Speech Useful: A Theory of Language Use

Abstract

We have seen that in the Leviathan and Human Nature speech is fundamentally constituted of its uses, and that those uses which define semantic relations are either separated from the general discussion of speech (as in Human Nature) or subsumed under it (as in Leviathan). Moreover, even in the sections dealing specifically with semantic relations (naming and signifying — in De Corpore chapters two and three) Hobbes is faithful to his pragmatic beginnings, and this is evidenced by the inclination to “use” and “speaker”, without which he cannot get his semantics under way. Yet two different theses opposing mine may be offered — theses which can be backed by Hobbes’s own words. The weaker, pluralist, hierarchal thesis has it that “Hobbes saw that speech has many specific uses as well as the general one of transferring ‘the train of our thoughts into a train of words’. Hobbes’s main interest, however, was in the descriptive use of language...best exemplified in science and mathematics.”¹ The second, stronger account would place naming and signifying as Hobbes’s primary philosophy of language, and derive all other uses of speech from it. The weak thesis does not seem very intriguing, mainly because it points to a triviality easily glimpsed in any theory of language and does not, therefore, deal with the systematic intricacies of Hobbes’s philosophy, e.g. the consistent locations of “descriptive” language either apart from speech, or alongside other uses, the differentiation between denotation and signification, and the linguistic-performative aspects of his political philosophy. The second thesis² poses a real problem and must be dealt with in earnest since, in effect, it puts my cart in front of the horse, claiming that Hobbes’s theory of language was fundamentally a semantic one, and that his dealings with use were merely an accompanying instance of signification. Such a theory would explain the things we do with words, in all cases, as acts of signification, so that the various uses which, in our interpretation, constitute speech would, on that reading, be construed as uses of signification. Crucially, such a theory does seem to be emerging from many of Hobbes’s comments — comments which posit names and their connections (propositions) as prior to uses of speech, and explain the uses as significations of these connected names.