From: PBurns-AT-lmumail.lmu.edu Date: Wed, 29 May 1996 10:55:52 -0700 Subject: Re: Peter on pomo phil Jukka Laari asks: >Do you mean that cartesian 'foundation' were 'clear and >distinct ideas' and not 'cartesian cogito' (usual reference >in several post-discourses)? Roughly speaking, the Cartesian cogito is a basic example of what Descartes thought were clear and distinct ideas 'in action'--ideas of self, existence, thought, etc. From there he went on to using the idea of God to guarantee protection from corrupt ideas. But the rationalist tradition continued after Descartes to rely on allegedly self-evident basic truths, self-evident because the ideas contained in them were alleged clear and distinct; so here I'm referring to that whole tradition which sought the foundations of knowledge in a priori "intellection" (Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel, and and the other German idealists such as Fichte, Schelling, etc, rather than in sense-data or sensory experience. It gets a bit confusing because the empiricists like Locke, Hume and Berkeley also used the terminology of 'ideas' to mean something less intellectual and more based on the physical senses. > 2) the semantic doctrine of indeterminacy of meaning and > reference. (roughly, a cluster of views, to wit: that > there are no metaphysically robust and well-defined > entities like 'senses' (i.e. meanings), pace Frege; that > reference is a socially constucted, not a metaphysically > robust relation What this would mean in context of Fregean example of Bedeutung vs. Sinn / Meaning vs. Sense? That planet Venus as sense could be socially constructed? How would it be possible? [In this example: sense is 'planet Venus', meanings are 'morning star' and 'evening star'.] (Or am I doing translation error - Bedeutung=sense, Sinn=meaning? I have to check this..) In the Fregean view, the name 'Venus' has both a sense (Sinn) and a reference (Bedeutung). The sense would be a definite description such as 'the third most distant planet from the sun, which appears in a certain portion of the sky in the morning and a certain other portion of the sky in the evening'. The reference would be the actual planet itself--the physical object out there in the solar system. In fact for Frege's own purpose of distinguishing sense from reference, he argued that the sense of 'morning star' is different from the sense of 'evening star' but their reference is the same, and it is this fact which explains why 'The morning star is the evening star' is a cognitively informative statement that might be discovered by astronomers, whereas 'The morning star is the morning star' or 'Venus is Venus' are truths which are not cognitively informative and don't need any empirical work in astronomy to discover. The view he was the attacking was that meaning was simply a matter of reference, the idea that what a terms means is the object in the world it stands for or refers to or designates--this is sometimes called the 'Fido'-Fido theory of meaning. The later Wittgenstein and Quine are rejecting the whole notion that individual terms have a definite, well-determined sense. For these anti-Fregeans, there are no such things as senses in any metaphysically robust sense (pun intended). Fregean senses do not exist, there are only social/linguistic behaviors of various sorts, e.g. tendencies to utter certain noises when other noises get uttered come to be meaningful in what Wittgenstein called a form of life (a bundle of social practices). For Quine the key bundle of social practices for meaning and truth are those involved in science, engineering and technology, but he justifies this on pragmatic grounds. He doesn't really try to give a non-pragmatic, justification for the epistemological primacy of science. > At the time and for decades afterwards, > analytic philosophy was dismissed by other disciplines > as totally useless mind-numbing lifeless shit. One remark: It isn't necessarily so simple. After WW2 there happened drastic changes in social sciences in favour of (then) logical-analytical philosophy (in Europe, I mean). Partly because of Niedergang of German culture, partly because of other reasons (social scientists looked for empirically more fruitful foundations, or somesuch). There was a trend towards 'late-Wittgensteinian and Quinean foundations' althought not necessarily under these banners. That trend was perhaps particularly strong in Nothern Europe Perhaps, but I was referring not simply to Continental thinkers but to humanities departments within the English-speaking world, in which analytic philosophy was regularly and ignorantly trashed for years. Peter --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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