[lit-ideas] Re: Meta-Philosophy
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 14:50:23 EDT
Donal McEvoy spots a regressus ad infinitum (if not a _reductio ad
absurdum_) in claims like Geary's, trying to delimitate what philosophy is
(from what
philosophy is not):
>Mere description of
>[philosophers] cannot work because we would
>have to select who we should regard
>as [philosophers] and select which of their
>activities are [philosophy]-related (their
>toilet habits might have no bearing on
>whether or not they are [philosophers]).
Plus,
>'Meta-philosophy' has a somewhat pretentious title.
And then there's meta-meta-philosophy. No entry or quotation for it in the
OED, or for any other meta-meta, other than 'meta-meta-language'. Below.
Cheers,
JL
Pretend pretension
quotes for
'meta-meta-language'
1945 Mind 54 217
To express what a set of symbols means.., a..second such set or
meta~language that speaks about them and about what they speak about is
required. â??
â??Chienâ?? bedeutet Hundâ??
-- for instance, is such a metastatement, where (part of) French serves as
the first..language, (part of) German as the second. But what if we do not
understand German? Then a third, or meta-metalanguage, say English, is needed.
1957 N. Chomsky Syntactic Struct. vi. 54
Linguistic theory will thus be formulated in a metalanguage to the language
in which grammars are Linguisa metametalanguage to any language for which a
grammar is constructed.
1976 Contemp. Sociol. 5 520/2
To separate statements in the object language from those in the
meta-language, the meta-meta-language, and so on.
1990 Mind 99 209
One idea would be to repeat for the meta-language the account of NEGATION in
terms of joining and separating. But this is pointless since the problem
will then recur in the meta-meta-language.
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