Abstract
This chapter develops a positive sketch of our capacity for meaningful speech, and hence of our capacity for word-mediated thought. More precisely, this chapter sketches an account of how there might be words with both content and meaning. We will soon flesh out this abstract story in coherently conceivable and apparently plausible resources, but it also fits with the alternative account of thought realization pursued in Part Three.
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Notes
“Cause” may unfortunately suggest the kind of robust causal relation between spatio-temporally distinct entities of the sort discussed in Chapter Seven, and this may be a misleading picture of what interanimation involves.
See for instance H.P. Grice, “Meaning”, Philosophical Review 66, 1957, 377–388; “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions”’, Philosophical Review78,1969,147-177; “Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning”, Foundations of Language4,1968,225-242. See also David Lewis, Convention(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), and Stephen Schiller, Meaning(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, translated by Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983).
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 50.
Paul Hoffman, “Kripke on Private Language”, Philosophical Studies 47, 1985, 23–28.
Consider this analogue, which can help dramatize the interesting parallel between semantics and syntax to which Hoffman points: P1) The position of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s requires that there be such a thing asX’s responding in one way and not another to a problem such as “57 + 68 =?”This is because quadition and addition involve different ways of responding to that problem P2) This requires that certain inscriptions of numerals, say “5 ” and “5 ”, be of one type, and other inscriptions, say “125” and “125”, be of another Any two inscriptions of a numeral will have some different properties, but there must be something which constitutes them as of one type. However, P3) The actual past and present use by X of inscriptions of numerals will not serve to determine to what types they belong. This is because there is an intuitively strange classification of the inscriptions which is consistent with all of their actual past and present use by X, and which deviates from the intuitive classification of the inscriptions in a way similar to the way in which quadition deviates from addition, out beyond actual past and present use. Tomorrow “125” may count as an inscription of the same type as “5” does today P4) But Kripke’s Wittgenstein can allow nothing to help fix this typing but actual past and present use Hence Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s position is inconsistent. Let me be clear. This argument doesn’t at all adequately capture Hoffman’s criticism, which suggests that finite resources do not determine syntax, rather than merely that actual use does not. And certainly it would require such a generalization to be an appropriate criticism of the argument of Kripke’s Wittgenstein, because my P4 is false. That is not merely because Kripke’s Wittgenstein makes no explicit claim about the resources available to fix the typing of inscriptions, but also because Kripke’s Wittgenstein allows more resources than actual use, for instance dispositions to use, even to help fix meaning. Nevertheless, this argument does draw out what seems an interesting parallel
W.V.O. Quine, “The Problem of Meaning in Linguistics”, in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 47–64.
Edward Becker, “Quine and the Problem of Significance”, Proceedings of the 7th International Wittgenstein Symposium (Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1983).
This sort of case worries, for instance, Jonathan Bennett. See the beginning of Linguistic Behavior(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
I owe something like this point to a discussion of Rorty with Thomas Blackburn.
It may be that at least humans and sophisticated aliens are capable of speaking a language with sentences too large to utter or experience. But this seems a parasitic and secondary phenomena, to which we will return in a bit.
There is some ambiguity about what it is to produce things, say utterances, at will. It seems reasonable to presume that in the first and primitive instance the capacity to utter language cannot be contingent on possession of a stylus or the like. So something like speech seems more plausibly primitive and primary for creatures than a written language. On the other hand, we come to be able to write things, say equations, which we cannot easily pronounce. Writing differs in a number of interesting ways from speech. For instance, under ordinary conditions speech is evanescent in a way that writing is not. It is gone quickly and cannot persist beyond the conditions which give it meaning for its speaker. This may make speech a better analogue of other sorts of thought than writing, but still the actof writing may be a very close analogue as well.
The invisible thermal wiggle I mentioned above was thus a different sort of case. We can’t so wiggle falsely or to ourselves, and we can’t introspect its content.
A good introduction is Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1994). Two classic texts are N. Chomsky, Syntactic structures(The Hague: Mouton, 1957), and N. Chomsky, Aspects of the theory of syntax(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).
M. Aronoff, Word formation in generative grammar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976). Of course, context may be required to determine what a particular inscription of a homonym means.
R. Friedin, Foundations of generative syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) R.S. Jackendoff, X-bar syntax: A study of phrase structure(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977).
Or even which links thoughts of individual words and of their possible continuations, if we allow that the possible continuations of the preceding words may dampen out conflicting interanimations.
Perhaps I should say instances of sentences.
See Wilfrid Sellars, “Some Reflections on Language Games”, in Science, Perception, and Reality, 321–358.
Of course, we are ignoring the possibility of mistakes, but that is natural given the form of Quine’s account. We will soon return to a consideration of mistakes.
Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) provides one helpful account.
This may be one mechanism which reasonably suggests the existence of certain unconscious thoughts, namely those which lose the competition.
Recall that quinean stimulus meanings may encompass both positive and negative elements. The conditions which lead one to deny a sentence may be part of its ingoing associated content, though they are presumably not as strongly associated with it as with its denial. The inferential and normative resources noted below play a large role in helping to underwrite the necessary differences in roles of various sorts of ingoing associated content.
Two important semantic projects, influenced by Wittgenstein, which deploy tests and verifications as important semantic resources are Dummetfs and Shwayder’s. See Michael Dummett, The Seas of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), and also D.S. Shwayder, Statement and Referent, Part I(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992).
It may be important to note that to say that meaning involves the acceptance of norms does not at all obviously imply that it involves normative facts, facts about the truth of the norms which are accepted. In fact, at least the appearance is just the opposite.
This inferentialist conception of semantics is developed and elaborated in Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
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Mendola, J. (1997). Words and Meaning. In: Human Thought. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5660-8_10
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