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sleepy 06.09.09 at 5:59 pm
My point is that as a model of the world as opposed to formal logic Davidson’s model is absurd on its face. It’s contradicted by the facts. The answer to the question is no. you cannot translate Mallarmé without losing information. In fact you can’t re-create or re-produce anything without change if only in context.

The same absurdity holds for Quine and for naturalist epistemology as something running parallel to the hard sciences. His is not a model of the world but of an enclosed formal system.
“The continentals” on the other hand construct a model not of the world but of behavior in the world Attitudes are manners of conduct. And as I keep trying to point out, lawyers as opposed to legal philosophers do the same thing. John Mortimer’s philosophy as a jobbing lawyer was a model of behavior, of conduct and attitude, not of ideal.

Thinking in terms of models of behavior helps us to be aware of tendencies not towards rationality but rationalization, including rationalizing behavior such as excluding those who tread on your turf for the sole reason that they’ve done so. while finding ways to justify that exclusion by spurious logic.
That I think was the subject of the post.

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engels 06.09.09 at 6:16 pm
Quine: No statement is immune to revision..
Rousseau: Commençons donc par écarter tous les faits, car ils ne touchent point à la question. Il ne faut pas prendre les recherches, dans lesquelles on peut entrer sur ce sujet…

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engels 06.09.09 at 6:18 pm
Quine: No statement is immune to revision…
Rousseau: Commençons donc par écarter tous les faits, car ils ne touchent point à la question.

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sleepy 06.09.09 at 6:56 pm
“Mistakes were made.”
It makes sense that a logician wouldn’t be aware of the history of the passive voice and think it meaningless.
Do I have to explain it to you too?

When you’re willing to revise any of your own statements let me know.

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sleepy 06.10.09 at 3:16 am
I think in the last two I said just about all I ever wanted to say on this site.
I described what I’ve always assumed to be obvious, in a way that I think made that obviousness quite clear.
Thank you Engels for lobbing me that softball pitch that allowed me my coda.

And again: removed

First, translators, now add theater critics:
Olivier’s Hamlet is not the same as Burton’s. Amazing that men and women as vested in civil society as you can have entire careers founded on distinctions that you and Donald Davidson says simply don’t exist.

Meanings accrue to language when you use it. Meanings accrue by way of context, inflection, and volume. By Davidson’s definition of language cadence means nothing. Choosing to use or not use alliteration means nothing. Using the passive voice means nothing. Really, the Quine bit was hilarious. That’s mid-century Americanism in a nutshell.
Talking about ideas as a way to delude oneself into thinking you’re not talking about values. Every social gesture you make is a manifestation of values. Which is why what I argue against are not ideas but the efficiency expert’s picture of the world; an efficiency expert’s definition of what’s valuable and what’s not.

Two sentences in two languages are can never be seen as two sides of an equation. What one person says and what another hears can’t either. That’s the way the world works. Just reread this thread: it’s pure symptom.
You’re not modeling the world, you’ve modeling your own desires, and making careers out of it.