Philosophy of Language |
Here is a summary of some of the material we have covered since the midterm exam. You should be familiar with, and able to write about, the issues, terminology, and arguments mentioned or briefly summarized below:
1. Semantic Pragmatics (Lycan, chapter 11)
Semantic pragmatics is concerned with features of linguistic meaning that are dependent on the context of utterance. It is thus intermediate, in a sense, between semantics and "pragmatic pragmatics."
semantics deals with linguistic expressions rather than with particular utterances of those expressions. So, in a sense, linguistic meaning is independent of particular contexts of utterance, since it is a feature of linguistic expressions that they carry with them, so to speak, in any context in which they are uttered.
However, there are some linguistic expressions which have a kind of built-in context dependence. The most obvious examples are "deictic" or "indexical" expressions such as "I," "here," and "now." A singular term that is or contains an indexical expression requires a context in order to determine what its reference is, and a sentence that contains an indexical expression requires a context in order to determine what proposition it expresses.
"Semantic Pragmatics" is concerned with the way in which the content of indexical expressions depends on particular contexts. As we discussed in class, a common way to understand indexicals like "I" and "here" is as follows. The extension or referent of "I" (on a particular occasion of use) is an individual. The intension is a function from possible worlds to extensions. In the case of indexicals, this is a constant function: "I" refers, with respect to every possible world, to the same individual. But, unlike non-indexical expressions, the linguistic meaning of "I" is not to be identified with its intension. Rather, its linguistic meaning may be thought of as a function from contexts of utterance to intensions. In any context of utterance, the intension of "I" is a constant function from possible worlds to the agent of the context. (Usually the "agent" of the context is the person who, in that context, is thinking or saying the word "I.")
2. Pragmatic Pragmatics (Lycan, chapter 12; Austin, How to Do Things with Words)
A. Relation of Speech Act Theory to Verificationism
Like the verificationists, Austin identifies utterances that look like statements but aren't. The verificationists focused on two such kinds of utterances: (a) "metaphysics," i.e. things that look like statements but are not analytic and can't be verified or disconfirmed; (b) utterances whose purpose is something other than stating facts about the world, such as ethical language, which according to Ayer was used not to state facts but to express emotions.
Austin focuses attention on a third category: (c) performative utterances, such as "I christen this ship the Santa Maria," or "I promise I will pay you back." These don't state a fact, but rather accomplish something -- the first does not state that I am christening a ship, but rather actually christens it; the second does not state that I am promising something, but rather actually promises it.
B. Performatives vs. Constatives
You should be able to describe Austin's distinction between performatives and constatives. Such a description should include the idea that a constative utterance is a "saying" whereas a performative utterance is a "doing"; the idea that the characteristic flaw of constatives is being false, whereas the characteristic flaw of performatives is being infelicitous. (You should be able to give examples of ways of being infelicitous.)
A number of things must be true in order for a performative utterance to fully succeed. You should be able to illustrate the main kinds of infelicities:
A. there must be a conventional procedure with a conventional effect, where the procedure includes uttering certain words, and in the particular case the people and circumstances must be appropriate for invoking the procedure. ("I hereby divorce you" doesn't work because there is no such conventional procedure for divorcing someone. A christening doesn't work if the wrong person does it or the wrong boat is present, even though there is a conventional procedure for christening. --an aside: often the conventions in question may not be explicitly written down anywhere, and there may be disagreement over exactly what they require: compare the current controversies over issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.)
B. The procedure must be executed by all participants correctly and completely. (E.g. if the marriage license isn't signed, the participants are not legally married. I think.)
Γ. Where the procedure is designed for use by people with certain thoughts and feelings, who will later act in certain ways, they must have the appropriate thoughts and feelings, intend to act in the appropriate ways, and actually follow up by acting in those ways. (E.g. the practice of promising is designed to be used by people who intend to keep their promises, and who actually do go on to act in accordance with the promise. The practice of apologizing is designed to be used by people who feel sorry for what they have done. And so on.)
Whereas failing to meet conditions A or B results in a failure of the performative act to succeed at all (a "Misfire"), failing to meet Γ results instead in the act being performed, but the procedure has been abused. (If I promise to pay you back but don't intend to, then I really have promised, and have the moral obligations associated with promising, but the promise was not sincere.)
C. Problems with the Performative/Constative Distinction.
You should also be able to describe Austin's growing doubts about the performative-constative distinction (notably the points that (a) constatives are subject to something very like infelicities, and (b) many performatives, especially things like judging, advising, etc., are intimately linked to propositions that can be true or false.
D. A More Comprehensive Speech-Act Theory
And you should be able to describe the more comprehensive view that Austin eventually replaces the performative-constative distinction with, including the following features:
the distinction between three kinds of acts: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. (Locutionary: act of saying something; at this level, meaning is crucial; Illocutionary: in saying something, one performs an illocutionary act, e.g. promises, christens, etc.; at this level we can talk about the force of the utterance; Perlocutionary: by saying something, one brings about certain effects.)
the distinction, among locutionary acts, between phonetic, phatic, and rhetic acts
the idea that a single utterance will always involve acts of all three kinds: each kind of act is an abstraction from the concrete utterance
the original notion of a constative focuses on the locutionary act and largely ignores the illocutionary act (but there still is an illocutionary act, and thus constatives can be felicitous or infelicitous: the act of stating something is just as much an illocutionary act as the acts of promising, christening, objecting, conceding, etc.)
similarly, the original notion of a performative focuses on the illocutionary act and largely ignores the locutionary aspect (but there still is an associated locutionary act, and the relation between the propositional content of the locution and the real world is still important)
E. Kinds of Illocutionary Act Verbs
verdictives: giving a verdict about something. examples: judge, pronounce (guilty), estimate, rule that, diagnose
exercitives: exercising a power or right. examples: appoint, vote ("I vote that we go outside today"), order, urge, advise, warn, fine ("I fine you $25")
commissives: committing oneself to do something. examples: promise, give my word, intend, plan, oppose, agree, side with
behabitives: have to do with attitudes and behavior. Examples: apologize, congratulate, commend, condole, curse ("I curse the day you were born!"), challenge, thank
expositives: have to do with the exposition of a view or argument. Examples: reply, argue, concede, illustrate, assume, postulate
3. Implicative Relations (Lycan, chapter 13; Grice, "Logic and Conversation")
Up to this point, our discussion of pragmatics had to do primarily with individual speech acts. Grice takes up the issue of how speech acts fit together into longer stretches of communication, in particular, into conversations.
Maxims of conversation:
Maxims of Quantity: be as informative as necessary; do not be more informative than necessary
Maxims of Quality: don't say things you believe to be false; don't say things you lack adequate evidence for
Maxims of Relation: be relevant.
Maxims of Manner: avoid ambiguity; avoid unnecessary prolixity. (notice this isn't quite the same thing as "don't be more informative than necessary")
Conversational Implicature: what happens when a maxim is violated? In some cases this may be simply because the conversationalist is incompetent. More often, however, it's a way of communicating something other than what is literally said. The maxims may be deliberately violated ("flouted") as an indirect means of communication.
example (Lycan): "There's the door." Looks like a violation of the maxim of relevance: we weren't talking about the door! Also may violate a maxim of quantity: I already know where the door is; there is no need to inform me of this. So the point must not be to inform me that the door is there, it must be something else having to do with the door . . . ah! I'm supposed to go out the door! [Side note: I experienced a nonverbal version of this chain of reasoning not long ago. I was with my daughter in the doctor's office as she was being anaesthetized to have her wisdom teeth removed. After she got very woozy, the doctor rolled his chair back a few feet, opened the door to the room, and gave me a long look. It wasn't until a couple of minutes later that I realized he wanted me to exit through the door . . . the point was to have me leave without calling my daughter's attention to the fact, but I was too dense to pick up on this right away!]
example: irony, sarcasm. I trip over a garbage can, and someone says "Real coordinated." It's obvious to all that I am not very well coordinated; why is the speaker violating the maxim of quality by saying what he must believe to be false? He must be trying to communicate something other than what he said . . . such as . . . the exact opposite!
example: metaphor. Again, often involves saying something obviously false.
One problem, noted by Lycan: the reasoning involved in conversational implicatures involves a negative phase (the utterance violates a maxim, so the speaker must be trying to communicate something other than the literal meaning of the utterance) and a positive phase, in which one attempts to determine what the speaker is trying to communicate. It's a lot clearer how the reasoning in the negative phase works than how the reasoning in the positive phase works.
(Lycan, chapter 14)
Davidson: no such thing as "metaphorical meaning," only literal meaning. Metaphors cause people to have interesting thoughts, but the metaphor in no sense means the thoughts it provokes; they are just causal consequences of someone hearing the metaphor. A consequence would appear to be that we can't speak of metaphors being true or false, or of someone misinterpreting a metaphor.
Naive Simile view: a metaphor is just a shorthand way to express a simile. "Juliet is the sun" as short for "Juliet is like the sun." Objections: (1) this seems to understate the "tension" involved in hearing a metaphor. Similes aren't "anomalous or puzzling," so if metaphors are just short for similes, they shouldn't seem anomalous or puzzling either. But they do. (2) Doesn't explain much: just shifts the burden of explanation to the simile. Everything is like everything else in some respect or other, so similes seem just as vacuously true as metaphors often are obviously false. Typically a use of a simile seems to be an attempt to say something more specific than merely that A is like B in some respect or other. So now we need an account of the meaning of a simile! (3) The similarity between A and B may itself not be literal. "Susan is a block of ice." In what respect is Susan like a block of ice? Well, they are both cold. But wait . . . Susan is not literally cold!
Figurative Simile Theory. Metaphors abbreviate similes in which the resemblances are figurative rather than literal. Objections: (1)but then we still need an account of figurative meaning! Otherwise the account seems just circular. (metaphor = simile in which the resemblances are metaphorical . . . this doesn't seem to get us very far!) (2) seems to have the result that virtually any sentence is ambiguous between a literal and a metaphorical reading. (3) some metaphors are too complex to be understood as similes. [My example: Nabokov: "Either the drizzle had stopped or Fialta had got so used to it that she herself did not know whether she was breathing moist air or warm rain." what exactly is the simile? Fialta is like a woman, and the drizzle is like her breath, and . . . somehow this seems way off. Nabokov again, from the same story ("Spring in Fialta"): "Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head." Again, it's hard to know even where to start in converting this into a simile.]
Pragmatic Theory: metaphorical meaning is not a kind of semantic meaning but rather a kind of pragmatic meaning. That is, the meaning is not (entirely) determined by the literal meanings of the words, but rather is a matter of what a speaker is using those words to communicate on a particular occasion of use. Metaphor on this account is a matter of speaker meaning, not linguistic meaning. And it's pragmatic because it attaches not to a sentence per se, but to the use of a sentence in a particular context of utterance.
We read the first three chapters of the Chomsky book (the introduction and the first two of Chomsky's essays). A couple of high points:
1. Rationalism/Empiricism. One reason Chomsky's work is interesting for philosophy is its relation to the debate between rationalists and empiricists over innate ideas. Rationalists like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz thought that there were innate ideas, ideas which we have and use but which we did not and could not learn from experience. (For Descartes, the related ideas of God and infinity are like this.) For empiricists like Locke, on the other hand, all our ideas derive from experience. For Locke, the infant mind was like a blank slate, or a dark room, or an unmarked piece of wax. Experience wrote ideas on the slate, or shone them into the dark room, or imprinted them on the wax. Although Chomsky doesn't address ideas in the sense of the early modern philosophers, his view about grammar has a clear affinity with rationalism. Chomsky holds that much of our knowledge of grammar is not acquired from experience, but rather is innate, present from birth (although like other innate abilities, possibly not activated or triggered until sometime later; similarly, in some sense the newborn "knows how to walk," but the knowledge isn't triggered until an appropriate stage of physical development is reached).
2. Mind/Body Problem. Another philosophically interesting aspect of Chomsky's view is his rejection of the mind-body distinction because of his view that the Cartesian notion of the body was shown by Newtonian science to be incorrect, and no more coherent notion of body has replaced it. For Descartes, the realm of body was the realm of explanations which were (a) visualizable (or modelable anyway) and (b) mechanical: we could picture the interactions of bodies by building or imagining a model which worked because its parts pushed each other around. By introducing into our conception of matter the idea of powers that were neither visualizable nor mechanical in this sense (notably gravitational attraction, which works "at a distance"), Newton showed that matter was more mysterious than Descartes envisioned.
(what exactly is Chomsky's point here? He certainly isn't defending Cartesian dualism: he thinks that both dualism and materialism share the same inadequate conception of "body." His view seems to be that it is no more mysterious how matter can give rise to thinking than it is how matter can give rise to the gravitational force. We shouldn't require a visualizable, mechanical explanation before we hold that matter can give rise to some sort of phenomenon. If this is right, then one is tempted to say that Chomsky really is a kind of materialist.)
3. Nature of grammar. Grammar or syntax of course is the main focus of Chomsky's scientific work; we barely scratched the surface of this. But a couple of important points stand out.
A. The recursive nature of language. Chomsky argues that the only way finite capacities can allow us to determine the grammaticality of an infinite number of sentences is if our knowledge of grammar consists of recursive rules. (Roughly, rules are recursive if they can be reapplied the results of an earlier application. For instance, a sentence can consist of a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase, but a sentence may also consist of a sentence followed by a conjunction followed by a sentence. So once we get a sentence or two, perhaps by the NP + VP rule, we can combine them by putting a conjunction between them. But the result is also a sentence, so we can use the same rule over again to produce a longer sentence. And there's no limit to the number of times we can do this.)
B. Universal Grammar. This is said to characterize the initial state one is in prior to learning a particular language. Then language acquisition is the transition from this initial state to a final state which is the knowledge of a particular natural language. For the empiricists, the initial state has to be empty, and all of grammar has to be acquired in learning a language. But according to Chomsky, the initial state is already very rich and complex.
4. Arguments for the innateness of syntax (more precisely, of Universal Grammar).
(1) the "poverty of the stimulus" argument: the child is not exposed to enough linguistic data to learn a specific language from scratch as rapidly as they actually do
(2) empirical evidence: finding a shared structure in all natural languages (according to the Principles and Parameters view, UG consists of universal principles that all languages share, with a few parameters that experience shows us how to set; the differences between natural languages are just different parameter-settings)
A. Meaning and Understanding
parallels between: knowing when a word does and doesn't apply; knowing how to continue a series ("how to go on"); reading a text out loud vs. simply saying the words in the presence of the text. In each case, Wittgenstein argues against a superficially plausible explanation (e.g. that correct use of a word is determined by a mental image that shows us how to apply it; that the ability to continue a series is based on recognizing a formula that shows us what the next item in the series is; that the difference between reading and saying is some sort of experience).
A general problem faces all these superficially plausible answers, namely that anything that might serve to interpret or show us how to use a word, carry on a series, etc. can itself be interpreted in various ways, so it too needs an interpretation, setting up the same problem all over again. Ultimately there has to be a sort of understanding that is not an interpretation.
B. Following a Rule
Wittgenstein offers what seems to be a skeptical argument: there doesn't seem to be anything internal to the agent that could determine whether he is following a rule correctly in new cases that haven't been seen before. The cases one used to learn a series (e.g.) don't suffice, because they are compatible with various ways of "going on"; a rule doesn't suffice, because it might be interpreted in more than one way; a rule + interpretation won't suffice, because anything we use to interpret the rule will itself be subject to varying interpretations. (There are striking resemblances between the argument here and Quine's reasons for the "indeterminacy of translation.")
It's controversial what Wittgenstein's solution to this problem is. Kripke suggests that for Wittgenstein, correctness is determined by agreement among members of a language community, not by some internal state of an individual agent. An intriguing view, but there isn't general agreement that it is actually Wittgenstein's view!
C. The Private Language Argument
The private language argument seems to have at least two parts:
(1) There is an argument that our own language is not private (not even the part that refers to sensations). That is, we do not learn the meaning of terms for sensations by looking inward to something that is in principle inaccessible to anyone else. The evidence for this is that there are public criteria for the correct application of sensation words. (After all, we learn them from people who wouldn't have access to our logically private states, if there were such a thing.) So the meaning of a word like 'pain' is determined by public, objective criteria shared by the members of a language community, not by the nature of a private state that no one else can know.
(A question: would a sharper distinction between meaning and reference call this argument into question? Why couldn't the meaning be given by public criteria, while the reference is logically private? Perhaps the "beetle in the box" metaphor can be seen as providing a reply to this criticism.)
(2) In addition to the point that our own language, including sensation-language, is not private, there is also, more deeply, an argument that no language could be private: the very idea of a private language is not coherent. I could not, even in principle, coin a term for a state such that only I could determine whether I was in it or not.
The main argument for this conclusion seems to be that (a) there need to be objective criteria for the application of a word, and (b) criteria cannot be objective unless they are public.
The argument for (b), in turn, is that there can't be a distinction between thinking that a private criterion is met, and the criterion actually being met. If even in principle I have nothing other than my own perception that the criterion is satisfied to go on, then being right is no different from thinking I am right. But then there is no way I could make a mistake, and that seems to show that there simply is no distinction between right and wrong applications of the word. (The discussion of the diary recording occurrences of the sensation 'S' seems to be making this point.)
D. Philosophy of Mind
Wittgenstein discusses a number of different kinds of mental phenomena, including having sensations, understanding the meaning of an expression, and having an intention.
Re: sensations, the metaphysical upshot of the private language argument seems to be that, not only could we not have a language to refer to truly private sensations or internal states, the very idea of such a private state is incoherent, so there can't be any such thing. We should not infer that Wittgenstein thinks we don't have sensations! Rather, the idea is that sensations are not logically private, not the kind of thing that one can know only from one's own case. (On the other hand, although Wittgenstein does not deny that we have sensations, he does imply that they are not things. Like the beetle in the box, they are "not a something, but not a nothing either!" (section 304).
Re: intentions, Wittgenstein famously asks: what is left over when you subtract your arm's going up from your raising your arm? (section 621) (The idea being that what's left would be the intention to raise your arm.) In a way, this is the question that launched the philosophy of action. But the question may misleadingly suggest that we could find the answer introspectively. Wittgenstein seems to want to suggest that there is nothing you can find in your experience that constitutes the intention.
Re: understanding the meaning of an expression, Wittgenstein asks a question a lot like the question about intention, one that could be put like this: what is left when you subtract uttering a sentence from uttering a sentence while understanding its meaning? Like the question about intention, this may misleadingly suggest that we can find what it is to understand the meaning by introspecting. But if we consider the question carefully, we will see that, if there is anything in our experience that differentiates saying a sentence without understanding it from saying a sentence while understanding it, whatever it is cannot be what the understanding actually consists in.
In all these cases, there seem to be at least three morals of Wittgenstein's discussion: (a) there's less going on phenomenologically than we are inclined to think: if we introspect carefully, and are honest about the results, we will find less in our experience than we might think. (There's an interesting book-length extension of this theme in Daniel Dennett's book Consciousness Explained.) (b) What there is in our conscious experience is less significant than we're inclined to think: we won't find there the essence of intending, meaning, sensation, etc. (c) if you want to understand intentions, meanings, etc., you need to look, not inward to inner experience, but outward to the social practices and especially language games in which these things, and language about them, figure.
(Or at least that's my take: have another look at these passages and see whether you agree or not!)
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Last update: May 4, 2004. |