continuing the past post and a recent one

The Churchlands

For instance, both he and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that constitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor. Surely this will happen, they think, and as people learn to speak differently they will learn to experience differently, and sooner or later even their most private introspections will be affected. Already Paul feels pain differently than he used to: when he cuts himself shaving now he feels not “pain” but something more complicated-first the sharp, superficial A-delta-fibre pain, and then, a couple of seconds later, the sickening, deeper feeling of C-fibre pain that lingers.

Quine

A felt need for meant entities may derive from an earlier failure to appreciate that meaning and reference are distinct. Once the theory of meaning is sharply separated from the theory of reference, it is a short step to recognizing as the business of the theory of meaning simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements; meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may well be abandoned

The Churchlands

“Well, given that they’re such a severe danger to the society, we could incarcerate them in some way,” Paul says. “We could put a collar on their ankles and track their whereabouts. We could say, We have to put this subdural thing in your skull which will monitor if you’re having rage in your amygdala, and we can automatically shut you down with a nice shot of Valium. It’s like having somebody who’s got the black plague-we do have the right to quarantine people though it’s not their fault.

“The blood of those who will die if biomedical research is not pursued will be upon the hands of those who don’t do it."

"These relationships [between parents and children] appear inegalitarian in deep ways. The parties to partial relationships may exclude others from the mutual benefits their association yields"

"...religious belief is not required, but at most just that self-evident religio without which there is no desire for knowledge, not even the desire for atheism." [also here]

"The triumph of the fact"