🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov6.190131.25000@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU| crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:
|In article <73878@hydra.gatech.EDU| cegtitd@prism.gatech.EDU (Tim Dodd) writes:
||In article <1992Nov5.221645.26360@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU| crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:
|||In article <73795@hydra.gatech.EDU| cegtitd@prism.gatech.EDU (Tim Dodd) writes:
||This is true, but if the concept has no correspondence to any elements
||in reality, or is defined in such a way that such a correspndence can
||never be established, then by definition, the concept is meaningless.
||I did not say anything about concepts not existing, but about whether
||or not they should be regarded as meaningful.
|
|     Your statement was that 'a word can be regarded as meaningful
|     if the concept it refers to exists'.  So, every concept is meaningful.

This does not follow.  Just because a word is meaningful does not mean
that the concept it refers to is meaningful.

||Again, you have not paid attention to what I said.  I was not speaking of
||a "subject existing outside of a conceptual universe" but of whether or
||not the "subject *pertains* to anything outside" the conceptual universe
||(emphasis added).
|
|     I paid complete attention (or at least as complete as I'm wont to
|     do).  How can there be a concept outside of the conceptual universe?

I never said anything about concepts existing outside the conceptual
universe.  What I was discussing was whether a concept corresponds to
anything outside the conceptual universe (i.e., whether there exists
a semantic mapping between the concept and corresponding elements of
reality).

Chomsky's famous "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was contrived as
a deliberate attempt to demonstrate that a syntactically correct sentence
could in fact be meaningless.  The phrase "colorless green ideas" describes
a concept.  It is obvious at a glance that this concept cannot refer to
anything real.  Nevertheless, the concept itself exists.

||No, this is exactly what I am arguing against!  Meaning is established
||by the semantic mapping between words or concepts and their referents.
||Since the existence of these referents must be empirically verifiable
||in principle, and reality is something we all share, then the presence
||or absence of meaning is something we can all agree on.
|
|     So now they must be 'empirically verifiable'?

This requirement is nothing new.  If an object is real, then by definition
it has some interaction with observable reality.  Therefore its existence
is subject to empirical verification.  If it is impossible in principle
to devise such an empirical test, then the object in question cannot have
any interaction with reality.  Hence by definition it is unreal.

|     Have you ever said 'I love you'?

Relevance?

|                            dale bass

Tim
-- 
Tim Dodd, Research Scientist, Georgia Tech:  cegtitd@prism.gatech.edu