This line of argument depends squarely on a concept of understanding a proposition, and its prospect for success awaits development of a theory of understanding.
The structure Abelard offers is linguistic, a logic of mental acts: just as words can be said to express thoughts, so too we can use the articulated logic of language to give a theory of understanding.
The first is that semantics provides a theory that explains entailment (and synonymity, validity contradiction etc.'), all notions that must somehow be part of a theory of language understanding.
"The flexibility of the jays' reactions in different social situations, and the use of these tactics across different sensory domains [sight and sound] supports the notion that the jays have something like a theory of mind an understanding of others' points of view," says Lisa Leaver, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the study.
Having a theory of mind means understanding that others have their own motivations and understandings and that intuiting those motivations and understandings means being able to predict the behavior of those others.
On the other hand, he has begun sipping imaginary water from a cup: a kind of "pretend" that is an early stage of developing a theory of mind, the understanding of others' perspectives.
Yet none of these thinkers developed anything like an explicit philosophical theory of understanding, let alone a method or a set of normatively binding rules by means of which the process of interpretation should proceed.
Participation in discussions that shape a theory of change, and a good understanding of priorities, should be central to any activist academy.
Some aspects of reality - a unified theory of physics, or a theory of consciousness - might elude our understanding simply because they're beyond the powers of human brains, just as surely as quantum mechanics would flummox a chimpanzee.
The new rhetoric can thus contribute to the development of a theory of knowledge and to a better understanding of the history of philosophy.
In the 1970's, he refined his thinking on cybernetics, the science of information theory, and in 1974 set out to develop a theory, explaining the challenge of understanding the impact of an observer on the system that is being observed.
