Verum Insights...

The best objects to think with are words, because that is part of what words are for. Indeed, it is a condition for something to be a word that it be thinkable. But”

“Any intentional state only functions, that is, it only determines conditions of satisfaction, against a set of Background abilities, dispositions, and capacities that are not part of the intentional content and could not be included as part of the content.”

“One lesson to be derived from the study of institutional facts is this: everything we value in civilization requires the creation and maintenance of institutional power relations through collectively imposed status-functions. These require constant monitoring and adjusting to create and preserve fairness, efficiency, flexibility, and creativity, not to mention such traditional values as justice, liberty, and dignity. But institutional power relations are ubiquitous and essential. Institutional power—massive, pervasive, and typically invisible—permeates every nook and cranny of our social lives, and as such it is not a threat to liberal values but rather the precondition of their existence.”

“It is somehow satisfying to our will to power to think that ‘we’ make the world, that reality itself is but a social construct, alterable at will and subject to future changes as 'we’ see fit. Equally, it seems offensive that there should be an independent reality of brute facts – blind, uncomprehending, indifferent, and utterly unaffected by our concerns. And all of this is part of the general atmosphere that makes antirealist versions of 'poststructuralism’ such as deconstruction seem intellectually acceptable, even exciting. But once you state the claims and arguments of the antirealists out in the open, naked and undisguised, they tend to look fairly ridiculous.”

“the point is that the only thing that blocks those interpretations is not the semantic content but simply the fact that you have a certain sort of knowledge about how the world works, you have a certain set of abilities for coping with the world, and those abilities are not and could not be included as part of the literal meaning of the sentence.”

“there is a radical underdetermination of what is said by the literal meaning of the sentence. There is nothing in the literal meaning of the sentence “She gave him her key and he opened the door” to block the interpretation, He opened the door with her key by bashing the door down with the key; the key weighed two hundred pounds and was in the shape of an axe. Or, He swallowed both the door and the key and he inserted the key in the lock by the peristaltic contraction of his gut.”

“nothing in the literal meaning of those sentences blocks those wrong interpretations. In each case we understand the verb differently, even though its literal meaning is constant, because in each case our interpretation depends on our Background abilities.”

“In a normal literal utterance of each of these sentences, each verb has a constant meaning. There is no lexical ambiguity or metaphorical usage involved. But in each case the same verb will determine different truth conditions or conditions of satisfaction generally, because what counts as cutting or growing will vary with the context. If”

“The simplest argument for the thesis of the Background is that the literal meaning of any sentence can only determine its truth conditions or other conditions of satisfaction against a Background of capacities, dispositions, know-how, etc., which are not themselves part of the semantic content of the sentence. You”

“when we talk about the Background we are talking about a certain category of neurophysiological causation. Because we do not know how these structures function at a neurophysiological level, we are forced to describe them at a much higher level. There”

“I have thus defined the concept of the “Background” as the set of nonintentional or preintentional capacities that enable intentional states of function. But”

“Intentional states function only given a set of Background capacities that do not themselves consist in intentional phenomena. Thus, for example, beliefs, desires, and rules only determine conditions of satisfaction—truth conditions for beliefs, fulfillment conditions for desires, etc.—given a set of capacities that do not themselves consist in intentional phenomena. I”

“language is precisely designed to be a self-identifying category of institutional facts. The”

“I do not think there is a sharp dividing line between either the institutional and the non-institutional or the linguistic and the prelinguistic, but to the extent that we think the phenomena are genuinely institutional facts, and not just conditioned forms of habitual behavior, to that very extent we must think of language as constitutive of the phenomena, because the move that imposes the Y function on the X object is a symbolizing move.”

“If our imagined tribe just is not disposed to cross the boundaries as a matter of inclination, they do not in our sense have an institutional fact. They simply have a disposition to behave in certain ways, and their behavior is just like the case of animals marking the limits of their territory. There is nothing deontic about such markings. The animals simply behave in such and such ways, and “behave” here means they simply move their bodies in specific ways. But if we suppose that the members of the tribe recognize that the line of stones creates rights and obligations, that they are forbidden to cross the line, that they are not supposed to cross it, then we have symbolization. The stones now symbolize something beyond themselves; they function like words. I”

“institutional facts in general require language because the language is partly constitutive of the facts. But”

“these points can be made clearer by calling attention to the deontic status of institutional phenomena. Animals running in a pack can have all the consciousness and collective intentionality they need. They can even have hierarchies and a dominant male; they can cooperate in the hunt, share their food, and even have pair bonding. But they cannot have marriages, property, or money. Why not? Because all these create institutional forms of powers, rights, obligations, duties, etc., and it is characteristic of such phenomena that they create reasons for action that are independent of what you or I or anyone else is otherwise inclined to do. Suppose I train my dog to chase dollar bills and bring them back to me in return for food. He still is not buying the food and the bills are not money to him. Why not? Because he cannot represent to himself the relevant deontic phenomena. He might be able to think “If I give him this he will give me that food.” But he cannot think, for example, now I have the right to buy things and when someone else has this, he will also have the right to buy things.”