Abstract
No one denies that language is a cultural phenomenon of some sort, that the fledgeling members of new generations of human beings eventually exhibit their speech — the actual power of parole — by some process of natural acquisition, by merely living in an adult community that already shares a language and a history of common experience and work focused and informed by that language. Instructively, the very passage with which Ludwig Wittgenstein begins his Investigations (which is largely addressed to that intriguing issue), the passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions, admits the point in such a way that, being ubiquitous, one is almost inclined to ignore it: “When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out.”1
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Notes
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), § 1.
Loc. cit.
L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Beliefs, Cyril Barrett (ed.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967): hereafter, Lectures.
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. (from 2nd ed.) Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York : Seabury Press, 1975); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception (trans.), ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964);
and Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
For instance, contra G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (London : Hutchinson, 1959), Chapters 1, 12 .
The principal publications by Winch (in this regard) include: The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Pau1, 1958); ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, American Philosophical Quarterly, I (1964); ‘Comment’, in Robert Borger and Frank Coiffi (eds.), Explanation in the Behavioral Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Most of the responses to Winch, while on the whole sensible about conceptual dangers risked by his position, are — it must be said in all candor — generally carried away by their own convictions. A very close and careful reading of Winch’s texts, I’m afraid, does not quite support the extreme charges brought against him. There is no particular reason to suppose that he was not prone to (or even naive about) certain methodological diffiiculties in his own view. He certainly never took adequate steps to correct impressions conveyed by his own statements — even in response to objections. But in retrospect his critics do seem to have been more than usually wildeyed. The most salient of the critical papers, including a number that Winch himself responded to, include: Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Idea of a Social Science’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. LXI (1967); Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?’ in John Hick (ed.), Faith and the Philosophers (London: Macmillan, 1964); Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘A Mistake about Causality in Social Science’, in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (eds.), Philosophy, Politics and Society, Second Series (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962); I. C. Jarvie, ‘Understanding and Explanation in Sociology and Social Anthropology’, in Borger and Cioffi, op. cit. ; and A. R. Louch, Explanation and Human Action (Oxford: Basil Blackwill, 1966). Winch does commit himself at least to two views that appear mistaken (which MacIntyre duly notes) : that all human action is “rule-governed” and that (having) reasons for one’s behavior cannot be accommodated as such within causal explanation. But these difficulties, important as
Lectures, pp. 2–3.
Philosophical Investigations, § 1.
‘Understanding a Primitive Society’.
Peter Winch, ‘Nature and Convention’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. LX (1959–60).
W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960); The Roots of Reference (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974).
B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957).
Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); Language and Mind, rev. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1972).
Noam Chomsky, ‘Some Empirical Assumptions in Modern Philosophy of Language’, in Sidney Morgenbesser et al. (eds.), Philosophy, Science and Method: Essays in Honor of ErnestNagel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), hereafter, ‘Empirical Assumptions’.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (eds.), G. E. M. Anscombe, transl. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).
‘Empirical Assumptions’.
Noam Chomsky, Review of B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior, Language XXXV (1959); ‘Empirical Assumptions’.
Cf. also, Joseph Margolis, Persons and Minds (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978), Chapter 11.
Philosophical Investigations, § 1.
Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegal Paul, 1962);
and Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, corr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
Zettel, §219.
Quine, op. cit., pp. 70–71.
PhilosophicalInvestigations, Pt. II, p. 223.
‘Empirical Assumptions’.
Charles S. Chihara and Jerry A. Fodor, ‘Operationalism and Ordinary Language: A Critique of Wittgenstein’, American Philosophical Quarterlv, II (1965).
Cf. Rogers Albritton, ‘On Wittgenstein’s Use of the Term “Criterion”, Journal of Philosophy, LXI (1959), reprinted, with an additional note, in George Pitcher (ed.), Wittgenstein: The PhilosophicalInvestigations (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966).
PhilosophicalInvestigations, §580.
Zettel, §302.
Ibid., § 306 .
Ibid., §318.
Ibid., §324.
Philosophical Investigations, §199.
Zettel, §293.
Ibid., § 295.
