User:Oliviaknickrehm/sandbox

article evaluation: I read over the "Literature" article. Everything was very straightforward and easy to understand. Everything was cited. A lot of it is just basic stuff that isn't from a super obscure source. I think it was put together well and organized easily. The only bad thing is that the "history" section has way more than all of the others. I'm sure more can be added to the others to make up for this.

Topic: cratylism

http://gradworks.umi.com/33/83/3383057.html

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/cratylus.html

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-cratylus/

https://outre-monde.com/2011/03/17/platos-philosophy-of-language-the-cratylus/

http://faculty.evansville.edu/tb2/trip/cratylus.htm

• the possibility and nature of the perfect language
• both philosophical and literary attempts to establish an inherently correct relationship between words and things
• phenomenology (in which language is the disclosure of particular things in their singularity or 'thisness').

• The formal topic of the Cratylus is ‘correctness of names’
• The positions of Hermogenes and Cratylus have come to be known to modern scholarship as ‘conventionalism’ and ‘naturalism’ respectively.
• Hermogenes holds that nothing but local or national convention determines which words are used to designate which objects
• Cratylus, as an extreme linguistic naturalist, holds that names cannot be arbitrarily chosen in the way that conventionalism describes or advocates, because names belong naturally to their specific objects.
• If you try to speak of something with any name other than its natural name, you are simply failing to refer to it at all.
• If Socrates is read as actually dismissing naturalism, it is almost inevitable that his naturalistic etymological decodings of words, to which well over half the dialogue is devoted, should be taken as not seriously intended, and in fact as making fun of the entire etymological practice
• It rests partly on the conviction that (a) the etymologies are ridiculous, and (b) Plato knew as well as we do that they are ridiculous
• Socrates' humour in the Cratylus is at least partly directed at his own uncharacteristic boldness in declaiming long strings of word derivations, contrary to his familiar disavowal of expert knowledge about anything
• if a given name (or word or phrase) is the correct one for denoting a given thing, what is it that makes it so?
  • Socrates discusses the correctness of names with Cratylus, a former pupil of Heraclitus, and Hermogenes, the impecunious brother of Callias, at whose house the Protagoras takes place.
  • Hermogenes argues that the correctness of names is simply determined by convention and agreement.
  • a person or object can have more than one name, and also different names to different people: ‘…whatever each person says is the name of something, for him, that is the name’.
  • Socrates asks Hermogenes whether he agrees with Protagoras when he says that ‘man is the measure of all things’. In other words, are things merely as they appear to a given person, or do they have some fixed being of their own?

• • He seems to have believed that true things cannot be said of things that change, because by the time words are uttered, things have changed. Words, therefore, falsify reality by introducing stability where there is none, and we would do well to say nothing at all.