In a message dated 5/9/2014 10:35:02 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes: Wittgenstein's point about pointing ... is a serious one... as is Augustine's: "Cum majores homines appellabant rem aliquam et cum secundum earn vocem corpus ad aliquid movebant, videbam et tenebam hoc ab eis vocari rem illam, quod sonabant cum earn vellent OSTENDERE hoc autem eos veile ex motu corporis aperiebatur." (Oddly, 'ostendere' is translated otherwise than 'ostend' in the edition of Philosophical Investigations that actually cares to give a translation: "When my elders NAMED some object & accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was CALLED by the sound they UTTERED when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements." ---- And as is Quine's Noonan, Harold and Curtis, Ben, "Identity", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries/identity/>. In “Identity, Ostension and Hypostasis” Quine suggested that when a predicate is an I-predicate in a theory only because the language in which the theory is expressed does not allow one to distinguish items between which it holds, one can reinterpret the sentences of the theory so that the I-predicate in the newly interpreted theory does express identity. Every sentence will have just the same truth-conditions under the new interpretation and the old, but the references of its subsentential parts will be different. Thus, Quine suggests, if one has a language in which one speaks of persons and in which persons of the same income are indistinguishable the predicates of the language may be reinterpreted so that the predicate which previously expressed having the same income comes now to express identity. The universe of discourse now consists of income groups, not people. The extensions of the monadic predicates are classes of income groups, and, in general, the extension of an n-place predicate is a class of n-member sequences of income groups (Quine 1963: 65–79). Any two-place predicate expressing an equivalence relation could be an I-predicate relative to some sufficiently impoverished theory, and Quine's suggestion will be applicable to any such predicate if it is applicable at all. Now from Gupta, Anil, "Definitions", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/definitions/>, under 'ostensive definition': "Ostensive definitions look simple but, as Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, they are effective only because a complex linguistic and conceptual capacity is operative in the background. It is not easy to provide an account of this capacity." From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostensive_definition John Passmore tells us that the term was first defined by the British logician William Ernest Johnson (1858-1931): "His neologisms, as rarely happens, have won wide acceptance: such phrases as “ostensive definition”, such contrasts as those between ... “ determinates” and “determinables”, “continuants” and “occurrents”, are now familiar in philosophical literature" (Passmore 1966, p. 344). Cheers, Speranza ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html