Ibid., §286.
philosophicalInvestigations, Pt. II, p. 226.
Ibid., § 136.
Ibid., §142.
Ibid., §292.
William P. Alston, Philosophy of Language (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 45.
Loc. cit.
Ibid., p. 46.
J. L. Austin, ‘The Meaning of a Word’, in Philosophical Papers, J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (eds.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), p. 24.
This redeems to some extent Stuart Hampshire’s inquiry about meaning, though not necessarily his theory about meaning; cf. ‘Ideas, Propositions and Signs’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. XL (1939–40).
Cf. Joseph Margolis, ‘Quine on Observationality and Translation’, Foundations of Language, IV (1968); and ‘Behaviorism and Alien Language’, Philosophia, III (1973).
Alston, op. cit., p. 38. Cf. Joseph Margolis, ‘Meaning, Speakers’ Intentions, and Speech Acts’, Review of Metaphysics, XXVI (1973).
Ibid., pp. 36–37.
Monroe C. Beardsley, The Possibility of Criticism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), pp. 47–48.
Paul Ziff, Semantic Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960), p. 7.
Alston, op. cit., p. 42. so Ibid., p. 42f.
Ibid., p. 108, notes to Chapter 1.
Ziff, op. cit., p. 42. Ziff’s intentions about the use of “meaning” are opposed to Austin’s: he fiinds it odd to speak of the meaning of utterances and sentences, not of words, p. 149.
Ibid., p. 34.
Ibid., p. 36.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 22. Cf. also, Hilary Putnam, ‘Is Semantics Possible?’ and ‘The Meaning of “meaning”’, in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Putnam shows implicitly why, for even “natural kind words,” a substitution strategy cannot establish the meanings of words.
Ibid., p. 24; also, p. 57.
Particularly by Jarvie, loc. cit.
‘Understanding a Primitive Society’; reprinted in Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy (eds.), Understanding and Social Inquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 162. (Page references are giv-:n to the Dallmayr and McCarthy printing, for convenience.)
Ibid., p. 173.
Loc. cit.
Loc. cit. ; cf. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937).
Cf. Joseph Margolis, ‘Cognitive Issues in the Realist-Idealist Dispute’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, V (1980).
Winch, op. cit., p. 161.
Ibid., p. 179.
Zettel, §326.
Cf. Language and Mind.
Cf. Donald Davidson, ‘Truth and Meaning’, Synthese, XVII (1967); In Defense of
Donald Davidson, ‘Reply to Foster’, in Evans and McDowell, op. cit., p. 33.
‘Empirical Assumptions’.
Jerry A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Crowell, 1975).
Cf. also Jerry A. Fodor, Representations (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981) and ‘On the Impossibility of Acquiring “More Powerful” Structures’, in Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (ed.), Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1979).
Language and Mind, p. 37.
Ibid., p. 64.
Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague : Mouton, 1965), Chapter 2. It is important to notice that Chomsky’s suggested “behavioral” criterion (p. 13) is quite capable of accommodating the caveats he subsequently mentions in this chapter.
Language and Mind, p. 70.
Ibid., p. 71.
Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility (New York: Pantheon Press, 1977), p. 140.
Ibid., Chapter 6.
Ibid., P. 138.
J. J. Katz, The Underlying Reality of Language and Its Philosophical Import (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); Semantic Theory (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
Language and Responsibility, p. 141.
Ibid., p. 142.
Alfred Tarski, ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages’, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, J. H. Woodger (transl.) (Oxford: Clarendon. 1956).
Donald Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in Lawrence Foster and J. M. Swanson (eds.), Experience and Theory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970).
Daniel Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969); Brainstorms (Montgomery, Vt.: Bradford Books, 1978).
Cf. Joseph Margolis, ‘The Stubborn Opacity of Belief Contexts’, Theoria, XLIII (1977).
Chomsky, Language and Responsibility, pp. 15 2–15 3, 172.
Ibid., pp. 188–189, 193–194.
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Margolis, J. (1984). Wittgenstein and Natural Languages: an Alternative to Rationalist and Empiricist Theories. In: Culture and Cultural Entities. Synthese Library, vol 170. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7694-9_7
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