In a message dated 4/2/10 10:48:32 AM, [email protected] writes:
William writes: " You left out bubble-headed, content, notion, fuzzy, explanations." Nah I didn't. At least not all of them. 'Content', 'notion', and 'explanation' are on that list. When Kate laments the absence of 'foopgoom', bless her, she cites it as "a necessary word for discussing the absence of meaning". In fact, by the time I got around to using 'foopgoom', I took it for granted that I'd conveyed my notion about words not having mind-independent meanings. I summoned up 'foopgoom' for use in an argument that the alleged mind-independent category of "words" is imaginary, a mistake in "reification". What makes any scription/utterance BE a word as distinguished from just being CALLED a word? William asks, "Why does Cheerskep give us a long list of words separated from any context when he knows that as individual words or terms no particular meanings are ascribed and then, surprisingly, refers to that list as proof of his view?" That's not what I was trying to do. I wasn't pressing a point about whether or not words have meanings. Notice that my title for the list was: TERMS PHILOSOPHERS USE WITH, APPARENTLY, FUZZY NOTIONS IN MIND. I intentionally eschewed 'meaning' in that title. I was protesting the fact that philosophers repeatedly use key words without having in mind a clear idea behind the words. (I'm content to accept as a stipulative working definition that the notion each of us individually and variously has in mind when we hear or use a word is its "meaning for me". We've all often heard the phrase, "Well that's what XXX means to me!") The evolving of philosophy through ages of disagreeing philosophers can almost be seen as a history of succeeding philosophers "correcting" the notions that predecessors had in mind when they used key words.
