Abstract
I have selected an epistemological motive to provide a framework for discussing recent work in the philosophy of language. The motive is the search for an account of understanding the “content” of our belief and knowledge. I shall show how results in the philosophy of language are relevant to this search, thereby revealing what a large part of the philosophy of language is and why (in part) it is philosophical.1
This chapter first appeared in Social Research, Winter 1981a, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 749–774. Originally titled “Philosophy of Language”, typographical errors have been corrected, one sentence modified—acknowledged in a revised footnote 6—and a new footnote added (fn. 38).
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Notes
I shall not survey this field, which has existed since Plato’s Cratylus. For an orthodox introduction to the field, read the introductions or prefaces to the following anthologies: Blackbuurn 1975, Caton, 1963, Chappell 1964, Cole and Morgan 1975, Davidson and Harman 1972 and 1975, Evans and Macdowell 1976, Fodor and Katz 1964, Flew 1965, French, Uehling, and Wettstein 1979, Gunderson 1975, Guttenplan 1975, Harman 1974, Hockney, Harper, and Freed 1975, Hook 1969, Lehrer and Lehrer 1970, Linsky 1952 and 1971, Margalit 1979, Munitz and Unger 1974, Nagel and Brandt 1965, Oh and Dinneen 1979, Olshewsky 1969, Parkinson 1968, Partee 1976, Rorty 1967, Rosenberg and Travis 1971, Searle 1971, Schwartz 1977, Stich 1975, Steinberg and Jakobovits, 1971, and Strawson 1967.
Cf. Chomsky 1965 and Katz 1966.
Searle 1979, ch. 5.
Cf. Braithwaite, Price, and Prichard in Phillips Griffiths 1967.
Quine 1960) offers such a suggestion. Cf. also Geach 1962 and Vendler 1972 for different view related to the paralleling of speech and mental acts.
This sentence is a modification of the one which appeared in the original publication of 1980. (Cf. Russell’s comments in a letter to Frege in the latter’s Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence (Frege 1980, p. 169) and Kaplan’s “Demonstratives” (1989.) Also, of course, there may be further Millian variations to explore. The differing views of Chisholm (1977) on “states of affairs,” Plantinga (1974) on possible worlds and essences, and the “intensionalists” like Lewis, Parsons, or Montague may not be exactly like any alternative sketched above.
Cf. Katz 1966 and 1972, also Peterson 1973. I recognize a wide range of mentalistic theories, from the rather clearly subjective ones like Locke’s to the very objective ones like Frege’s—where it could be mistakenly thought it was not mentalistic at all due to his antipsychologistic uses of “sense”, “concept”, and “thought”.
Cf. Davidson in Rosenberg and Travis and 1971, and Evans and Macdowell 1976.
Cf. Alston 1979, revised February 1980. However, Alston also believes that one couldn’t acquire knowledge of what the token means, its truth conditions, without priori knowledge of type meanings, conceiving of these as “recipes” for truth conditions.
Cf. Katz in Gunderson 1975, and Katz and Katz 1977.
Not all philosophers of language today are meaning nominalists, of course—cf. Katz’s books and some of the “representationalists” like Fodor 1975, Sober 1976, Rosenberg 1974, and possibly Sellars, though cf. Peterson 1982a. Castaneda,
as in French, Uehling, and Wettstein 1979, evidently belongs with the nonmeaning-nominalists too.
Cf. Quine 1953, pp. 11, 48, 107, 115—my favorite Quine passages.
Cf. ibid., ch. 2, but also chs. 1 and 3.
Quine 1960.
Quine 1969.
This should be no surprise, epistemologically, for Quine’s resulting “naturalized epistmeology” (1969 and 1974) is a form of skepticism anyway, as is so much contemporary pragmatism.
Katz 1966 and 1972.
And cf. Fodor 1968 and 1975, as well as Katz in Rosenberg and Travis 1971.
Cf. N. Chomsky 1972, ch. 2.
E.g., the Leibniz selections in Stich 1975.
Searle in Harman 1974, pp. 28–30. Searle pursues this substitution of speech act theory for even later semantical developments in linguistics vs. Ross and Lakoff in Searle 1979, ch.7.
Alston 1977. Also cf. Alston 1979.
Alston 1977, p. 19.
Bennett 1976.
But see Biro 1979.
Alston 1979..
It seems quite advisable that a nonmentalistic approach, via substituting a more Millian concept of proposition for the mentalistic one, be explored. Perhaps that is part of what is going on in some current approaches to pragmatics via intensional logic, cf. Lewis in Davidson and Harman 1975, Montague 1974, and Montague commentators in Partee 1976.
Though I think they can modify to answer Katz, they probably cannot devise a moderate meaning nominalism to provide anything absolutely new for explaining propositional understanding. For it will still come out Platonistic (or worse, with new mysteries in merely possible individuals) or mentalistic—or so I would bet.
Kripke in Davidson and Harman, 1972, Putnam 1975a ch. 12, and Donnellan, as in Schwartz 1975. Also, see Kripke and Donnellan in French, Uehling, and Wettstein 1979.
Compare this view with the intriguing alternative in van Inwagen 1977.
One difficulty this leads to, which is still being inflicted via Kuhnian theories of scientific development reminiscent of Quinian pragmatism, is that it tends to prevent us from comparing our changing beliefs—since lack of common concepts makes them incomparable.
This reference-in-thought part of the theory does not appear very clearly in the literature, but see Boër Lycan 1975. In contrast, cf. Vendler 1976.
Kripke does not appear to be a meaning nominalist of any sort, Putnam does sometimes; but cf. Putnam 1971 for his Platonism.
Cf. Kripke in Margalit 1979 for additional difficulties. Also see the exchange between Clark and Heidelberger in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1980, 5, 509–531.
Perhaps a strong fact-proposition distinction would help; cf. Vendler 1972 and Chapter 3 below.
For example, Chomsky 1966, 1968, and 1975).
One of the topics I have unhappily omitted due to space limitations is the question of how recent research on language in animals has affected current linguistic theory and the philosophy of language. Cf. Peterson 1980a, for a discussion that not only covers some of this but also relates to the idea of a new look at Kant.
Three very important essays on propositions which space limitations prevented attention to are Ryle 1929–30, Prior 1976, and Dretske 1975.
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Peterson, P.L. (1997). Propositions and the Philosophy of Language. In: Fact Proposition Event. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8959-8_3
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