meaning of ontological claims. Different meta-ontological theories disagree on what the goal of ontology is and whether a given issue or theory lies within the scope of ontology. There is no universal agreement whether meta-ontology is a separate field of inquiry besides ontology or whether it is just one branch of ontology. Meta-ontological realists hold that there are objective answers to the basic questions of ontology. According to the Quinean approach, the goal of ontology is to determine what exists and what doesn't exist. The neo-Aristotelian approach asserts that the goal of ontology is to determine which entities are fundamental and how the non-fundamental entities depend on them. Meta-ontological anti-realists, on the other hand, deny that there are objective answers to the basic questions of ontology. One example of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Meaning (linguistics)
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science. History In English, the study of meaning in language has been known by many names that involve the Ancient Greek word (''sema'', "sign, mark, token"). In 1690, a Greek rendering of the term ''semiotics'', the interpretation of signs and symbols, finds an early allusion in John Locke's ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'': The third Branch may be called [''simeiotikí'', "semiotics"], or the Doctrine of Signs, the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also , Logick. In 1831, the term is suggested for the third branch of division of knowledge akin to Locke; the "signs of our knowledge". In 1857, the term ''semasiology'' (borrowed from German ''Semasiologie'') is attested in Josiah W. Gibbs' '' ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Duhem–Quine Thesis
The Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, after Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine, is that in science it is impossible to experimentally test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions (also called ''auxiliary assumptions'' or ''auxiliary hypotheses''): the thesis says that unambiguous scientific falsifications are impossible.: "The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses" (Duhem)... "Duhem denies that unambiguous falsification procedures do exist in science." In recent decades the set of associated assumptions supporting a thesis sometimes is called a ''bundle of hypotheses''. Although a bundle of hypotheses (i.e. a hypothesis and its background assumptions) ''as a whole'' can be tested against the empirical world and be falsified if it fails the test, the Duhem–Quine thesis says it is impossible ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |