Understanding, Thought, and Meaning
Aristotle's solution to the problem raised in Ch. 4 depends on his account of how we arrive at thoughts on the basis of experience. In his view, we standardly acquire a term for a kind on the basis of contact with members of a kind, without thereby knowing that the kind in question exists. Further, we can grasp such terms without knowing that the kind (if it exists) has a unifying basic feature that explains its necessary properties. Our understanding of the kind is to be compared with that of a craftsman and not that of a proto‐scientist. Aristotle's view is distinguished from several twentieth‐century accounts of these issues (e.g. modern essentialists such as Putnam, neo‐Fregeans, dual‐component theorists).
Keywords: Aristotle, dual‐component theories, essentialism, experience, Frege, master craftsman, Putnam, thought, understanding
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