Reviews for Philosophy and Health Care

The average rating for Philosophy and Health Care based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-02 00:00:00 Tyrone Notyce I hope I've correctly figured out which book I read. In any case, the book that I read was a critique of theories of the meaning of words, as well as sentences and utterances more generally, as follows. As I infer, we are taking a particular interest in "content" words. In order to explain what I mean by content words, I'm at risk of presuming an answer to the book's question before we have considered the question. So I'll give my explanation in parentheses and claim that afterward we can set it aside. (Content words are those such as nouns and verbs for which perhaps a more explicit specification of a category could be substituted. For example in the sentence "Please sit in one of these chairs." we see that it doesn't really change the simple meaning of the sentence if "chairs" is replaced by one of its definitions in WordNet, "seats for one person, with a support for the back". Superficially at least, it would seem that everything either does or does not satisfy that description, and so either does or does not belong to a category of "chairs". In contrast, a relevant WordNet definition of "in" is "to or toward the inside of". It is not so clear that that phrase is a description at all. I claim that it is not. In particular I claim that it is not equivalent, although it is similar, to the description "the relation between two things, one of which is to or toward the inside of the other".) So, is a word a symbol? Then what does it stand for, a meaning? Is a meaning something that exists in the world (whether a physical object or a metaphysical ideal)? Is a meaning an image in the mind? But in those cases, how can I suppose that anyone else can identify the meaning that I have for the word? After all, my experiences of an image in my mind or of something that exists in the world are different from anyone else's. Perhaps an utterance is a speech act, such as the act of informing someone of a state of affairs, the act of marrying a couple to each other, etc. That seems promising. Perhaps it merely replaces our difficulties involving words with difficulties involving acts. But at least, let's say that the question of how observers can agree on the nature of an act is a question of a separate kind that we can pursue separately. Now can we analyze a speech act to determine the meanings of its words, and if so, how? The book's final proposal (as I understand and formulate it for present purposes) is that to determine the meaning of a word w[i], we will consider each sentence s[j] that contains that word, with a blank where that word belongs. The meaning of the sentence is then a function of that word s[j](w[i]). Then we will understand (or else deem not understandable) the meaning of w[i] according to the manner in which EVERY sentence s[j] depends on the choice of w[i] in preference to all other possibilities w[k]. On the basis of this critique and proposal, I felt myself on very solid ground when I encountered linguistic "minimal pairs" and then the statistical approach to natural language as in corpus linguistics. For example, it seems to me that those words that are (statistically) conventional choices for the blank in "Please sit in one of these ___." are indeed related in their meanings. As we look at more sentences, we can infer whether two words have common usages that are synonyms, antonyms, or related by their meanings in other ways.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-07-22 00:00:00 Ryan Sculley finally it's done :)) fave chapter was the biology of mind&consciousness and memory. In memory page, there's this thing called vivid flashback; when we remember something but we dont even think a single bit about them like for years, like it's flowing by itself. So that thing isn't a real memory yet new creation of stressed brain 0_0 but i hate the test chapter arrr so stressing T_T p.s.: i didnt reat the appendix lol