Monday, April 11, 2016

Strawson on Types vs Uses [Alex Rowell]

A quote that I found relevant from the Strawson reading, pg 327 from my book:

"I am saying that we cannot say the same things about types, uses of types, and utterances of types. And the fact is that we do talk about types ; and that confusion is apt to result from the failure to notice the differences between what we can say about these and what we can say only about the uses of types. We are apt to fancy we are talking about sentences and expressions when we are talking about the uses of sentences and expressions. This is what Russell does."

By my understanding, Strawson is drawing a distinction between the concept of words, their regular usage, and the context in which they are specifically used. This seems to somewhat parallel Frege's thinking and matches the structure, while allowing that each may have its own meaning instead of reserving the meaning to one level. This is a fairly clean way of dealing with somewhat muddled language that improves upon Frege, though I don't feel significantly improves upon Russell.

Question: Strawson starts off by focusing in on the 'he', 'I', 'you', 'it' portion of language, but how does the theory fare when outside of those words and words like it?

No comments:

Post a Comment