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I feel like my brain is growing, literally, after this one. I should've learnt this while studying English philology, but my course sucked. Trying to make up for this now, getting Tarski's concept of truth (disquotationalism), possible world semantics, Two-dimensional semantics etc. Very educating on the current developments in the linguistic theory.

"I feel like my brain is growing, literally, after this one. I should've learnt this while studying English philology, but my course sucked. Trying to make up for this now, getting Tarski's concept of truth (disquotationalism), possible world semantics, Two-dimensional semantics etc. Very educating on the current developments in the linguistic theory."

*dictionary!

I feel like my brain is growing, literally, after this one. I should've learnt this while studying English philosophy, but my course sucked. Trying to make up for this now, getting Tarski's concept of truth (disquotationalism), possible world semantics, Two-dimensional semantics etc. Very educating on the current developments in the linguistic theory.

After Quine's attack on analyticity, Sellars comes to finish the job. He tears all the remaining linchpins of foundationalism. His effort results in a double kill; both the dogma of rationalism is axed, along with dogmas of empiricism. There is no "given" to us by the senses, knowledge requires no foundation. Everything, including conceptuality is acquired through stimulus and experience by contact with environment.

It does seem to me that Quine's essay "On what there is" is largely pointless. It doesn't add anything interesting atop of Russell's definite descriptions. We should not talk about "The unicorn" and other metaphysical entities as real because there is no such unique unicorn x for all beings y, in the domain of known beings, that is a that unicorn y. What we're having is a sense without reference, as Frege points out.

Fresh after reading "Two Dogmas..." Essay. Quine should be most accurately described as The Destroyer, as one of the other reviews concluded. He, single-handedly, destroyed all the hopes for analyticity and purely logical vision of science (Carnap). Despire the general acceptance of Quine's scientific method (confirmation holism) there isn't many programmes actively doing it (apart from Fodor), which is surprising.

Kim's arguments are very interesting but I believe that Ned Block has a point against his supervenience argument. Overdetermination and physical exclusion seem like silly criteria for a truly physics-based explanation of the world. It is also interesting how he turns casual drainage argument against the Block. I believe that instantiation of physical property P* by property P cannot be the full explanation.