Matt said:
Better than rubberband even is Quine's self as a web of belief. Web is nice
because if we visualize "life" as instead of a river, but an open space of air
with a nice breeze.
dmb says:
The of idea of a web of belief comes out of the structuralist movement. It's
based on the insight that the meaning of words isn't derived from a one to one
relationship to its referent but rather from its relation to all the other
words in a given language. Thus the language as a whole is a kind of set of
structured relations. So the web of belief is not a way to visualize "life",
but language and concepts.
That's why we can't replace the river with the web. The web is composed of the
buckets. All our verbal and conceptual understandings have to be static or they
wouldn't be able to function. Without stability of meaning, communication is
not possible. This is not to say that language does not evolve or that words
are totally inflexible, but static intellectual patterns are just that, static.
They have to be or there aren't any patterns.
You can characterize the web of belief as flapping in the wind, but there is no
such thing as dynamic language because, as the use of interchangeable terms
shows, there is no such thing as pre-intellectual intellect or pre-verbal
verbiage.
I mean, to trade the web for the river is to misconstrue the analogy as
approximately the opposite of what it is meant to illustrate.
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