Semantics Quotes

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
Felix Frankfurter

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.
Roman Jakobson

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.
Willard Van Orman Quine

Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

We should not be surprised that we find meaningless noises in the foundation of many old philosophies, and that from them arise most of the old philosophical fights and arguments.

a few philosophers really do important work. This applies to the so called critical philosophy and to the theory of knowledge or epistemology. This class of workers I call epistemologists to avoid the disagreeable implications of the term philosopher.

In the rough, a symbol is a sign that stands for something Before a noise, etc., may become a symbol, something must exist for the symbol to symbolize.

If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures.

Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.

It's a matter of semantics, because you are creating an identical twin. Cloning is creating a replica of a person or an animal. This is creating what happens in nature every single day.
Hilton Kort

A memorable quote requires a shake of semantic shenanigans and a pinch of poetic pulchritude.
Rain Bojangles

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The map is not the territory.
Count Alfred Korzybski

The model is not the muddle.
Robert Anton Wilson

Man's achievements rest on the use of symbols.
Korzybski

Man's achievements rest on the use of symbols.
Korzybski

To understand the symbolic process is to be able to use it to advantage; not to understand it is to remain forever its victim.
SI Hayakawa

Admittedly, as the economic "symbolism got farther and farther from reality, it required more and more ceremony to keep it up.
Robert H. Nelson

Most of us have, in some area or other of our thinking, improper habits of evaluation. For this, society itself is to blame: most societies systematically encourage, concerning certain topics, the habitual confusion of symbols with things symbolized.
SI Hayakawa

Some people always other people twist the meanings of words, especially during the course of an argument.
SI Hayakawa

Symbolism is the study of the part played in human affairs by language and symbols of all kinds, and especialy of their influence on Thought. It singles out for special inquiry the ways in which symbols help us and hinder us in reflecting on things.
Ogden & Richards

Words, as every one now knows, "mean" nothing by themselves, although the belief that they did ... was once equally universal. It is only when a thinker makes use of them that they stand for anything, or, in one sense, have "meaning."
Ogden & Richards

Words may come between us and our objects in countless subtle ways ... they lead to the creation of bogus entities ...
Ogden & Richards

The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.






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